Posts by Jeff Wagner

I want to write a few words about mental health in local food systems. Casey’s suicide has been overwhelming, partially because of the loss of such a visionary person and partially because in our agricultural community, there are most certainly people who have walked close to that edge and felt alone and unsupported during at their lowest moments. Small-scale organic farmers are being squeezed—crushed rather—between the economic pressures of a hyper-industrialized food system and the risky challenges of growing food for uncertain local markets in […]

Continue reading >>

This month, we are honoring Casey Piscura, one of our peers in mountain farming and food systems education. He was the force behind Wild Mountain Seeds and was one of this country’s seed visionaries, experimenting with cutting-edge landrace plant breeding techniques to create new vegetable varieties that are adapted to harsh mountain growing conditions. Those who knew Casey describe him as one of the hardest-working and driven people they’ve ever met, and he was a foundation of Western Colorado’s food and seed systems. Casey died by suicide last month on February 2nd at the […]

Continue reading >>

How are great open-pollinated vegetable varieties created? Through years of careful tending, a certain amount of cross-pollination, and careful selection for the plants that thrive. Casey Piscura at Wild Mountain Seeds in Carbondale, Colorado, was a master plant breeder. In our April 2024 newsletter, we shared a piece on his Sunfired Flare tomato, and we’re reprinting an updated version today as a tribute to Casey. Casey was a part of a small collection of people developing and experimenting with a method of plant breeding known […]

Continue reading >>

Seeds have stories. Sometimes those stories get lost. People forget. Somebody who knew where the seeds came from might hand a few to a friend, saying “these are great, you should try them.” And in an instant, the history of the seeds is broken, forgotten. I bought a packet of Za Hara eggplant seeds from the great seed stewards at Sand Hill Preservation Center. Sand Hill has a lot on their hands, stewarding hundreds of varieties of rare seeds with the goal of getting small seed […]

Continue reading >>

Willow weaving is in the air at Groundwork! With our upcoming class The Story of Willow getting ready for production (pre-register here), we’ve been thinking about stepping out of the immediate moment and engaging in practices like willow weaving and wild willow tending that are multi-year processes, moving at the Earth’s pace rather than the pace of a society scarce on attention. Our instructor Kelly Moody, who teaches our ecology classes and is slated to help create and teach our upcoming online willow cast, also runs a […]

Continue reading >>

There is a central question we wrestle with at Groundwork: with our world in trouble, where does real change come from? A trend in environmental thought blames the big things for our problems: corporations and governments. It’s easy to point to faceless entities liquidating the living world for profit. But if that’s the only answer, where then does hope come from for ordinary people? If we point out the window towards the CEOs and the politicians, a part of what we are pointing at is the reflection of ourselves […]

Continue reading >>

In the high desert, growing squash is always a gamble. Our home, Delta County, used to be one of the biggest squash-growing areas of the United States, known for exporting Japanese varieties like kabocha squashes to discerning markets in Japan. We have faced increased pest pressure from squash bugs, recently, which both weaken the vines and carry diseases that can kill whole plants, and our region is now faced with very challenging growing conditions for Cucurbita-lovers like ourselves. This year, with a generous dose of […]

Continue reading >>

Groundwork has always focused on the relationship between culture and environment. This newsletter, we offer you an episode of one of our favorite podcasts: Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio. The episode focuses on what happens when you take a species (that’s us) that has a keen sense of direction and sense of place, and replace nearly all their navigation through the world with GPS in the span of just a few years. As you might suspect, our relationship with the world, both built and […]

Continue reading >>

Habanero-type peppers are their own species of pepper, capsicum chinense. Most of them are grown in extreme humidity and heat in tropical areas, requiring a longer growing season than the most common pepper species, capsicum annum. You see large amounts of habanero-types in places like the Caribbean and the tropical mountains of northeastern India (this is where ghost peppers come from). In tropical areas, peppers are long-lived plants, forming small trees that can live for several years. In areas with freezing weather in the winter, […]

Continue reading >>

Throughout the Groundwork food systems fellowship, we meet for weekly seminars on alternatives to the mainstream culture that relies on destruction to produce economic growth. We study the cultural, political, and economic movements that are imagining and trying to bring into reality a more livable future. Degrowth is one of our favorite movements. As a movement, degrowth is based primarily in the global north, focusing on how the wealthy societies of the world can craft a path forward that focuses on real measures of well-being […]

Continue reading >>