Come March, winter is starting to feel long in many portions of the northern hemisphere, enter gardeners, the spring and summer vegetable garden is beckoning to us.
Niki Jabbour is an enthusiastic gardener in Halifax Nova Scotia, a gardening zone which might challenge many a dedicated gardener. Especially in winter.
But not Niki.
Host of the Nova Scotia-based radio program The Weekend Gardener, cofounder of the online Savvy Gardening forum, and award-winning best-selling author of beloved gardening books over the past decade, including "The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener," Niki Jabbour is a vegetable gardening evangelist.
Niki joins Cultivating Place this week to share more of her enthusiasm and vegetable gardening knowledge - in particular some of the season extending skills she shares in her newest book "Growing Under Cover".
Niki's knowledge and skills are applicable no matter where you garden, and in our conversation, we get into detail on some of the undercover skills Niki encourages us to try in order to extend our seasons or make each individual season more successful with simple techniques and materials.
You can follow Niki on line at Facebook: Garden.with.Niki.Jabbour/ and on Instagram: @nikijabbour/
Join us again next week when we are joined by Lorena Gorbett, of the Maidu Summit Consortium in Northern California. Cultivating Place is produced from a base on ancestral and present homelands of the Mechoopda Maidu, and I am so grateful to be in conversation with Lorena about land-back under the care of Maidu people and their Traditional Ecological Knowledge of this place.
RELATED EPISODES INCLUDE:
Thinking out Loud this week...
In this conversation with Page I am really stuck on this idea of how we learn to love our gardens in time and space. We live in an ever more and more comparative culture and in-line landscape. Everyone else’s garden can look bigger, better, prettier, fuller, more everything.
If I had one wish for ANYONE listening to this this week it is this – and at the risk of sounding incredibly and irritatingly matronizing – try to remember that everyone’s garden started somewhere and no-one’s garden is weed or pest of awkward section free. It’s honest to goodness not about the magazine cover shot, the comparison or the competition. Try to find to just be with your garden and love the time and any small task engaged in. Remember why you came to love this friendship with the plants and the land in the first place.
When and if you find yourself scrolling online or flipping through pages and feeling overwhelmed or badly rather than filled up and excited – just go outside and play a little ok? Just go outside and be with the garden or the park or the trail.
You will feel better – you will remember. You are a gardener. It's good.
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