Groundwork Blog

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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It’s 6am, and I’m wide awake, my body refusing to forget the farm harvest schedule. I’m sitting in my brother’s high rise apartment, looking down at the bustling street of people beginning their daily grind. Coasting down highway 70 away from a blazing sun, my heart felt full as I headed into Denver this weekend. Being in the city is like night and day from life at Groundwork. The values we practice day to day at the farm have seeped their way into my mind […]

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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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I applied for this fellowship because… I recognize that change must happen sooner rather than later. A movement to localize our food systems has taken root throughout our local communities and the world. I want to play a larger role in ensuring its success by focusing on the food systems that provide sustenance to communities all the while engaging in a healthy relationship with the land, people, and earth as a whole. While learning is vital, making connections is equally important. Understanding other cultures as […]

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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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I applied for this fellowship because… I want to create meaningful change toward a socially and environmentally just future. There are many, many ways to do this and I’m still trying to find my place in the movement, but over the last year I’ve grown especially curious in how local and organic farming can embody that future. I learned about Groundwork through its ties to Pun Pun, an organic farm and seed saving center I was volunteering at in Thailand, and applied because of the […]

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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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This March, I took a willow basket weaving workshop with Jeff Wagner from Groundwork. Let’s just say, it was a humbling experience! Working with wild materials involves significant preparation. Our willows, harvested by Jeff in early winter, were dried for three months before being rehydrated for weaving. We were learning a European stake and strand style. Jeff is the executive director of Groundwork, a Western Slope non-profit that believes environmental problems stem from cultural issues. Their solution? Place-based education that fosters a shift in perspective […]

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I applied for this fellowship because… I applied for this fellowship because I have been seeking to understand and work towards a vision of the world that inspires me. I have ever-changing ideas of what this future could look like: It always includes community, a close relationship to the food we’re growing, vulnerability, and personal responsibility. I often ask myself if some version of this future is possible in our polarized and disconnected culture where these values hold such little importance. How do we get […]

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For my “summer vacation” this year, I spent about a week on the traditional lands of the Ute communities now known as Grand Mesa National Forest in Colorado. The pull to meet the Mesa was strong. Many of us traveled from afar (some as far as Southern England). We were pulled because we had an insatiable curiosity about land relationships on top of the world’s largest Mesa. Having a bit of fear of being an animal on a mountain is healthy. I had this fear […]

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