Digging in with gardenstead | Celebrating community

Community is a wonderful, vital, life-enhancing thing. It gives a sense of belonging, it’s a place (literal or virtual) where we find like-minded people, answers, friends, contacts and colleagues. Community, it’s been said, is central to human experience.

For us, community is the place we go to find our people. Folks who are happiest with their hands in the soil. Growing things. Nurturing things. Occasionally doing battle with squirrels, rabbits, tiny annoying voracious bugs and other pests. We’re harvesting food. Cutting flowers. Breathing deeply on cool summer mornings, surrounded by the plants we’ve grown.

We are a community of gardeners, in spaces small and larger, indoors and outdoors. We are always growing.

Which is why it makes us utterly thrilled to announce, in the latest episode of Digging in with gardenstead, that we have reached an amazing milestone.

We are now a community of 500,000 gardeners.

Yes, indeed. Half a million people who are equivalently enthusiastic about gardening and love to connect with others about that enthusiasm.

So, in this latest episode of Digging in, Katie and her guest Liesje celebrate reaching that amazing half million mark. They also, importantly, have a chat about the wonderful collective of gardeners and plant lovers who have virtually banded together to get us get there.

Stream the episode below, or catch up with the podcast on YouTube. You can also check in via Spotify if you’d rather listen than watch.

Show notes:

In the episode, we celebrate our community of gardeners, and:

Katie introduces Liesje, gardenstead’s senior writer and behind-the-scenes shaper of content
Katie and Liesje both marvel at the amazing group of plant lovers who have connected with each other on gardenstead’s social channels
they discuss the meaning of community and why it’s important (more on that here)
the deep, shared knowledge of gardening in all forms they’ve both noted in gardenstead’s Facebook groups
Katie shares her favourite gardenstead topic from the past year (about a woman living a permaculture life); Liesje narrows her favourites down to a tie between this one (dealing with invasive plants) and this one (sustainable farming just north of Toronto)
how gardeners share a common language and how that was first made clear to Liesje in our first podcast
how gardening makes connections across generations
Liesje talks about her favourite post from the gardenstead community’s Facebook groups in the past year: about a corpse flower plant coming into bloom. If you’ve never heard of a corpse flower plant, it’s worth your time to check out this fascinating species
the role our Ambassadors play in the Facebook groups and how much we learn from them
plus, some possibilities for future Facebook groups, and Katie gives a brief shoutout to a great product she found at Cultivate ‘22