Do you hate the noise and stink of gasoline-powered blowers and mowers rampaging through your neighborhood? Matthew Benzie of Indigenous Ingenuities in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is doing something about that. He’s switched his maintenance crew to zero-emission, quiet, battery-powered equipment transported on a bicycle-powered cart. He’s designing his landscapes for greener, sustainable maintenance too. Learn about this revolutionary rethinking of the landscape business on this week’s episode.

One of the first designed public landscapes in the United States, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery was a favorite resort of New Yorkers throughout the 19th century, rivaling Niagara Falls as a tourist destination. Director of Horticulture Joseph Charap tells how Green-Wood has re-discovered its heritage as green-space for the community, re-inventing itself as an arboretum and as a center for environmental research to serve the living as well as dead.

It’s a ritual of autumn – clearing all the fallen leaves from your yard and garden, and cutting back the dead flower stems. It’s familiar, but also highly destructive to the wildlife that serves as a foundation for the local ecosystem. Join Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society as he outlines a wildlife-friendly treatment for putting the garden to bed for winter – one that also saves you work.

If you want a garden that is fruitful as well as beautiful, and chemical free, you need Robert Kourik’s new book “Sustainable Food Gardens: Myths and Solutions.” In our conversation, Robert details the exhaustive research in the garden and in the library that went into the writing of this invaluable guide. We focus in particular on “food forests,” a central concept of the widely popular Permaculture school of gardening. Robert describes how he has corrected this for the North American landscape, and where the Permaculture model goes wrong. Just one of the many myths and solutions this must-have book addresses.

If you think you need to travel to somewhere rural and remote to enjoy Nature, you’ve never visited Brooklyn Bridge Park. Built on a series of concrete shipping piers on the Brooklyn shore of New York’s East River, this 85-acre landscape has reworked salvaged materials into a series of thriving, vibrant ecosystems. The park’s Director of Horticulture, Rebecca McMackin, details the process of inviting wildlife into a built environment, and how this organically maintained landscape recycles everything, including stormwater, to keep the landscape sustainable as well as green and lush. Join us for the conversation.

A leading researcher on Asian Jumping Worms, Dr. Josef Gorres of the University of Vermont has been tracking this invader’s impact on northern forests and seeking methods for controlling their numbers. In this conversation he discusses how Asian Jumping Worms can impoverish the vegetation of the forest floor and lead the deer to fall back on browsing maple saplings, over time transforming the forest flora as a whole. He describes different techniques for controlling the worms’ numbers in the wild and in the garden, and those he believes have the most promise for the future.

As a volunteer forest steward, Adrian Ayres Fisher manages restoration activities in a 53-acre tract of Cook County, Illinois’ forest preserve. A devoted gardener, Adrian has seen the devastating effect that whitetail deer can have on domestic landscapes; as a forest steward, she finds herself confronting the same animals in a different context. Lacking any effective predators, the deer population has exploded, and its voracious appetite for greenery is having a transformative impact on the woodlands. Wildflowers and undergrowth are disappearing from the forest floor, and native trees that the deer favor as browse are giving way to invasive species, setting off a cascade of effects throughout the ecosystem. Learn the details of the deer’s ecological toll.

When Carol Bouska and her siblings (three sisters and a brother) inherited the family farm in northeastern Iowa in 2009, they decided to keep it true to their parents’ community- and conservation-minded spirit. Working slowly and deliberately, the new generation developed a joint vision of a farm that would sequester carbon in the soil, reduce water pollution and soil erosion, and foster wildlife – while also promoting family harmony and serving the local community. Eight years into the siblings’ program to convert the farm to regenerative agriculture, they planted 4,500 trees this spring. The farm continues to be a center of family life, drawing the far-flung siblings, their children, and grandchildren back for reunions and projects and maintaining their ties to their neighbors. Feeding the public, it turns out, can also feed the soul and the earth.

Lawns of the traditional sort are notoriously greedy for inputs of resources such as water and fertilizer, and inhospitable to pollinators and other wildlife. Dr. Eric Watkins, a professor in the Dept of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota, has been working to change this. He has been mixing different grasses with flowers to create lawns that require far less inputs, much less mowing, and which attract and feed native bees and other pollinators. Learn about Dr. Watkins’ innovative lawns and a Minnesota state program to promote bee-friendly lawns on this week’s Growing Greener.

A passionate gardener and prolific author, Ginny Stibolt has written countless articles about the joys – and challenges – of gardening sustainably and organically with native plants in her adopted home in northeast Florida. She’s also authored or co-authored five books, and today will discuss an invaluable guide she co-wrote with Massachusetts landscape architect Sue Reed, Climate-Wise Landscaping. This book will prepare your personal landscape to flourish in the challenging situations that are emerging across the United States with the onset of climate change. With Ginny’s advice, you will be part of the solution.

Farmer Jesse Frost says that he has never grown anything – all he has done is to enhance the natural systems that produce his bountiful harvests. In his new guide to ecological market gardening, “The Living Soil Handbook,” Jesse details the techniques he has employed to make his Rough Draft Farmstead the go-to source for organic crops in central Kentucky, and an inspiration to farmers and gardeners all over the country.

Los Angeles landscape architect Greg Kochanowski was studying the impact of wildfires on landscape management in the West even before his own house burned in 2018. His suggestions and conclusions, detailed in his book “The Wild,” offer a vision of a new kind of community response to living in fire-adapted landscapes. In this conversation, Greg discusses this with Growing Greener and the part that individual homeowners and gardeners can play.

Roses, with their superb flowers, have always been a special enthusiasm of mine, but one I de-emphasized because of the toxic pesticides involved in growing them. Now Stephen Scanniello, a distinguished rosarian with an international practice, teaches me how to grow roses to perfection without chemicals.

According to ecological landscape designer Marie Chieppo’s research, the self-styled “Green Industry” is not always so green. In fact, American nurseries use billions of plastic containers each year that must be land-filled after a single use. Listen as Marie describes the obstacles to recycling nursery containers and the ways that gardeners can make plant producers switch to a more sustainable model.

Sundials, says sculptor Robert Adzema, are far more than quaint garden ornaments. The earliest astronomical instruments, they have for thousands of years modeled the relationship of earth and sun, helping users find their place in the universe, mark the seasons, and be in the moment. Learn about Robert’s unique sundials and how he can help you create your own instrument of solar power.

Ecologist and author Tom Wessels has spent decades on what he calls “forest forensics,” identifying the visual clues that allow you to read the story of your forested landscape. How can you tell if your woods were every agricultural land – pasture, maybe, or crop field? Wee they every struck by a hurricane, and when? Did some insect or disease ever thin the stand of trees? Were they logged and when? All of this becomes easy to read, especially if you have Tom’s field guide, “Forest Forensics.” And now Tom has published a new book, “New England’s Roadside Ecology,” which takes you to 30 easily accessible and unique natural areas that illustrate the dynamics he has shared with us. Listen to Tom and become fluent in the language of the forest.

Paul Tukey wrote the book – literally – on organic lawn care, and though several years old, “The Organic Lawn Care Manual” remains the essential guide to anyone with a lawn. We caught up with Paul recently to discuss what he says we can learn from our weeds. Paul tells us how a humble dandelion or plantain testifies to what our turf is lacking and how to adjust our lawn care – toxin free – to favor the grass and eliminate the invaders.

UK Environment Journalist of the Year Fred Pearce challenges standard attitudes toward invasive species in his book “The New Wild.” Revisiting the literature and interviewing experts, Pearce concludes that in many cases invasive species perform a useful function in colonizing and re-invigorating severely damaged habitats, and that in the long run it may be aggressive, adaptable invasive species that will be “Nature’s Salvation” in our time of global ecological disruption.

Weeds are one of the greatest challenges for any gardener and are commonly an excuse for the application of toxic chemical herbicides. When Nancy DuBrule-Clemente founded her pioneering, all-organic garden center and garden service Natureworks 38 years ago, she rejected such measures. In this conversation she shares her insights about weeds and the arsenal of chemical-free methods she has developed for overcoming them.

Starting a wildlife garden from scratch can be a daunting task. There is the challenge of selecting appropriate plants native to your region and adapted to your garden conditions, and then you have to locate a source from which to purchase them. Even after you get the plants home, there’s still the challenge of how to arrange them and create a pleasing and workable design.

Fortunately, the National Wildlife Federation has a new program that will do all of this for you. It takes you through a simple, step-by-step process that ensures you get just the garden you want, whether your landscape is a tree-shaded suburban back yard or a handful of pots on a sunny apartment balcony. Let program director Mary Phillips give you all the details, on Growing Greener today.