6 Top Podcasts About Gardening

Whether you're a bona fide green thumb or just thinking about planting some seeds, these podcasts explore how to create a flourishing garden. Entertaining and informative, they also discuss how healing — not to mention nourishing — it can be to tend to our plants. They're available on Spotify, your Apple podcast app and other popular podcast platforms.

A Way to Garden

Margaret Roach, host of the insightful gardening podcast A Way to Garden, considers the garden “part Buddhist retreat and part science laboratory.” Her public radio show airs live on Mondays, but you can listen to the archived episodes at your leisure for hours of inspiration. (The website also has illustrated transcripts of each show that are fun to browse.) Over the course of each 25-minute episode, Roach dives deep in conversations with “plant people,” as well as related experts such as entomologists and ornithologists. Recent subjects have included the secrets to successful tomato cultivation, how to compost, and the best flowers to grow for beautiful table arrangements.

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Cultivating Place

You could be an avid gardener, just starting out or someone who simply admires the beauty of a pretty plot from a noncommitted distance, and you'll likely find something to love about Jennifer Jewell's thoughtful, gratitude-filled explorations on Cultivating Place. A garden writer and photographer, Jewell says she finds lessons in the garden “on resilience, collaboration, community and the cyclical nature of everything.” Past guests on her hour-long weekly public radio podcast have included Jamaica Kincaid (who shared her love of lilies) and chef and fruit forager Sara Bir, with whom Jewell discussed fruit as the currency of memory.

The Beginner's Garden

A good balance of home gardeners and experts share personal experiences and deep terrestrial knowledge with Jill McSheehy, the host of The Beginner's Garden. The show airs in 40-minute segments, as well as shorter Q&A segments of just a few minutes that are packed with quick tips (like how to handle herbs when they start to flower). Ever motivational, McSheehy tells us, “Growing a garden is not only possible for everyone, but I believe it can quite possibly change someone's life.” She often shares her own trials and errors in her 3,000-square-foot plot in Russellville, Arkansas, and discusses topics such as when to interfere with pests in an organic garden and how to care for adolescent plants (once you've graduated from the seedling stage, McSheehy explains, it's on to the trying teen years).