Jessica Walliser is an avid gardener and professional horticulturist – working in the business of plants and gardening since the tender age of 15. As she has matured as a gardener, so too have her understandings and passions, and she now considers herself a devoted bug lover as well as a devoted plant lover because, you know, these two groups of lives we love are wholly interdependent.

Jessica is a former garden podcaster, a co-founder of the online gardening resource Savvy Gardening, and the author of many books reflective of her journey and knowledge, including "Good Bug, Bad Bug"; "Attracting Beneficial Insects to your Garden", and most recently, "Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies” (Artisan Press, 2020).

Listen in this week as we discuss how far we’ve come in our mainstream gardening practices this past 50 years, from companion planting to cover cropping, interplanting to the joys of watching predatory robber flies help control Japanese beetles. We also cover the even greater joy of knowing that more life in your garden equals more health in your garden life.

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.