A New Season Of 'A Growing Passion' Debuts On KPBS

Speaker 1: 00:00 From farm to table and see do fruit. A growing passion explores the way southern California grows. Speaker 2: 00:07 A growing passion is back for season seven credible. They're not kidding. Wow. Look at that. What we're doing is organically growing heirloom beads Speaker 1: 00:19 show kicks off. It's new season on KPBS TB Thursday host and garden expert Nan sturm and takes us all along. She visits gardens, farms and even southern California. Super Bloom. I spoke with Nan Sterman earlier about her show. Well man, thanks for joining us. Speaker 3: 00:35 My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So season seven premieres tomorrow night. Tell me what is the overarching theme for this season? We never have one overarching theme. I mean the overarching thing was plants in our world, but beyond that we love to have diversity. So we have all kinds of different stories at all sort of fall under that plants, people, planet, you know that umbrella that we're doing this season. In episode one you talked about bromeliads. Tell me about that. What are the hosts from really, it's a really interesting category of plants that are very distinctive. They don't look like other plants. Pineapple is a Bromeliad so you actually eat permeates. It's, it's the only edible bromeliad. There's all kinds of variations, but generally the plants have slung strappy leaves that are kind of vase shaped and many of them they come from, from tropical regions primarily. Speaker 3: 01:27 Um, many of them accumulate water in the center of that vase. So they, they also attract frogs and insects and stuff. So you can, in their native habitats, you can have a whole little community living in the center, in our gardens, air plants to Lantis. Those are Bromeliad special kind of Emilia. It's like when you see Spanish moss hanging on a tree, but in our gardens, a lot of those plants are epiphytes. That means that they live on other plants. They don't take anything for the plants other than structure other than living on them. They don't take anything because a lot of those plants take water from the air or from rainfall or whatever. So they're really interesting plants to have in the garden and all of the places that you take us along and your episodes. It really does. I'm sure inspire a lot of people to want to do gardening, have their own space though as limited in many places here in San Diego. Speaker 3: 02:19 Can you do a garden anywhere and then how do you work around the space issue? Well, it's interesting you asked that because one of our favorite episodes this season, one of the last episodes, in fact we just finished shooting yesterday is on community gardens. So if you don't have room to do it at home or you have a small patio, you don't have enough sunlight or you just don't want to do it by yourself. There are 80 more than 80 community gardens around San Diego and there of every variety size, price point you can imagine. And they're wonderful because their places where literally the community comes together and they build community and if you don't know how to garden the people in the garden, we'll teach you whether formally or informally. Wow. One of the beautiful things that people have been talking about all season is the super bloom. Speaker 3: 03:04 Uh, we know those flowers are out there. Beautiful. What are some of the things that um, people should take away from that? From all of the rain that we received? Is there anything that people can expect in their own gardens? Yes. Will we, we had an interesting winter and fall. It was longer than normal. The rain started early, they came at regular intervals. We don't usually get that and it was cool. So all of that together inspired a lot of seeds. Inspired, caused a lot of seeds that normally would have been dormant in the soil. It, there's, there's often seeds have compounds and chemicals that keep them from germinating until conditions are just right and rainfall being one of them. So the rain leeches, those chemicals out and the seeds germinate. And then that's one of the components of getting that super bloom. But it's happening in our gardens too. Speaker 3: 03:52 I can't tell you how many people have said to me, I can't believe the flowers in my garden this year. And it's lasting a long time as well. So it's, it's really fun. And our episode on the big bloom was so fascinating and so much fun to make and it's still going on. There's still blooms all over southern California in places most people don't expect. And I love it. You know, I see the flowers everywhere, even in my own garden. But you know what else I see a lot of weeds. It's the same idea. You know the seeds have been there and we call that the soil seed bank. The seed sit there and they just wait for the right moment to generate to, to germinate rather. And then they pop up. So if you have that situation, and most of us do, the important thing is you get those seeds as soon as you see them because once they have flowers or little seeds on them, forget it. Speaker 3: 04:42 They're making more and you're going to have more problem next year. So as the temperatures warm up, is there anything people should be doing in their gardens right now? Anything we should be planting or, Oh yes, this is prime. Some are vegetable planting time. Tomatoes, eggplants, squash. It's almost warm enough for Bazell. You know, all those wonderful melons and things that we loved to harvest and you'd over summer. This is the beginning of that sowing time. This is the beginning of that transplant time. This is when hopefully you got your garden ready, your garden beds are ready, put them in the ground now and given everything that you've learned and everything that you know about gardening, what's the key to having a successful garden? Patients? Patients, because gardening is so much trial and error, it's so much letting things happen. Watching what's happening, understanding, observing, figuring out what the issues are. Those are the things that we need to pay attention to. What's happening in my garden? What's what's going right with things are going wrong? What is the problem and then how do I solve that problem or do I even need to, is it really a problem? Who knew that gardening could be a life lesson in patience? Oh my God. The biggest, the only thing. That's a bigger Speaker 1: 05:58 life lesson then than the garden in terms of patients having children. Nan Derryn. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You can catch the new season of a growing passion starting this Thursday at eight 30 on Kpbs TV.