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PODCAST

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.

leisure home & garden

All Episodes

29:01

A New Chapter in the Roundup Debacle

Growing Greener ·

2026/05/13

Award-winning investigative journalist Carey Gillam exposed the corruption and suppression of evidence involved in the Environmental Protection Agency's original approval of the use of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate on American gardens and farms. In today's conversation she details the on-going suppression of evidence of its harmful impact on human and environmental health and discusses how the case about Roundup currently before the Supreme Court is designed to deprive

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29:01

Landraces – Customizing Vegetable and Fruit Cultivars...

Growing Greener ·

2026/05/06

In a conversation first shared in February of 2024, farmer and author Joseph Lofthouse describes how to foster "landraces," strains of vegetables and fruits adapted to the unique conditions in your garden.

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29:01

Are Alien Plants Superior at Supporting Insect...

Growing Greener ·

2026/04/29

James Hitchmough, an eminent British garden designer and former professor of horticultural ecology asserted on a previous episode that research confirms that gardens rich in alien plants support a greater diversity of insects. Today, Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, an organization founded to promote insect and invertebrate conservation shares a different understanding of the science.

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29:01

The Million Orchid Project Turns Urban Areas into...

Growing Greener ·

2026/04/22

Dr. Jason Downing of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden turns rare orchid propagation into an educational adventure for Miami area students, beautifies the cityscape, and rescues native Floridian species from the brink of extinction.

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29:01

Maine's Wild Seed Project Offers Education and an...

Growing Greener ·

2026/04/15

In this week's Growing Greener Heather McCargo, founder of the Wild Seed Project, describes its programs to encourage gardeners to grow native plants from wild-collected seeds to preserve genetic diversity in the garden and beyond, and how McCargo has embraced the evolution of her personal garden from meadow to biodiverse woodland.

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29:01

Chemical Warfare from Invasive Plants

Growing Greener ·

2026/04/08

One of the ways that invasive plants displace indigenous floras is "allelopathy." In a conversation first broadcast in February 2024, Dr. Susan Kalisz of the University of Tennessee Knoxville describes how many introduced plants actually poison the soil so that indigenous species cannot germinate or flourish in their former homes.

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29:01

Using Genetics to Avoid Spraying in the Vegetable Garden

Growing Greener ·

2026/04/01

Selecting disease-resistant cultivars is an essential tool for avoiding the use of pesticides in the vegetable garden. Plant pathologist Nicole Gauthier of the University of Kentucky explains how to identify cultivars appropriate to your region and your garden, and why "tolerance" may serve you as well as "resistance."

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29:01

Make Your Lawn a Low-Maintenance Contributor to...

Growing Greener ·

2026/03/25

As Dan Jaffe Wilder Wilder says "you can grow a lawn which is a whole bunch of green stuff. Or you can grow a lawn that is a whole bunch of low-growing green stuff with some yellow, some blue, some white, some pink and some red mixed in. Which do you choose? " Join the conversation with this native plant expert and learn how you can make your lawn not only colorful but also easier to maintain and supportive of the local wildlife and native flora.

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29:01

A Gardener's Introduction to Fungi and Their...

Growing Greener ·

2026/03/17

Estimates of fungi diversity range into the millions of species, yet the vast majority remain unknown. What is clear, says mycologist Gabriela D'Elia, is that your garden plants depend on the services provided to them by the indigenous fungi.

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29:01

A Brazilian Genius of the last Century Created...

Growing Greener ·

2026/03/11

James Lord speaks of his mentor and inspiration Roberto Burle Marx, the painter, sculptor, musician, and botanist who found in Brazil's native plants the basis for a new style of landscape architecture and a language to celebrate the distinctive beauty of his homeland.

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29:01

A British Horticultural Ecologist Challenges the U.S....

Growing Greener ·

2026/03/04

Citing European studies, British horticultural ecologist James Hitchmough, a leader of the ecological gardening movement in his country, rejects the intrinsic superiority of native plants over exotic garden imports for supporting insect diversity in the garden.

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29:01

Balancing your account in the soil seed bank

Growing Greener ·

2026/02/25

A square foot of topsoil typically hosts thousands of dormant seeds deposited by previous floras. Nathan Lambstrom of Lambstrom Garden Ecology discusses his research into how this "soil seed bank" can enhance or derail ecological restoration, and how to manage your "account" to benefit your garden.

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29:01

A Tree's Perspective on Pruning

Growing Greener ·

2026/02/18

Is your pruning aimed only at gratifying your aesthetics and needs? Chris Roddick also views pruning from the plants' perspective, promoting techniques that enhance their growth patterns and ecological function as well.

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29:01

O Canada ¬– A Garden Activist Enriches and...

Growing Greener ·

2026/02/11

Travel with Growing Greener to Winnipeg, Manitoba to learn how Ash Burkowski is collecting seed from local prairie remnants to raise indigenous grasses and wildflowers that can be integrated into lawns, restoring populations of native flora while relieving homeowners of the need for fertilization and irrigation and reducing the need for mowing.

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29:01

Creating Crops that Thrive in Your Garden

Growing Greener ·

2026/02/04

A replay of a February 2024 conversation in which Joseph Lofthouse, author of "Landrace Gardening" details how anyone can create genetically diverse vegetable and fruit crops that flourish in the local climate and soil with minimal inputs in just three years.

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29:01

Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center combines energy...

Growing Greener ·

2026/01/28

Byron Kominek knew the family farm needed a more profitable crop than hay to survive. By installing photovoltaic panels and growing crops underneath, he now supplies electricity to 300 neighboring houses while also producing food and hosting educational programs at what is now a popular learning center.

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29:01

The Missing Piece of Your Ecological Garden

Growing Greener ·

2026/01/21

Liz Koziol of the University of Kansas shares hew work with mycorrhizal fungi and native plants, and how a properly designed fungal inoculant can make your ecological garden more biodiverse, quicker to establish itself and more resistant to weeds.

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29:01

An Antique Tool Brings New Knowledge of Native Plants

Growing Greener ·

2026/01/14

Herbariums, annotated collections of dried plant specimens first appeared in Italy almost 500 years ago. In today's Growing Greener, Lea Johnson, Director of Conservation at the Native Plant Trust discusses why they remain an essential tool for those who track and study native plant populations, and the new technologies herbariums facilitate.

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29:01

How Your Garden Helped Drive the Deer Population Boom

Growing Greener ·

2026/01/07

Dr. Elic Weitzel of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History describes the thousands of years of association between deer and people, how they long ago came to prefer human-created landscapes, and why their population has exploded

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29:01

Behold the Magic of Warm-Season Grasses

Growing Greener ·

2025/12/31

In a conversation recorded in December of 2019 Shannon Currey, a leading educator in the native plants industry, describes how the unique adaptations of warm season grasses make them winners in an era of climate change as well as invaluable in the late summer garden.

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378 results

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