Posts by Jeff Wagner

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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Meet a new vegetable! Stem lettuce, also called celtuce, is a Chinese specialty. Coming from the same species as regular old lettuce, these plants are grown for their large edible stems rather than their leaves. Stem lettuces are the aster family’s answer to kohlrabi. I first tasted stem lettuces in Yunnan Province in 2019, and fell in love. They have a great flavor. Mild and enjoyable: a little lettucy, a little asparagusy. This variety comes from Kitazawa Seed Company, and lives up to its claim to fame: […]

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This conversation from the podcast “The Way Out Is In” is about applying mindfulness and wisdom in environmental and social movements. This week, our world had the two hottest days ever recorded. In the middle of the summer heat, it’s easy to feel overheated and overwhelmed as both heat and news cycles tax us and our communities. We chose this piece for this newsletter’s inspiration because it feels like a soothing balm for people who are working for a better future in any setting, whether it be as […]

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Listen to a conversation between Groundwork’s director Jeff Wagner and Kelly Moody, an incredible botanist, teacher about people’s relationship with land, and instructor for Groundwork’s field programs. Kelly interviewed Jeff for her Ground Shots Podcast. The conversation focuses on the Colorado River, industrial food production, and how the Colorado River is a microcosm of the U.S. relationship with the natural world. Listen Now

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