Growing Greener

Rutger Myers of Eco-Cycle, a leader in promoting community composting programs for 50 years, discusses studies that indicate microplastics may be finding their way into the finished product and what you can do to prevent that.

A school of European and English garden designers, and now American ones too, claim their "designed ecosystems" of plants gathered from all over the world provide similar benefits to natural plant communities of locally co-evolved species.  Peter Adler, a plant ecologist at Utah State University, helps us explore the potential of such a practice.

Texan Ben Pfeiffer discusses his personal crusade for fireflies and the remarkable facts about their strange and colorful life cycles in this return visit to a conversation from July 2020

Sara Weaner Cooper describes how New Directions in the American Landscape is incorporating indigenous American approaches into Ecological Gardening and how by adjusting the growing conditions in her lawn she caused it to transform itself into a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers without the use of herbicides or other unsustainable practices. A replay of a July, 2024 conversation.

By storing excess heat from sunny days in the soil below his greenhouses, Tim Clymer keeps them warm on winter nights for a fraction the cost of conventional propane heat.