The Mike Nowak Show Podcasts

Mike promotes plant sales at the Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse and the Peterson Garden Project. Mike then travels to Oak Park to talk to Pamela Todd, a co-founder of the West Cook Wild Ones, about creating a wildlife corridor between Chicago and Thatcher Woods while promoting their Living Landscapes Conference. Sidney Phelps, distribution manager at Bonnie Plants, chats with Mike about their new phone app, as well as interesting plant selections for 2015.

Podcast Episode

Lake Calumet has long been a neglected and even abused part of the City of Chicago. Yet, it remains the largest body of water within the city limits and an area that hold promise for restoration from its days as a dumping ground for industry. The Southeast Environmental Task Force invited folks to come to the shores of this lake on Earth Day 2015 to look for birds and other wildlife and reflect on what has been and what might be for this once natural but now quite unnatural area.

Carol Niec and Kerrie Rosenthal are the founders and proprietors of The Seed Keeper Company, which was created to help gardeners organize, plant and store their seeds. Mike chats and jokes with them about the starting 2015 gardening season. Nancy Klehm explains how The Ground Rules will change urban soils and the way people think about them, as she promotes the Indiegogo campaign to get the concept up and running.

Karen Hudson is is an Illinois farmer and co-founder of Illinois Citizens for Clean Air and Water, She reports that that a hog factory farm has been proposed for Menard county, near the historic site of Abraham Lincoln's New Salem home. And she notes that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) seems to be having a difficult time doing an inventory of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) in the state.

Mike's partner and webmaster Kathleen Thompson talks about recent changes on the website for The Mike Nowak Show. Karen Hudson, an Illinois farmer and co-founder of Illinois Citizens for Clean Air and Water, warns that the historic site of Abraham Lincoln's New Salem home could be despoiled by a nearby hog factory farm. Writer and native plant specialist Benjamin Vogt describes The Ultimate Pollinator & Native Plant Gardening Guide, which he posted on his blog, The Deep Middle.

Canadian filmmaker Su Rynard has teamed with scientists, ecologists, bird enthusiasts and a superb film team to create a documentary called The Messenger. In it, they travel the globe to look at the causes of songbird decline, whether it's possible to reverse that distrubing trend, and what it means for all of us.

Mike runs into University of Illinois entomologist Dr. May Berenbaum at the Chicago Flower & Garden Show and takes the opportunity to ask her about the status of bees as we enter the 2015 growing season. She comments on bee populations (they're up slightly), bee health, and whether a ban on pesticides like neonicotinioids would be effective.

A few short years ago, Ohio gardener Bren Haas helped to create a Twitter forum called gardenchat, which now regularly engages thousands of gardeners from all over the planet. Mike caught up with Bren outside of the Chicago Flower & Garden Show to find out how she became an accidental social media guru.

Raya Carr is sales manager for Mint Creek Farm, a family-run business that raises premium, grassfed meats for the Chicago area on Certified Organic central Illinois pasture. They are also part of the FamilyFarmed Good Food Business Accelerator and are participating in the Good Food Festival and Conference this week at the UIC Forum. She talks about having grown up on the farm and what separates it from so-called conventional meat operations.

Podcast Episode

Dave Coulter appeared on the program in 2014 to extoll the virtues of what he calls the post modern hedgerow ahead of a confererence of the Midwest-Great Lakes Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration, where this issue will be discussed. Raya Carr is part of the family-run Mint Creek Farm, which is produces humane, sustainable meat products, and which will be participating in the o The Good Food Festival and Conference this weekend at the UIC Forum.

Brenda Haas of BGgarden blog and LaManda Joy of The Yarden, preview the Twitter Garden Party in Chicago in anticipation of the Independent Garden Center Show at Navy Pier.

Mike travels to Big Jones Restaurant in Andersonville to sit down with Chef Paul Fehribach, who is receiving the Good Food Chef of the Year Award at the Good Food Festival and Conference. They talk southern cooking, sustainability and heirloom sourcing. Dennis Dreher of Geosyntech Consultants will be speaking at the Midwest Ecological Landscape Alliance (MELA) conference on March 12 at College of DuPage and he discusses storm water management with Mike.

Marcy Cravat is the producer-director of Angel Azul, a documentary about visionary and environmentally-minded artist Jason deCaires Taylor, who is causing people to look at the world's endangered coral reefs in a new way by creating sculptures that are displayed on the bottom of the ocean.