Cultivating Place

Latest Episodes:

Herstoric Development & Milkweed Commons in South Bend, IN with Charity Stowe Nov 05, 2026

Show notes

Sometimes unexpected paths lead us to stay–and grow–in a place we thought we were leaving. This week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa talks about staying at home, with Charity Stowe, founder of Herstoric Development & Milkweed Commons in South Bend, Indiana. Charity’s journey back to South Bend began with a house she planned to renovate and sell. But what started as a real estate project grew into something much more: a commitment to the community and the neighborhood she found herself calling home. Listen in - this week! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you’ll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can’t thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The Collective: Seed Saver's Exchange, with Mike Bollinger Oct 29, 2026

Show notes

Seeds are essential not just to our gardens but to life on this planet across time and space. Seeds and humans have partnered since humans have walked on two feet. This week on Cultivating Place, we are in conversation with Mike Bollinger, Executive Director of Seed Savers Exchange, celebrating the history and agency of individuals saving seeds. Founded in 1975 by Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, SSE is one of the largest non-governmental seed banks in the world, focused on preserving open-pollinated, heirloom crop seeds and education, and Mike shares so much more about SSE moving forward and all that we save and grow when we steward seeds well! PS: Mike is also host of Seed Savers Exchange’s new podcast, Sowing Connections. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Do Unto Others Downstream: Regenerative thinking with Mark Lewis, Trailhead Capital Oct 22, 2026

Show notes

Many of the systems that run our world, let alone garden our world, are built-sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently-to discourage and disincentivize regenerative growing and regenerative thinking. Mark Lewis is a human who learned from gardening, and ultimately from running a 354-acre regenerative organic farm, how to live into his regenerative values. Gardening and regenerative farming also demonstrated to him that if we want those values to really root in our world, we need to apply those values to some of our larger systems – like the economics of our world. As a co-founder and managing partner at Trailhead Capital, he believes there are many pathways to regeneration, and we need them all. Mark joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his journey and his regenerative thinking. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Gardenside with journalist Kai Wright, co-host of The Guardian's Stateside with Kai + Carterz Oct 15, 2026

Show notes

Kai Wright is a gardener, but chances are good you know him as a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and longtime journalist whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity. He is co-host of The Guardian’s new video podcast: Stateside with Kai and Carter, a current events program "striving to make sense of it all". Kai’s garden history and practice help ground him in all that sense-making. And we could all use more good sense. Listen in this week! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The Essence of Thriving with Dr. Garrett Liles, Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems, CSU Chico Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

For the next conversation in our intermittent series on what regenerative cultivation looks like in our world-at many levels, Cultivating Place is speaking this week with Dr. Garrett Liles, cofounder and faculty affiliate of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico. The Center is all about caring cultivation of place, understanding and supporting better systems, and training the next generation in the ethos and the practices. The Center is directed by nationally recognized regenerative agriculture leader, Dr. Cynthia Daley, an educator, researcher, and advocate, who joined CSU Chico’s faculty in 1998. Between 2016 and 2019, Dr. Daley, along with Dr. Tim LaSalle and Dr. Garrett Liles, created the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems. Today, the Center is a nationally respected hub for interdisciplinary research, producer education, student engagement, and policy outreach. Dr. Liles has been mentored by and is a colleague of Dr. Daley and Dr. LaSalle, expanding on and adding to the longstanding work of sustainable agricultural practice at Chico State–past, present, and future-for the benefit of all people and places. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Sweet Peas & Sweet Homes: Where Flowers Become Memories Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

To welcome October, this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa welcomes Colleen Raney of Washington State’s Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company. Colleen founded Songbird Seed Co., a seed company devoted to cultivating and preserving exceptional sweet peas. What started as a personal fascination with the sweet pea became a deeper study of their history, varieties, cultivation, and extraordinary diversity. Today, Colleen grows hundreds of sweet pea varieties each year, selecting and sharing seeds that she finds particularly beautiful, unusual, and worthy of being grown again. Her work is grounded in the belief that sweet peas need not be complicated, and there is so much to be discovered in paying attention. Colleen publishes a bi-annual periodical, The Sweet Pea: A Garden Companion, and she is the founder of the American Sweet Pea Society. Together, Ben and Colleen explore her early life in acting and singing, and the connection between scent, memory, and our sense of home. We follow Colleen’s growth from tending a simple garden and growing flowers for pollinators into a full-fledged flower farm, with a particular focus on her success growing sweet peas. They also talk about stepping back, paying attention, and letting the plants tell us what they need. At the beginning of the season for sowing many spring bloomers, we hope you join us by listening in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The Gospel of Asa Sims, a Garden History Love Story Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Happy Autumn! Cultivating Place is proud to launch an occasional series from Host Abra Lee, delving into our Garden past to better understand and illuminate our Garden present and future. Sometimes we have to look back to grow forward! This week, Abra shares her research into an intrepid and unflagging cultivator of place from our past in Virginia’s Tidewater Region: Asa Sims. A businessman, educator, floral grower, and designer, Asa was also a cofounder in 1932 of the Historic Black Garden Clubs of Virginia, then known as the Negro Garden Clubs of Virginia. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

To Leave the Land Better Than We Found It, Bryce & Brita Lundberg–Lundberg Family Farms Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

To “leave the land better than we found it” should be the ethic of all Gardeners. It is the North Star ethic of regenerative and organic farming leaders: Lundberg Family Rice. Third- and fourth-generation stewards of rice, land, and planet, Bryce and Brita Lundberg join Cultivating Place this week to share why, and all that grows from that single dedication. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Pre-Autumnal Equinox Celebration with Erin Benzakein of Floret & Floret Originals Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental in cultivating a flower-farming economy in our country. Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past decade, however, is a whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. As we look toward the Autumnal Equinox later this month, please enjoy this favorite conversation! Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for the program & for The Earth in Her Hands, she was already a tireless advocate for local flowers and for supporting more flower farmers and local-flower florists in our everyday lives here in the US. Through her on-farm and subsequently online flower farming Floret Workshops, for more than a decade, she has been renowned for encouraging and training eager new flower-farmer-florists in order to transform the cut flower industry from the multi-billion-dollar, large-corporate-owned international import (with little ecological or economic oversight) behemoth it had become, back into the more lovely and loving, organic, locally-based circular and community-oriented economy she envisioned it could be – and should be. Floret - once a flower farm and training center – is now more fully (and perhaps even more beautifully) described as “a family-owned flower farm and seed company specializing in breeding new cut flower varieties for gardeners, farmers & designers.” They add: “ Our thriving research & education farm is dedicated to giving flower lovers the tools & information they need to grow the gardens of their dreams.” In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, and its seeds of the next season feeling, I am so revisiting Erin on Cultivating Place – just as Floret's newest title, From Bloom to Seed, is now available for preorder! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

A place for healing, safety, comfort, joy, and belonging, with David Jacques Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

As the season begins to show signs of turning its next page, Cultivating Place host Ben Futa heads to Vermont! This week he's in conversation with David Jacques, also known by the internet persona "Davey Wavey". David is the owner of Frog Meadow Bed & Breakfast, a retreat for men in southern Vermont. For nearly 20 years, David has been pursuing his passion for gardening while serving an audience (online and in person) of primarily gay men. In their conversation this week, they explore childhoods spent in the soil, how David’s career led to an East Coast homecoming, and a newfound connection with wild, beautiful spaces intended for healing, safety, comfort, joy, and belonging when David became the new owner and steward of Frog Meadow. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and see many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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