Sunday, March 3, 2024 Schedule
Hort2Culture: Connecting People with Plants
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Speaker: Jared Barnes, Ph.D., started gardening when he was five years old, and since then he has enthusiastically pursued how to best cultivate plants and cultivate minds. He currently fulfills those passions as an award-winning associate professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. He is also the host of The Plantastic Podcast and writes a weekly newsletter titled Planted. Recent awards include the 2021 Stephen F. Austin State University Teaching Excellence Award and the 2019 Perennial Plant Association’s Academic Award. His passion has been recognized by peers in interviews in People, Organic Gardening, Greenhouse Grower, AmericanHort Connect, Ken Druse’s Real Dirt, and Nursery Management, and his articles have appeared in The American Gardener, Fine Gardening, and Carolina Gardener.
Presentation: With all the challenges we face on Planet Earth, plants are poised to change the 21st century. In this enthusiastic talk, Dr. Jared Barnes will share how we can sow passion, help gardeners take root, graft interests together, and much more to help gardeners and the horticulture industry blossom.
Bring the Bees to Your Yard
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Speaker: Sam Droege grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, and received an undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland and a master’s degree at the State University of New York – Syracuse. Most of his career has been spent at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird Survey Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the Bioblitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs, and works on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs. Currently, his team is running an inventory and monitoring program for native bees; developing tools and techniques manuals; a bumblebee floral survey for citizens; along with online identification guides for North American bees at www.discoverlife.org, and producing public domain hi-resolution photographs of bees, insects, and flowers.
Presentation: People think they know about bees. But they don’t. It turns out that any yard in the region could have 100 species of native bees using that yard. But few do. Why? Because while you might think bees are using your flowers, this is often not the case. Our native bee species are picky, often only using native plants and often only going to a single plant genus. We will help people create better bee habitats through choices of flowers in their yards and give them insider cocktail talking points about native bee species that will impress their friends.
The Story is in the Seed: Growing a Taste of Home
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Speaker: Owen Taylor co-founded Truelove Seeds in 2017. This Philadelphia-based seed company is a collaboration between over 70 small-scale urban and rural farms committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture. Truelove Seeds' model stems from Owen's 20+ years of work with food justice and urban agriculture in San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia, and four years spent learning the art of seed saving while managing William Woys Weaver's Roughwood Seed Collection in Devon, PA.
Presentation: Join Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and the Seeds and Their People podcast to explore how growing the foods that fed our ancestors can bring us closer to a deeper and more delicious understanding of who we are in the world. How can this personal journey of connection and reconnection to ancestral food in the garden allow us to connect with others who also grow their traditional foods? "Oh, you eat the shoots of the pumpkin plant as well? How do you harvest and prepare it? What do you call it?” for example. We will talk about our model of working with about 75 farms throughout the country, each of whom contributes at least one of their cultural heirloom seed varieties to our seed catalog; as well as the ways we have seen our customer base expand among immigrants, refugee, and other specific cultural groups, all the while supporting our growers financially and through mentorship and networking.
