Passport
Designed to help the beginning gardener learn the tools of successful vegetable and herb gardening.
Let’s Grow Stuff is back with new episodes and blog posts in 2022 to help you plan and garden this growing season! Visit this page to stream on-demand or watch episodes on our PBS Wisconsin Facebook page or YouTube Channel.
03/13/24
Start your spring gardening to-do list with ‘Let’s Grow Stuff’
As winter thaws, Wisconsin gardeners are itching to get back outside. From helping out pollinators to preparing for your best...
02/09/24
Interview: PBS Wisconsin’s Let’s Grow Stuff summer “on set” at Eagle Heights Community Gardens
Greetings from the . . . winter! It’s me, Sig, your occasional PBS Wisconsin Let’s Grow Stuff blogger (and garden-curious,...
02/09/24
Let’s Grow Stuff Interview: Lata and Tilak grow seeds of India in Eagle Heights Community Gardens
Greetings from the 2024 PBS Wisconsin Garden & Landscape Expo! It’s Sig, again, sharing a second conversation from my summer...
08/10/23
Let’s Grow Stuff: Designing your turf-free landscape
Note: This is Part Two of a 3-part blog series explaining how to “Replace your lawn with something better, a...
Meet the Gardeners
Ben Futa is the co-host of Let’s Grow Stuff and a professional gardener and horticulturist. He is passionate about connecting people to plants — and to one another — through public gardens. Ben grew up gardening on 5.5 acres in northern Indiana. For more than 20 years, he cultivated his green thumb under the enabling influence of his parents. A childhood hobby for gardening evolved into a professional passion for public horticulture through internships with the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Fernwood Botanical Garden in southwest Michigan. Ben’s experience shaped his outlook that public gardens are more than the sum of their plants: they must also embrace the “culture” of horticulture, creating gardens and programs with, rather than for, diverse audiences. He believes that gardeners, through their gardens, will save the world.
Qwantese Winters is the co-host of Let’s Grow Stuff as well as a doula, urban gardener, herbalist and home cook. Her work aims to create space for diverse communities in the world of food growing — through education and accessibility, and the empowerment these two crucial elements bring. Qwantese was born in the suburbs of Chicago but grew up on the West side of Madison in Middleton, Wisconsin. After learning about her grandfather’s Gullah Geechee roots, she was inspired to bring her ancestral history of food growing, herbalism and medicine to her community. She joined the Troy Farms Urban Farmer Trainee program in 2019 to build growing skills. It was at Troy that she discovered her love of helping others see the connection between their culture and the land. Qwantese believes nature and its bounty are home to us all, and seeks to help diverse communities overcome the barriers that prevent the development of a healthy relationship with the land.
Funding for Let’s Grow Stuff is provided by American Transmission Company, Ganshert Nursery and Landscapes, Willy Street Co-op, the Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programming, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
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