Growing Greener
Growing Greener
Tom Christopher
Your weekly half-hour program about environmentally informed gardening. Each week we bring you a different expert, a leading voice on gardening in partnership with Nature. Our goal is to make your landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.
This Year’s “Less Lawn More Life Challenge” Goes Viral
Last May Growing Greener featured the challenge that Plan it Wild, a rewilding design and installation firm, posed to American homeowners: to replace 25 square feet of lawn with locally indigenous plants.  Today we hear how nearly 10,000 people in 49 states committed to this 12-week online program, how backyard biodiversity flourished as a result, and how the challenge is expanding through neighborhoods to reach people who hadn’t previously considered devoting their landscapes to reinforcing the regional ecosystem.
Aug 27
29 min
America’s most beautiful neglected genus of keystone plants
Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, a pioneer of organic land care, extolls the outstanding aesthetic and ecological contributions of goldenrods, a genus of native flowers too seldom seen in our gardens.
Aug 20
29 min
The Path from Traditional Horticulture to Ecological Gardening – Part Two
Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, completes her interview of Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, exploring his path to ecological gardening, the hope he finds in the remarkable contributions of young colleagues, and the most effective ways to reach out to the broader gardening public.
Aug 13
29 min
The Path from Traditional Horticulture to Ecological Gardening – Part One
Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, interviews Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, about what led him from an education steeped in traditional gardening to helping found ecological gardening in the United States
Aug 6
29 min
A Female-Owned and Operated Gardening Cooperative Creates a New Business Model With Nature as “our foremost collaborator”
Andrea Hurd of Oakland, California describes the way she structured Mariposa Gardening and Design Cooperative, Inc. to provide employee equitability and management experience for women breaking into the field, and the firm’s commitment to celebrating the local landscape by enhancing habitat and working with indigenous materials.
Jul 30
29 min
Finding Opportunity in a Common Landscape Roadblock
Switching to more environmentally friendly practices is too often resisted by landscape professionals afraid to stray from familiar routines.  Mariah Whitmore and Tony Piazza, both prominent landscape business owners in the eastern end of Long Island, New York, discuss how they are increasing profits by adding Nature friendly land care to their repertoire.
Jul 23
29 min
A Game-Changing Shortcut to Creating a Native Meadow
Claire Chambers, founder of Meadow Lab, describes the roll-out sod her company is producing that can transform a landscape into a blooming, mature meadow of native flowers and grasses in a single growing season
Jul 16
29 min
The Overlooked Beauty and Garden Services of Wasps
A replay of a conversation from April of 2021 with Pollinator Conservationist Heather Holm about her multi-award-winning book, Wasps, Their Biology, Diversity, and Role as Beneficial Insects and Pollinators of Native Plants.
Jul 9
29 min
A New Guide for Helping Your Native Plant Garden Adapt to a Changing Climate
Jenica Allen and Matt Fertakos of Northeast RISCC describe the invaluable free online guide they helped to create that provides all a gardener needs to know about selecting native plants that will flourish not only today but also persist as the local climate changes
Jul 2
29 min
Pee-Cycling: Taking the Waste Out of Our Waterways by Fertilizing the Garden
Julia Cavicchi and Tatiana Schreiber of the Rich Earth Institute talk of curbing water pollution by removing human urine from the waste stream, and how you can repurpose it to feed your plants
Jun 25
29 min
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