Posts by Jeff Wagner

Notes on Cultural Appropriation & Traditional Skills

All our ancestors, no matter where they originated, created intimate relationships with their home places, including place-based skill traditions. In the modern world, those skills and relationships are in decline. Groundwork’s folk school is a space to share and learn traditional non-industrial skills as a way to… Preserve and expand ancestral and traditional skills, helping humanity prepare for a less industrial future. Build relationships with place and foster the emergence of more localized culture. Explore values and ways of life the oppose capitalism, industrialism, and […]

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Interview with KVNF’s “As The Worm Turns”

At the end of May, Lance Swigart, Jill Spears, and Lulu Volckhausen visited Groundwork’s educational farm for a tour and interview. We chatted about Groundwork’s educational farm programming and the work that needs to be done to inspire young leaders in environmental and agricultural fields. You can listen to the interview on KVNF’s website by clicking here. The interview is split across the radio hour into segments, which begin at about 17:00 and 40:00. Click here to see more of Groundwork’s interviews and articles in […]

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Kelly Moody Interviews Nikki Hill on Human-Landscape Relationships

How can we create a sustainable relationship with the land? Nikki Hill and Kelly Moody are both teachers for Groundwork’s field courses studying ecology, botany, and human-landscape relationships in Colorado. Kelly is also the force behind the Ground Shots Podcast, interviewing all kinds of people who work with plants and ecosystems. The core question this conversation orbits around is this: how can we build a sustainable relationship with the Earth, rather than substituting one kind of over-consumptive culture for another? This interview with Nikki comes from […]

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Sunfired Flare Tomato

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. Our friends at Wild Mountain Seeds in Carbondale, Colorado, bred the Sunfired Flare tomato. They often work with a plant breeding method known as “grex gardening”. Last month, we shared a little about carefully-controlled F1 hybrid breeding. Grex gardening is the other end of the spectrum from industrial F1 hybrids. “Grex” is Latin for “flock”, and refers to a population of plants that will […]

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Joanna Macy’s Wild Love For The World

Listen Now In several conversations recently, this interview has come up as a foundational piece of inspiration for activists, educators,. So this month, we’re featuring Joanna Macy’s first appearance on the On Being podcast: “A Wild Love For The World“. Joanna Macy has lived a varied life: she is a translator of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, worked for the CIA and the Peace Corps, worked alongside the Dalai Lama when he was first exiled to India, and was a foundational force for the environmental […]

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The Winnowing Tray: Groundwork’s New Quarterly Publication

Groundwork began in 2019 as a collection of Bite-Sized Books that had the goal of contributing to more expansive, holistic, and creative conversations about addressing environmental issues. With encouragement from friends, I (Jeff) am returning to writing and publishing on a regular basis. In the next few weeks, watch for the first release of The Winnowing Tray. You may ask, what’s a winnowing tray? It’s a type of flattish basket used all around the world to winnow seeds, separating the viable seeds from chaff, dust, […]

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Bekana Mustard

This month, we bring you the story of a mustard defying the odds: Bekana mustard! This mustard has everything. Fast-growing. Beautiful. Mild flavor to eat raw in salads. Crunchy stems to cook like bok choi. What could go wrong with this plant? Truelove Seeds describes the history of these seeds: “Japanese soldiers returned home with Chinese cabbage seeds after the Russo-Japanese war in the turn of the 20th Century. Bekana (often called Tokyo Bekana) is believed to be a selection from these early Chinese cabbages, […]

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Papalote Ranch Cushaw Squash

One of the most exciting and inspiring parts of being a seed grower is the understanding that our food and seed crops aren’t static relics of the past, and instead, living ecosystems that are constantly evolving and adapting to place. Therefore, the work of the seed grower isn’t only the maintenance of varieties from our past but as a co-evolutionary partner in the varieties of the future. For the past summers on our educational farm in Paonia, Colorado, we have been plagued by infestations of […]

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Christiana Figueres On Ecological Hope

This new section of our newsletter (and blog!) will include the books, podcasts, and people that keep us inspired to continue our environmental work in the face of all the challenges facing our world. We see burnout, overwhelm, and hopelessness as some of the largest obstacles to climate and ecological action, so this is where we share tools to maintain a sense of stability in rough seas. Hooray! This month: an incredible interview with Christiana Figueres, one of the guiding figures for the UN’s work […]

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Galina Siberian Tomato

These seeds defied USSR government control to travel to the United States in the late 1980’s! One of our seed steward mentors, Bill McDorman, was visiting an agricultural research station in Siberia on a trip to find seeds that might grow well in the harsh conditions mountain west. He asked whether he could take samples of the seeds back to the US to grow and distribute, but the research director told him he would need permission from the Kremlin. As he was leaving, one of […]

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