PTS Recommendation - Felder Rushing

A great radio program from MPB (Mississippi Public Broadcasting) is Felder Rushing's Gestalt Gardener. Apart from being informative, the show is entertaining and often humorous. Felder's "down-home" approach to gardening is really in sync with the growing home-grown movement as well as the "buy local" and craft food movements that are popular right now. Learn everything from how to properly compost to when you should plant your tomatoes!

The show is Friday (9am) and Saturday (10am) mornings, so don't miss it! Or, if you can't wait, you can listen to some recent episodes online (look below). Here's one titled "Sustainable in 2012".

Check out his show at the Gestalt Gardener link above, or check it out below!




Here's the bio from Felder's personal website:

"Felder Rushing is a 10th-generation American gardener whose pioneer ancestors (several lines of which were involved, on one side or the other, with the American revolution), settled across the Southeast, bringing many plants with them. Rushing's overstuffed, quirky cottage garden has been featured in many TV programs and magazines - including a cover of Southern Living and in the New York Times - and includes a huge variety of weather-hardy plants along with a collection of vernacular folk art. There is no turfgrass, just plants, yard art, and "people places."

Felder currently travels extensively for lectures or garden tours from both his cottage in Mississippi, and a farmhouse in England's rural Midlands near Wales.

The author or co-author of 17 gardening books (including several national award winners) and former Extension Service urban horticulture specialist (fully retired, at an early age) has written thousands of gardening columns in syndicated newspapers, and has had hundreds of articles and photographs published in regional and national garden magazines, including Garden Design, Horticulture, Garden Weekly (an English publication), Landscape Architecture, Better Homes and Gardens, Fine Gardening, Organic Gardening, and the National Geographic.

Felder, who was celebrated in Southern Living magazine's 25th anniversary issue as one of "twenty five people most likely to change the South" has been featured three times in full-length articles in the New York Times. He has hosted a television program that was shown across the South, and appeared many times on other TV garden programs. Felder hosts a popular weekly call-in garden program on NPR affiliate stations called The Gestalt Gardener.

Rushing has served many years as a distinctly non-stuffy board member of the American Horticulture Society, national director of the Garden Writers Association, and member of the National Youth Gardening Committee. A rare male honorary member of Federated Garden Clubs of Mississippi and twice past president of his state's only chapter of the Mens' Garden Club (now Gardeners of America), Felder gives many dozens of lectures and workshops every year, coast to coast and overseas, at flower shows, horticultural and plant society meetings, and Master Gardener conferences.

Believing that too many would-be gardeners are intimidated by a crush of "how-to" experts ("We are daunted, not dumb," he says), Felder uses an offbeat, "down home" approach rife with humorous anecdotes and garden-irreverent metaphors, zany observations, and stunning photography and to help gardeners get past the "stinkin' rules" of horticulture."