Many times we're asked about the location we do our shooting.
Well, below are many features on the guests and grounds at which we produce segments for the program.

There are other locations, however!
Jodi shoots her 'bridges' (the stand-up pieces where she introduces the show and segments, for example) that are equally as gorgeous and accessible!

If you're in the neighborhood, make sure you stop in!

Here is one of the most unique and natural settings for a garden center, if you can call it that, that we've ever shot at!

Monches is a small community, slightly northwest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It is a picturesque rural town, full of artists, barns, and sandhill cranes.

We shot 3 sets of our bridges there in June, 2008- and it was gorgeous!
The folks there are incredibly knowledgeable, kind and helpful.

Their grounds abound with interesting farm life, chickens, peacocks and, when we shot there, a family of cranes.

It's a quaint and eclectic setting, with antiques, animal shelters, wind chimes, ponds and all sorts of plants in wonderful gardens. Their 'shop' features interesting garden art and similar products.

Monches farm is a perennial nursery, with over 1500 varieties grown on-site... admittedly, it is sort of
"what they are all about".
The farm was established in 1980 and originally just sold dried flowers and it has grown incrementally ever since.


Please make sure you visit when you're in the Milwaukee area.
And tell them how you know about their incredible farm!


www.monchesfarm.com/

Here's another Milwaukee area landscape that we just love to feature.
The folks at the Wauwatosa Historical Society have always been great to PBS- very hospitable!

The grounds are kept-up by volunteers and are always outstanding!
The home itself is well worth a tour.

Their Firefly Fair each August features local, state, regional and national artists showing off their good all through this gorgeous landscape.


www.wauwatosahistoricalsociety.org/

Garden Paths truly offers many different ways, many different paths to helping you find your own success in your garden!

Some of our guests are renown gardeners or chefs, and some are just like you...

Here's some information on some of the people you will meet on the program this season.

Michael Kmiotek's work focuses on 3 areas: paint, metal, or ceramic.
We found his work featured in a Wisconsin Botanical Garden- it so complemented the landscape, it was obvious that he should find his way onto 'Garden Paths'!


from his own website:

Biography

I have lived in Wisconsin for most of my life. I lived in the Minocqua area until I was eleven, spending most of my time in the woods or lakes. My father taught me about nature and how to hunt and fish.

We moved to Madison at the start of sixth grade. I liked it because the lakes were good for fishing and there were trout streams nearby. I remember one time trying to paint next to my favorite stream when the fish were rising. I finally had to take a break from painting and catch some!

I decided to become an art teacher because I was lucky enough to have Don Hunt as my instructor in high school. His instructors were connected to the Bau-Haus school of art. After I graduated from U.W. Madison, I worked as a substitute teacher.

I have a somewhat unique sense of humor. For example, I have always been interested in paleontology, and, the year after graduating from college, decided that the best way to "find" fossils would be to create my own. I recruited friends to pose as professors of archeology and documented the dig sites with photos and bones. One of the reconstructed skeletons is on display at the U.W. Madison Zoology department.

I moved to Milwaukee in 1985 and was an art teacher there for sixteen years. I returned to Madison in 2001. I obtained a one-year position as an art teacher in Madison, and was recommended for hire, but did not secure a permanent position. At the end of the summer, I was hired to teach Tech Ed at a nearby high school. I didn’t really know what Tech Ed was, but soon began taking coursework to become licensed in this area. One of the courses I taught was welding. I have purchased my own MIG welder and Plasma Cutter to use when making my metal sculptures.

I hold the following degrees: BS, Art Ed, UW-Madison 1979; BS, Elem Ed, UW-Madison 1985; MS, Art Ed, UW-Milwaukee 2000; 18 credits towards a Tech Ed license, UW-Plattville 2005

I currently live in Cottage Grove, just outside Madison, with my wife, Maria. My son, Michael Joseph, lives with his mother in Eagle River.


www.kmiotekart.com/index.php

John Michael appears in several segments of 'Garden Paths' this season.
He joins Horticulturist Melinda Myers on a visit to a St. Paul, Minnesota Farmers' Market to pick out garden fresh produce.
We also join this renown chef in his kitchen and discover great ways to put that fresh produce to good use!

ABOUT JOHN MICHAEL LERMA
Author of
JOHN MICHAEL LERMA’S GARDEN COUNTY
“Where Everyone Is Welcome to Sit at the Table”

John Michael Lerma grew up on a farm in North Dakota where he learned from his grandmother how to grow fruits and vegetables, prepare large meals, and can preserves.

John Michael was a winner at the 2005, 2006, and 2007 National Pie Championship in Celebration, Florida sponsored by Crisco. He is a frequent guest on KARE 11's Saturday Morning News Show and Showcase Minnesota. He also appears on WCCO Sunday Morning Live Show, KSTP, and Cities 97 morning show with BT & Lee.

He was featured on the Food Network Special--All American Pie Championship November 2006 baking his Vidalia Onion Pie. John Michael just completed filming for a Food Network Challenge--The Great Pie Cook-Off which will air at the end of summer 2007.

John Michael is a Corporate Chef at Cooks of Crocus Hill, in St. Paul, MN and contributing chef at The Chef's Gallery in Stillwater, MN. He is the director of Tuscan Gathering and Caribe Gathering Food and Beverage Adventures in Tuscany and the Caribbean. He is currently working on this second cookbook and writes a monthly column for Lavender Magazine titled "Word of Mouth". John Michael is also a member of Slow Food USA. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his partner Chad and their daughter Heather.

After surviving the 1997 flood that destroyed his hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota, John Michael moved to the Twin Cities of Minnesota where he worked in management at a Fortune 500 company. John Michael turned to cooking, gardening, and food preservation as a form of relaxation and to recapture the life of contentment that he knew growing up in the Red River Valley. Eventually, John Michael began to enter his recipes in Minnesota State Fair competitions and has won numerous honors both locally and nationally.

John Michael received a degree in English from the University of North Dakota and has several short stories, poems, and plays published in regional and academic texts. He is a recipient of the Gladys Boen Award for Fiction.

info courtesy gardencounty.info


gardencounty.info/_wsn/page11.html

We shot 2 segments with Chef Dave.
What was unique about these cooking segments, is that they occured IN the field where the goodies were picked!!

Jodi certianly had a tough time NOT nibbling on the raspberries and vegetables she helped pick right off the vine.

Their website spells out great reasons for eating locally---

The simple joy of eating fresh, delicious, nutritious food is a great reason to buy local. On average food travels 1,700 miles to reach your table. A lot of effort and fossil fuels went into processing and transporting that food, conventional and organic.

Going beyond freshness and flavor, buying locally grown food is an investment in the economic, social and environmental well being of the local community. When buying locally grown food, it helps support the economy by placing the food dollars directly into the hands of the farmers; increasing their profitability and helping them sustain local communities.

By buying locally grown food, you vote with your dollars for farmers who practice excellent stewardship of the environment. Many farmers practice above and beyond organic standards, farming in a truly sustainable manner. Your food buying choices can directly support the use of sustainable practices; eliminate pesticide use, prevent soil erosion, promote the humane treatment of farm animals and the ability to use the land for generations to come.

The power to choose is in your hands!



Top 5 Reasons to buy local:

Helps to support family farms
Retains food dollars in the community
Exceptional taste
Unique varieties not found in stores
Maximum freshness
Grown locally instead of traveling thousands of miles
Helps to sustain the environment
Promotes stewardship of the land
Nutritious and affordable
Promotes healthy lifestyles


www.braiseculinaryschool.com/

We're fortunate to be able to feature this incredible, nearly 90 year-old individual! Lorrie has been proclaiming the benefits of natural landscaping for as long as anyone can remember, and has certainly made her mark on Wisconsin and the midwest.

This excerpt is from the WI Conservation Hall of Fame, where Lorrie Otto is a respected inductee.


Lorrie Otto
Inducted 1999

"If suburbia were landscaped with meadows, prairies, thickets or forests, or combinations of these, then the water would sparkle, fish would be good to eat again, birds would sing and human spirits would soar." – Otto

Love of nature and the plants and wildlife it supports led Lorrie Otto on a lifetime mission to protect biological diversity and to fight whatever threatened it.

Otto became concerned in the 1960s about the number of dead birds around her property north of Milwaukee. She noticed robins having convulsions. The cause was DDT, which was widely used to control mosquitoes and the pest that causes Dutch elm disease. Otto's tenacity brought hearings on the pesticide to Wisconsin. She sought and organized scientists, attorneys and witnesses from the United States, Canada and Sweden to present evidence against DDT. It led to a ban, first in Wisconsin in 1970, and nationwide two years later.

Her first battle on behalf of nature was decades earlier. She had stopped mowing a large area of her front yard in Bayside after noticing rosettes of wildflowers struggling to survive. Without warning, village officials mowed her wildflower meadow. Otto saw an opportunity to address antiquated weed laws that encourage sheared, monotonous landscapes. She gave village officials a tour of her yard, describing each plant that had been destroyed.

When she learned of plans to develop a 20-acre woodland nearby known as Fairy Chasm, Otto worked for 10 years to save this wildlife haven of rare plants. Eventually, she succeeded in bringing it under Nature Conservancy protection. When she learned at a conference that prairie wildflowers and the bird and insect life they supported were at risk of extinction, Otto began encouraging suburban homeowners to maintain biological diversity and wildlife habitat. She taught natural landscaping classes at nature centers, colleges and technical schools, businesses and museums in the Milwaukee area.

After hearing an Otto lecture in 1977, a group of nine women began meeting monthly to share information about natural landscaping. They called themselves the Wild Ones. Otto became their philosophical compass. The organization has chapters throughout North America.

A nationally recognized speaker and author, Otto influenced the re-establishment of native roadsides in areas of Wisconsin. She planted environmental gardens at local schools. She has worked to control foreign invasive plants and whitetail deer, threats to biodiversity and native vegetation in the Milwaukee area. Thanks to Lorrie Otto, hundreds of schools, businesses and private yards across the country are naturally landscaped. The Schlitz Audubon Center's annual natural yards tour now bears her name.

FACTS

• Helped lead efforts banning DDT in Wisconsin and the nation
• Protected and promoted native wildflowers
• Taught natural landscaping classes
• Inspired formation of The Wild Ones

(Publication of this fact sheet made possible with assistance from Krause Publications, Iola, Wisconsin.)

For further information on Lorrie Otto, read her Hall of Fame monograph.

For further information on Lorrie Otto's association with Wild Ones Natural Landscapers,
go to Wild Ones.

Additional articles:

"Godmother of Natural Landscaping – Naturalist Lorrie Otto"
from National Wildlife by Bret Rappaport
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1169/is_n3_v34/ai_18201851

"Rainy Day Gardens" by Maryalice Koehne
Rainy Day gardens: http://www.ahs.org/040329_TAG/rainy_day_gardens.pdf


link to the WI Conservation Hall of Fame article on Lorrie Otto:
http://www.wchf.org/inductees/otto.html#


www.wchf.org/inductees/otto.html#

Jodi Olson visits this well-known and popular hot sauce makers on Avery Island, Louisiana.
This 5th generation family business has produced the iconic McIlhenny Tabasco sauce you find just about everywhere for upward near 140 years!

A look at the production of the sauce allowed us to discover a unique landscape right in the Bayou- their Jungle Garden.

From the Tabasco.com website:

A Natural Paradise
Avery Island is a natural paradise, inhabited by exotic plant and animal species from around the world. And under the Avery/McIlhenny family's careful management, it has remained that way to this day.

Saving the Egrets
E.A. McIlhenny, or "Mr. Ned" as he was affectionately known, founded a bird colony in the 1890s — later called Bird City — after plume hunters slaughtered egrets by the thousands for feathers to make fashionable ladies' hats. Mr. Ned gathered up eight young egrets, raised them in captivity on the Island, and released them in the fall to migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. The following spring the birds returned to the Island with others of their species - a migration that continues to this day, as thousands of snowy white egrets and other water birds return to Bird City each spring. This vast, protected rookery owes its existence to Mr. Ned.

Botanical Treasures
Mr. Ned also prized rare plants, and he enhanced the Island's natural landscape with numerous varieties of azaleas, Japanese camellias, Egyptian papyrus and other botanical treasures. When oil was discovered on the Island in 1942, he made sure that production crews bypassed live oak trees, buried pipelines (or painted them green), and took additional steps to preserve the Island's pristine beauty and ensure its continuing role as a wildlife refuge.

Visitors From Around the World
Today, his famed 250-acre Jungle Gardens and Bird City host visitors from all over the world. In season, visitors to Avery Island can expect to see a variety of azaleas, camellias and bamboo, in addition to alligators, deer, and raccoons that live in the hills and marshes around the gardens. Visitors can stroll along a path covered by gnarled oaks laced with Spanish moss, and stand at the shrine that houses a centuries-old Buddha - a gift to Mr. Ned in 1936. And then there are the thousands of snowy egrets that nest in Bird City each spring.

Visitors to Avery Island can also tour the factory where TABASCO® Sauce is made and shop in the TABASCO® Country Store.


http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/avery_island.cfm#targ

Jodi Olson found many incredible gardens and historic sites on her travels to New Orleans.
No story rivaled that of Rashida Ferdinand, however.
You may very well have seen or will see her home, garden and life after Katrina featured on PBS's 'This Old House'.

We found Rashida's garden and yard to be quite amazing, especially considering the damage inflicted by that devastating hurricane several years ago, plus the rigors of rebuilding her home with the help of the "TOH" experts.

Here's some information on Rashida, courtesy 'This Old House' magazine:

Keep a Small House Small
New Orleans is a city of small houses. So when it came time for ceramicist and teacher Rashida Ferdinand to think about making more space in her Lower Ninth Ward home, a renovation recently documented by This Old House television, blowing out the walls or adding a full second story just wasn’t an option. Her addition needed to respect the scale of the area—as well as her budget.

Like a lot of young homeowners, she needed to turn her outdated one-bedroom, one-bath into a modern three-bedroom, two-bath so she could stay for a while—through single life, married life, and family life.

Fortunately, there are ways to expand without being overly expansive: Increase conservatively, make better use of existing spaces, and blend old and new seamlessly. What Rashida ended up with, built from a design by local architect Rick Fifield, is quickly recognizable as the Italianate-style shotgun cottage she bought a year before Hurricane Katrina. Which is surprising, given that they nearly doubled its original 1,200 square feet. A camelback addition—a small, two-story hump at the back of the single-story house—manages to keep the lines of the facade intact.


www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/photos/0,,20201164,00.html

John would agree that this the focus of this segment ought not be on him, but on the amazing gardens found at the New Orleans City Park.
You'll also find some of these images in the opening for the 'Garden Paths' program!

Read on, courtesy of the New Orleans City Park:

The New Orleans
Botanical Garden

The New Orleans Botanical Garden has its roots in the Great Depression as a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Originally known as the City Park Rose Garden, the garden opened in 1936 as New Orleans' first public classical garden. It is one of the few remaining examples of public garden design from the WPA and Art Deco Period, remaining today as a showcase of three notable talents: New Orleans Architect Richard Koch, Landscape architect William Wiedorn, and Artist Enrique Alferez.

Reborn as the New Orleans Botanical Garden in the early 1980s, the garden's collections contained over 2,000 varieties of plants from all over the world set among the nation's largest stand of mature live oaks. The site contains the recently renovated Conservatory of the Two Sisters, several theme gardens containing aquatics, ornamental trees and shrubs, perennials, and the new New Orleans Historic Train Garden. The garden also encompasses the Pavilion of the Two Sisters, the Garden Study Center, and the rebuilt Lath House.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt a serious setback to the Botanical Garden, City Park, and the New Orleans region. As a result of the category 3+ winds, there was serious tree damage which was followed by flooding in the garden by as much as three feet which covered our plant collection for ten days to two weeks. As a result, the vast majority of our collection was lost. The loss of electrical power during our evacuation led to the death of containerized plants that were above the floodwaters. Such plants included our collection of orchids, staghorn ferns, bromeliads, and other plants lost through heat buildup in our greenhouses and the disabling of automatic watering systems.

Since its rebirth in the early 1980s, the New Orleans Botanical Garden has strived to be the center of horticultural excellence for the Gulf South. The Garden was in the initial stages of the final component of its 1980s master plan- the expansion of the Conservatory. Fortunately, our structures survived the storm with relatively minor damage, but nearly our entire plant collection was lost.Our initial focus was on restoration of our collections, repair to our buildings, and preparation for Celebration in the Oaks, our annual holiday lighting event.

A new beginning

The Botanical Garden reopened to the public and made our facilites available for functions beginning on March 4th, 2006- just over six months after Katrina- thanks in large part to volunteers and donors from throughout the United States and worldwide.

Hours of the Garden are Tuesday through Sunday 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Historic New Orleans Train Garden is open for viewing, however, the trains are currently running only on weekends and during certain special events.

http://www.neworleanscitypark.com/nobg.html


www.neworleanscitypark.com/nobg.html