Some people keep their lawn because they like them—which may be the only good reason to do so. Some of us believe that we need a lawn, perhaps because we don’t have the money to get rid of it, or because “natural” gardens are more work, or—and this is a big one—because we have kids.

For most of us homeowners, though, the lawn is a given, an unthought, default planting.

During our conversation this week, Evelyn Hadden, author of Beautiful No-Mow Yards: 50 amazing lawn alternatives, lays all of these fears to rest. She recommends walkable ground-covers or sedges for those who just love the look of a lawn, and for those who don’t, she explains how to kill turf for the price of some old cardboard or newspaper (and no digging whatsoever), leaving a surface that’s ready to plant. She describes plantings that need far less care than grass, which requires mowing, watering, and weeding. As for children—well, Evelyn is full of ideas for them. And she knows the research that backs those ideas.

She is full of wonderful ideas for all of us, not just children, and so is her book. Part One, called “Design Inspiration: the many possibilities,” consists of eleven chapters, and at one point I simply ask her to read through them—living carpets, shade gardens, meadows, ponds, patios, edible gardens and the rest—and to say few words about each, because this cornucopia of possibilities lies far beyond the imaginative reach of most of us.

Unless we have a guide, that is. And Evelyn Hadden is a wonderful guide to the possibilities of the lawn-free yard.

Check the blog, The Manic Gardener, for more links and information.

My first guest, Paul Tukey, is a writer, filmmaker, activist, and founder of Safe Lawns.org. He tells the story of Hudson, Quebec, where a persistent local doctor got the town to ban lawn pesticides, and of a school in Ohio where pesticide drift sent 47 students to the doctor. He has the facts on 2,4-D, an herbicide widely used in northern Canada, where so many farmers die of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that it is referred to as “old farmer’s disease.”

But first he tells the story of his conversion from lawn-care professional to a passionate advocate of organic lawn-care. That conversion came only after his own health had deteriorated to the point where doctors told him that the chemicals he was using would kill him if he didn’t quit. But what he didn’t know even then was the effect those chemicals might have on his son.

My second guest is Cristina Milesi, a senior research scientist at California State University, who is affiliated with NASA’s Ames Research Center. Cristina has used satellite images and complex modeling techniques to produce increasingly accurate estimates of the number of acres devoted to lawn in the U.S.—it is only when we have some idea of how big this number is that we can have any sense of the scope of the problem. Cristina’s work extends to the ecological impact of that acreage; in this interview she talks about water use and carbon sinks.

When you think about the the kind of problems faced by Paul Tukey, multiplied by the acreage of lawn we have in the U.S., it looks like we need to make some changes.

Check the blog, The Manic Gardener, for more links and information.

Start with this setup, and it’s a given that Atina takes them on and beats them. To top it off, she not only protects her own land from the pipeline, but she gets Koch to accept an agreement (at least in Minnesota) that will protect all organic farms threatened by pipelines. Then add that Atina had survived five years in an early, abusive marriage.

Isn’t that just a bit much, as plots go? Maybe. But it’s true.

Author of the beautiful memoir, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, Atina Diffley joins me this week to talk about the double assault on organic farms that she and her husband Martin have endured. She describes the “total ecological collapse” they saw as their first farm was gradually sold off to developers, and the shock when she discovered that their second farm might be subject to a claim of eminent domain by the Koch Brothers, who were planning to lay a pipeline across it carrying oil from Alberta’s oil sands. (No, the Keystone XL pipeline would not be the first.)

In part, this is the story of Atina’s transformation, from a battered woman almost devoid of self-esteem, to the woman who took on the Koch brothers and won. But it is also the story of the community she and Martin had built, for Atina stresses, both in the interview and in the book, that she did not win this victory alone. Her intrepid attorney was essential, as was Martin’s support on the home front. But the thousands of letters written by satisfied customers may have tipped the balance, for they made clear to the judge that this farm could not simply be replaced by another. Establishing that fact—that the farm was not fungible—was essential in arguing that Koch should not be allowed to damage it.

This saga is rife with smaller anecdotes, often funny ones, for Atina has retained her sense of humor even about some of the most devastating moments in these crises. There’s not much to laugh at when she tells how she and Martin lose an entire potato crop in a single night of rain after the adjoining hill has been stripped bare. But when she adds that the developer—of Irish extraction, no less—doesn’t know that potatoes grow in the ground, a touch of the ludicrous leavens the scene. And when she tells how her gentle husband terrifies the developer into buying the ruined field from the old woman who owns it—well, I, for one, laughed out loud. I hope you do too.

Go to the blog, The Manic Gardener to see more on this topic.

Toby Day, Extension Horticulture Specialist at Montana State University, returns to The Manic Gardener, this time to guide gardeners through the intricacies of the plant purchasing process. We look first at how to choose your basic herbaceous plants (vegetable starts, bedding plant, young perennials); then at selecting healthy bare-root asparagus, strawberries, and small fruits; and finally at choosing trees and shrubs. We also talk about getting these into the ground with the least effort and the greatest chance of success.

There are numerous surprises along the way: choose a stocky plant, not a tall one; look for a plant with no flowers—even if it’s a flowering plant; holes for trees and shrubs should be wider than they are deep; male asparagus live longer than female; a pampered fruit tree may bear less fruit than one under some stress; circling tree roots can strangle the tree; foliage on bare-root plants lowers their chance of survival.

Toby also shares numerous tips: he goes to nurseries armed with a sheet of white paper, which he holds under candidates while giving them a gentle shake so that pests will drop onto the paper, becoming suddenly visible. This is a plant to avoid. He also chooses plants from the middle of a table or bed, as they tend to be better watered than those at the edges. (How many people think about that?)

Many of us have brought home a plant only to watch it die, and it’s an experience most of us would prefer not to repeat. Toby can help with that.

Check the blog, The Manic Gardener, for more information and links.

But just how does one start with this composting business, anyhow?

The number of books out on the subject—or the fact that even one person, much less several, thought the topic deserved an entire book—can make the task seem daunting. Then there’s the question of hot or cold processes, and the problem of balancing brown and green ingredients, not to mention what it means (something bad, clearly) if a pile “goes anaerobic.”

And if you’ve ever happened upon a commercial composter costing several hundred dollars, you may well have concluded that the whole thing is way more expensive than it’s worth.

But despite all those books and dollars, backyard composting can actually be pretty straightforward, and its price can be zero.

My guest this week, Graham Golbuff, makes that quite clear, by clarifying the many mysteries of composting.
Graham directs the Master Gardener program at Seattle Tilth, a non-profit that’s been teaching and promoting organic gardening in Seattle for 35 years. (Check out their compost resources.) He guides us through the composting process, starting with an overview of its benefits to your wallet, your garden, and the environment. Then we turn to the how-tos, from the simplest, passive method, right through the intricacies of hot composting.

Join us for an introduction or refresher course on pile composting. It may answer a few questions, and it’s definitely good for a few laughs.

(Visit the blog, The Manic Gardener, for more on this topic.)

Five minutes, though, is close enough to nothing as makes no difference. How does he manage this? (Without planting through a plastic mulch, that is.)

During this week’s show, Lee explains his four-part system and its many benefits, which range from healthier soil to way less work for the gardener. The system itself is pretty simple: don’t till or disturb the earth; lay out permanent areas to walk and plant; keep the soil covered at all times; and use drip irrigation where irrigation is needed.

But how to implement the system is not quite so clear. How do you fertilize, or add organic matter, without digging? And don’t plants need access to these things deep in the earth? As for keeping the soil covered, mulches are indeed great for conserving moisture, but how do living mulches(or cover crops) work in a garden? Aren’t they supposed to be dug in, come spring? (Which sort of negates the no-till part of the plan.)

All of these questions, and many more, get answered on this week’s show. It’s a fascinating hour with a funny, intrepid, knowledgeable guest who’s not afraid to buck the established wisdom of the day.

Lee Reich has a PhD in Horticulture from the University of Maryland and actually started his career as a researcher with the USDA and Cornell University, but he has been for years an independent writer, lecturer, and “farmdener.” He blogs at In Lee’s Garden.

If this sounds so unlikely as to be impossible, trust me, it isn’t; all you have to do to believe this is to take a look at the lush photographs in her book, Small-Space Container Gardens: Transform Your Balcony, Porch, or Patio with Fruits, Flowers, Foliage & Herbs. As my guest this week, Fern describes the special problems that people gardening on roofs and balconies face (those falling pots, you know), but she then goes on to talk about the many (many) tools and techniques that these folks can use to make the most of their extremely confined spaces.

Once one puts one’s mind to it, hanging pots seem fairly obvious, but even trellises anchored in large pots are a stretch for most of us, simply because we don’t think of trellises as belonging on porches or balconies. As for the three or four ways that Fern has for anchoring pots to fences, or for straddling railings with various soft planters or molded pots—my bet is that most of these will be new. Beyond this, there are myriad green walls, including the one she describes in some depth during the interview: the pallet planter, in which an ordinary pallet is transformed into a lovely, vertical display of spring and summer flowers.

It seems there’s no end to Fern’s imagination, and her great gift is to liberate our own. She has ideas about how to deal with noisy neighbors (or nosy ones), how to cope with wind, with blazing sun, with incessant shade. The space that was far too small for a “real” garden may have possibilities you never realized.

Fern Richardson blogs at Life on the Balcony.com

At stake in the suit is the question of whether Monsanto would be able to continue to sue individual farmers, both conventional and organic, whose crops were contaminated by pollen or seeds from fields growing Monsanto’s genetically modified crops. This group of organic farmers and organizations is suing to prevent Monsanto from suing them.

It’s now three and a half months later, and much has happened. The suit did advance to oral arguments, but at that point the judge ruled for Monsanto. The consortium of plaintiffs, under the leadership of OSGATO, the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, has appealed the decision. So once again, everyone is awaiting the decision of the courts.

My guests here, as in the original show, are Jim Gerritsen, President of OSGATA, the lead plaintiff, and Daniel Ravicher, the lead lawyer in the case. Dan serves as both the Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to representing the public’s interests against undeserved patents and unsound patent policy. PubPat is associated with Cardozo Law School, where Dan is also a professor.

This is a rerun of the original show, with some revisions. The interview themselves have not been touched, but both the introduction and the conclusion have been revised and updated.

Go to The Manic Gardener blog for more links and information.

Yes: not only does this method do away with rows, which segregate one vegetable from another; it does away with separate beds, which segregate flowers from herbs from vegetables.

My guests this week are David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, who put polyculture at the heart of their latest book, What’s Wrong With My Vegetable Garden? 100% Organic Solutions for All Your Vegetables, from Artichoke to Zucchini.

On the show, David and Kathryn explain the principle of polyculture and its benefits, which range from thwarting both pests and disease, to creating lovely, creative plantings. They describe several uses of polyculture gardens: easy combinations such as the “salad bowls” Kathryn keeps just outside her door, plots focused around carrots, or tomatoes, or melons, and how to integrate various vegetables into an existing garden.

Then (we’re not done yet) we move on to organic solutions to pests and problems, a conversation that includes rather more about slugs than you might expect. It’s a fun, lively hour, full of practical tips nested in an easily grasped theory that can be applied to gardens everywhere.

Both groups are right, and the only way to make an informed decision about whether or not to use manure is to become better informed about it. So just how wonderful a conditioner is manure? What problems can it cause? And how can they be managed or avoided?

My guest this week is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. He’s Frank Larney, a soil scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada (roughly equivalent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), where he specializes in soil conservation, including feedlot manure composting and soil restoration with manure.

With Frank’s help, we’ll take a quick tour of the various problems that manures can cause, from air and water pollution to soil degradation, before turning to some of Frank’s research. He has done studies on how many pathogens disappear during composting (99.9%) and how long this takes (one week), and on how composting affects pharmaceuticals (they drop to undetectable levels) and again, how long this takes (six to eight weeks).

He’s also been involved in long-term studies that measure for how long a single application of manure to degraded soil can improve crop yields. Want to know the answer? Twenty-two years. And counting.

In the end, each gardener will have to decide for herself (or himself) whether or not to use manures. This program doesn’t try to direct that decision. But it does provide some information that might help.

This week’s Gardening Tip draws on the interview to suggest how back-yard gardeners should and shouldn’t use manures.

The parallel post on the blog, The Manic Gardener, will include links to some of Frank Larney’s papers for the intelligent layperson.

As the chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, Doug knows whereof he speaks. And he’s got the relevant statistics at the tip of his tongue. How many spicebush leaves does the larvae of a spicebush swallowtail need to become a butterfly? Three. What percent of a black bear’s diet is insects? Twenty-three percent. How many caterpillars do a pair of bluebirds feed their young each day? Three hundred.

Doug may be most widely known as the author of the tremendously popular book Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants. As my guest this week, he explains both why we need more native plants and more varied ones in our gardens, and also how we can go about the initial steps of landscaping for this change.

Judy Owsowitz sells both seedlings and vegetables, and she starts thousands of them herself and the rest with the help of her six interns. She does all this starting in early February, in the relatively inhospitable climate of northern Montana. So she seemed the ideal person to tap for advice about starting, tending, and transplanting seedlings.

Owner of Terrapin Farm, Judy has been farming in northern Montana since the seventies, using draft horses for years, but more recently and reluctantly, tractors. She sells vegetables, herbs, flowers, and edible flowers, as well as seedlings and seeds for many of those plants. She has also developed a number of cold-hardy vegetable varieties, and at the end of the show she tells us about a few of those.

Though she has a full-fledged business including a greenhouse, Judy can provide plenty of useful tips for backyard gardeners. Amongst other things, she explains how to get artichokes, usually considered a biennial, to produce in their first season. In cold climates. From seed.

And her methods will suit the thrift-minded as well: for several weeks before she opens the greenhouse, her seedlings are housed in her basement under florescent lights. Not fancy grow lights; not even full-spectrum florescent bulbs; but the cheapest of the cheap, common florescent bulbs.

So if you’re wondering about the perfect consistency for potting soil; or about which flowers, herbs, and vegetables to seed first; or about how to water seeds or seedlings, tune in.

Check The Manic Gardener for further background and links.

Unlikely as it sounds, a cube of free-standing soil can sprout a seed, support a seedling, even grow a full head of lettuce.

How is this possible? And why don’t the darn things just fall apart, without any container to hold them together?

Jason Beam, of Potting Blocks, sells soil blockers, the presses used to make soil blocks. He joins me this week to answer these questions and many more. Here’s a sample of some of the topics that arise in the course of the conversation: Why is transplanting a seedling several times a good thing? Which holds heat more effectively, air or water? Is peat moss a renewable resource? Just how many grades of coconut coir are there?

I won’t claim that we answer all these questions definitively, but it’s a lot of fun. And the central questions about soil blocks—what they are, how to use them, and why they’ll give you increased germination rates and sturdier seedlings—these do get answered.

Check The Manic Gardener for further background and links.

“Food security” does not ask us to consider the wages or welfare of the people who work in the fields and factories that produce the food; it does not address the quality or cultural appropriateness of the food for the people to whom it is “given;” nor does it deal with their dignity, nor their right to make choices or exercise some control over the food they eat. Food security goes no further than a full belly.

Enter food justice, a term that encompasses all these issues. People who work for food justice are looking at the entire food production system, and the lives and welfare of all involved in it.

Charles helps run a local community garden (organic, of course), and he has served on the Board of the American Community Gardening Association; he has worked with The Stop, Toronto’s all-in-one food bank, community garden, and all-round center for food-related activism. He has written numerous articles on food movements, including several on The Stop.

My second guest, Lena Miller, founded and is now Executive Director of Development of Hunters Point Family, a non-profit that works with at-risk youths and families in one of the poorest areas of one of America’s richest cities. Lena was born in Hunters Point, and she is raising her daughters there, but in between she earned a B.A. at Berkeley and an M.A. at San Francisco University.

While Hunters Point Family runs numerous programs, one closest to Lena’s heart may be its organic gardens, for she believes profoundly in the healing power of digging in the dirt. She also believes that to heal themselves, people must return to basics, including to that most fundamental relationship between ourselves and food.

These two guests come to Food Justice from very different backgrounds, but they are equally passionate about its centrality to human dignity. This is where organic gardening meets social activism.

All of the links, along with pictures of many of the vegetables mentioned and links to others, can be found on the blog, The Manic Gardener.

At the end of the program, Edwin Beck, a consultant with EarthMinded Rain Station, explains how Rain Station water barrels avoid the flooding caused by others, why they cost less to ship, and how you can link two together. These barrels really are different. They contain 30-85% recycled material, their lids lead double lives, and hey—they look pretty classy, too.

Bring your water-saving tips and your water-wasting horror stories to the blog, The Manic Gardener.

Check the blog, The Manic Gardener, for more links and resources

For books on native planting,* see The Wild Ones Bookstore.
For more links and resources, see the blog The Manic Gardener.

*(And other stuff. One is called Sex, Death, and Fly Fishing. Hmm.)

If you have any doubts about your command of this or other common botanical distinctions, check out today’s show with Toby Day, Extension Horticulture Specialist at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. In this first of an occasional series, Toby not only explains the difference between monocots and dicots, and between annuals, biennials, and perennials, but also makes it clear why an ordinary gardener might care about such things. He then goes on to define the three basic functions of plant physiology—photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration—and the relations between them. Finally, he discusses the plant growth that these functions make possible—where in the plant it occurs, and how these locations affect practices like pruning.

This isn’t botany made easy—it’s botany made practical.

This is the first in a series that will air from time to time—one of which will be a stump the chump session where Toby tries to field whatever random gardening questions we can throw at him. Add yours to the comments on the post about this podcast episode at The Manic Gardener blog.

Most of the savanna and prairie native to the Midwest are gone. But native plantings are being re-established by many private landowners, my father-in-law Rick Durbin among them. Three generations of Durbins are currently working on the project, so for years I’ve been hearing about prescribed burns and battling buckthorn from Rick, his son Jeff, and my son Jesse. But this New Year’s was the first time I could see a real change in the land, and the first time I helped scatter seed on the prairie. Clearly, it was time to find out just what these guys have been up to.

Since Jesse was off for El Salvador by the time I whipped out my microphone, you’ll only hear two guests on this show. Rick, a plant pathologist and author, is the project’s main mover. My brother-in-law Jeff, a writer and naturalist, participates in every facet of the work, from cataloguing plant species to cutting down trees. In talking with them, I learn about such things as why they’ve planted their wildlife refuge as a circle, and why it’s important to leave dead trees standing in a wood, and why most North Americans have never seen the open woodlands of a savanna.

The details are fascinating. But Rick and Jeff also explain why this work compels them: why it is not merely sentimental to mourn the loss of the prairie.

Check out Jeff’s website at jeffdurbin.com, and see the blog The Manic Gardener for more links and information about prairie and savanna restoration.

Jenny Harlen of Jenny’s Bokashi Blog joins us from Sweden, a veritable Bokashi hotbed, to explain how it works, how to do it, and how it benefits you, your garden, and the environment. If this sounds suspiciously upbeat, it only gets worse (or better): Jenny also recounts how the Efficient Microorganisms (EM) at the heart of the Bokashi process have also been used to restore degraded agricultural fields, clean up contaminated sites near Chernoble and Fukashima, and rejuvenate polluted waterways.

Too good to be true? Maybe. But maybe not.

My guest this week is Jared Zystro, who describes how a catastrophic fire helped the Organic Seed Alliance realize that the best way to preserve seeds was by teaching others to save them. The fire may or may not get credit for the Alliance’s decision to fill the widening gap between gardeners raising heirloom varieties and farmers growing GMOs, but out of the fire arose, phoenix-like, the OSA’s new mission: to develop seeds for organic and sustainable agriculture.

But that’s just part of the program. Jared starts by talking about his subversive role as an organics-booster in a traditional plant genetics graduate school program, and ends with some seed-saving advice for the back-yard gardener.

We’ll hear also from Josh Kirschenbaum of Abundant Life Seeds, which was originally the commercial division of Organic Seed Alliance, but which has become the organic arm of Territorial Seed Company. (Yes, it’s confusing.) Josh personally starts every single seed for Territorial’s extensive seed farms and eats vast quantities of vegetables in the process of choosing which should go into their catalogues.

Bad enough? It gets worse. One day, his fire escapes and burns your house down. Then he sues you for patent infringement. After all, you now have fire not covered by your license.

Absurd? Yes. But there’s a close (and disturbing) analogy here to a practice the seed giant Monsanto has been using for years: suing farmers for having Monsanto’s patented genetically modified material in their fields, even when that material is unwanted and diminishes or destroys the value of the crop.

Now organic farmers are suing Monsanto, arguing that a farmer whose fields are unintentionally contaminated by Monsanto’s GMOs shouldn’t have to bear the worry and expense of being sued, on top of losing their crop, their organic certification, and possibly years of work developing a line of seed.

This week I’m joined by two people at the forefront of this effort. Jim Gerritsen, President of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA), talks about what it’s like to be an organic farmer, constantly worried about contamination and lawsuits. And Daniel Ravicher, Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) and lead lawyer for the suit, explains some of its legal ins and outs—including the environmental basis for the argument that GMOs serve no social function.

Check The Manic Gardener blog for more about this topic.

Jazvac also describes how regulations tend to favor producers of pure, synthetic fertilizers but work against companies that make complex, organic fertilizers. Most of us know nothing about this and other hurdles faced by developers of organic products. Here’s a chance to learn about some of what was involved in the two and a half year journey of bringing this one to market.

Weekly Gardening Tip — Want to keep your hot compost pile cooking for a couple more weeks? Insulate it!

Better World Plant Food is available by mail order now, and will be carried by Whole Foods starting early in 2012.

And yes, Steve does give the formula for his complete organic fertilizer, a mix-it-yourself recipe designed to pack the perfect nutritional punch, thus yielding vegetables rich in nutrients.

Twenty-five years ago, or even ten, chances are you’d have been out of luck. These days though, many cities across North America positively bristle with helpful organizations for the aspiring urban gardener.

In Seattle, Liza Burke introduces us to Seattle Tilth, which offers a range of educational courses, gardening opportunities, programs for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, and advice on organic gardening and sustainability for people lucky enough to have their own gardens.

In Toronto, Chris Wong heads two new gardening organizations: the for-profit Young Urban Gardeners, and the non-profit Young Urban Gardeners CSA. In this conversation, he describes how to set up a working organic farm on scraps of land you don’t own.

This show highlights one of the continent’s oldest community gardening programs and one of its youngest. Along the way, it mentions a dozen others, giving a glimpse of the resources available to activists, gardeners, and those in need of fresh food, fresh air, and exercise.

Cindy Owings and Jim Patrick belong to Madison Farm to Fork, a group dedicated to promoting healthy, organic foods within their foodshed, the Madison Valley in southwest Montana. It so happens that this area abounds in geothermal power—hot springs galore, including the iconic Old Faithful. Because yes, this is right next door to Yellowstone Park.

The residents of Ennis (population 1,049) have forged a bond with a neighbor who has water rights to the largest hot spring in Montana. And with a fellow who works for a company that handles the technology necessary to capture the heat of the spring’s 190ºF water. And with a neuro-scientist who enjoys the challenge of designing the whole system. And with the individuals, groups, and businesses (over a hundred of them) that have contributed thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours, to building the greenhouses, writing grants, working in the schools, and tending the gardens.

This is the part of an occasional series on organic garden projects—projects that both depend on and build community.

IPM, or Integrated Pest Management, is a graduated approach to dealing with plant diseases, insects, slugs and so on, meaning that it lays out a series of steps for managing them. Developed as one of the earliest responses to the sudden surge in pesticide use that marked the 1940s, it remains the basis for most sustainable gardening practices today.

Toby Day, of the Montana State University Extension program, explains how IPM works and how you can make it work for you. For almost every problem, every disease, IPM offers a sequence of earth-friendly actions or responses that mean you almost never have to reach for that bottle of insecticide—even if all it’s got in it is lemon juice. This approach can make organic gardening—as well as pests—manageable.

Check The Manic Gardener blog for more info and links to useful websites, including a downloadable newsletter on urban IPM.

Jerome Osentowski, founder and director of the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute, grows figs and filberts at 7,200 feet, and actually sells energy to the “grid,” though he has four green houses, a house, a teaching institute, and several cabins. And no, they don’t use candles to read by. His descriptions of how he can make a pond, a patio, or even the walkway in a garden serve multiple purposes, make you want to rethink the whole idea of waste.

Kareen Erbe teaches composting, permaculture, and sustainable living in Bozeman Montana, and this podcast covers that city’s first permablitz: a four hour intensive transformation of a bare, recently weedy, backyard plot, into the start of a permaculture garden.

Permaculture redefines vegetable gardening—it’s not about annuals any more—and waste—who needs it?—and energy—it’s all around us; we just need to learn to capture and use it. This is mindboggling stuff.

Check The Manic Gardener: an Organic Gardening Blog with Twisted Roots for a parallel post with more info and links.

Michael Daltons and MJ Arendes of Gardens from Garbage explain how they are establishing school gardens, keeping tons of garbage out of landfills, and creating compost through a process most North Americans have never heard of, all at the same time. (And all despite the fact that according to MJ, they’ve “made every mistake in the book.”)

Gayle Gifford, Executive Director of the food bank in Great Falls, Montana, talks about how Bokashi has cut her organization’s garbage bills, intrigued Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, and provided her with something to give back to the gardeners who contribute their produce.

Bokashi appears to do everything from clean up nuclear waste (see last week’s show, Kitchen Composting: Bokashi 101) to keep your cat box from smelling. Yes, you can put it in your cat box, but also your smoothies, your fish pond, or your septic tank, and it will help every time. Don’t believe it? Listen and decide.

The weekly garden tip will give you an inexpensive and easy way to extend the season for your vegetable garden. And meet Susan Elsass, whose seed envelopes make the gift of seeds lovely as well as useful.

Like most North Americans these days, the amount I know about farming might fill a small teacup. But last week I visited the Kimm seed potato farm, where Jason and Yvonne Kimm operate a small organic plot and help their extended family run a much larger conventional farm. You might say I got educated in a hurry.

On last week’s show, “No Small Potatoes,” Yvonne introduced me to the organic operation and to the farm machinery and buildings. This week, we take to the fields.

You’ll also hear this week’s Garden Tip, and a moment of reflection about the show’s theme, which might be called “Against Purity.”