Frontyard Politics

Guest: Adam Weisberg Our guest Adam Weisberg is Executive Director of Urban Adamah, located on the west side of Berkeley on 6th Street. It’s located in a neighborhood that contains a Whole Foods, car mechanics, a skate park, a Kosher winery, and UC Berkeley’s family housing all within three blocks of Urban Adamah and its welcoming gates and well-tended paths that lead through e

Guest: Anna Mudd I met Anna Mudd via Instagram and forged a friendship before I realized she was grafting the very queens that end up in my hive. Eventually, I got to meet her in real life at the apiary where she works, from where I bought my hive. Anna Mudd is a queen bee grafter. The queen bee of a hive is essentially the mother. And there can only be one mother. If two queen bee

Guest: Jeffrey Hickey Jeffrey Hickey is a medical cannabis grower and cannabis educator whose blog My 2020 Isolation Grow is featured on Oaksterdam University’s website. Jeffrey is also a terrific gardener. In this episode, we talk about medical cannabis, the horror of chronic illness, the health system, and overcoming helplessness. Because in the end, growing medical cannabis no

Dustin Schell and Alexander Chee were longtime residents of New York City who recently found an opportunity to fulfill their dreams of full-scale gardening. Dustin previously had a community garden plot the size of a grave in New York City. It was located in the Clinton Community Garden in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he gardened for over twenty years. Then they moved to r

Kanchan Dawn Hunter is co-director of the Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project, which operates as a nursery, a community garden, a foodshed, and an education resource that welcomes anyone and all in the community to participate. As a single Black mother and farmer, she has learned about legacy and the importance of nurturing that connection to land early on in life. She s

Guest: Doug Jones Doug Jones is one of my mentors–he’s my grandmaster at his dojo, DJ’s Martial Arts, located on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland’s Laurel District. He is also a horseman and rancher. With the onset of the pandemic, he has transformed his roles as kung-fu master, teacher, and cowboy into a symposium and sanctuary in the Oakland hills. I asked him how his ident

Guest: Kristyn Leach Kristyn Leach is a small commercial farmer located in Winters, California. At Namu Farm, she specializes in Korean and Asian produce and produces seeds for Kitazawa seeds. We talk about her journey through farming and seed keeping and how it informs her life–and how her life has informed her work. Learn more: Namu Gaji Restaurant Follow: Instagram

Guest Yolanda Burrell is/was the owner of Pollinate Farm and Garden in Oakland. It has been one of my happy places, not the least of which is due to Yolanda’s positive and warm energy. She built Pollinate to create a community and to recreate the memory of her childhood feed store, where people assembled not only to purchase goods but to share knowledge. Pollinate is the culminat

At my urban farm, I have gathered tomatoes and beans alongside guavas and pluerries. I’ve learned about permaculture and Korean natural farming and the ways in which farming is about more than gardening, but about an understanding about the ecosystem and maximizing production. I’ve also gathered many lessons along the way, some of which I’ve documented in my Backyard Politics