March 14, 2010: Theodore Klein Plant Awards & Peruvian Agriculture

HomeGrown covers about 800 years of horticulture history this week with a look at Peruvian farming practices of 1200-1500 AD, and the 2010 Theodore Klein Plant Awards. Peruvian agroecologist Stef De Hann offers a fascinating look at Inca farmers from 1200 to today, including attempts to market their old crops in new ways. University of Kentucky extension horticulturist Win Dunwell names the five plants selected to honor nurseryman-legend Theodore Klein in 2010, and explains why they deserve to be in your garden.

See Bob Hill’s photos from Cusco, Peru

Find out more:

• Theodore Klein Plant Awards
• Win Dunwell
• Yew Dell Gardens
• Protecting Potato Diversity in Peru
• Peruvian Farmers Learn From History
• International Potato Center

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About the hosts: Bob Hill has been a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal for 25 years, including several years spent wandering Kentucky and Southern Indiana in search of interesting people, fun, fact and whimsy. He’s also written eight books on subjects as diverse as gardening, the history of basketball, the history of the Louisville Slugger bat, manic-depression through the eyes of five families dealing with the illness and a true crime book about a Louisville man who got away with murder. He’s also published two collections of his columns. He and his wife Janet are co-owners of Hidden Hill, a plant nursery and sculpture garden built around their old farmhouse and eight rolling acres of land about eight miles northeast of Louisville near Utica, IN. Bob has been raising and propagating rare and unusual plants for 20 years, and has traveled to England and Ireland as well as much of the United States in pursuit of his hobby. Send Bob an e-mail.

Jeneen Wiche, a native of Louisville, started gardening as soon as she could walk. Her professional career in gardening, however, did not begin until her father, the late Fred Wiche, died of cancer in 1998. After his death she began writing the syndicated garden column that had been his. Today she writes a weekly column that is published in about 20 community newspapers across Kentucky and Southern Indiana. In 1999 she started to produce a weekly garden segment for WDRB-Fox 41 television. And in the fall of 2001 joined Bob Hill and began producing HomeGrown, her favorite job outside of working in the garden. Jeneen earned a Bachelors degree from Kalamazoo College in 1991 and a Masters in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona in 1996. In addition to her horticultural pursuits, she has been teaching American Indian Studies courses part-time at the University of Louisville since 1998. She lives with her husband, Andy Smart, in western Shelby County on 20 acres named Swallow Rail, the place her father began to shape into a horticultural farm in 1979. Jeneen and Andy continue to cultivate his legacy with an eye towards diversifying the overall garden scheme including herbaceous and woody plants, native prairie and aquatic plants, an orchard, nut grove, fruits and vegetables. Send Jeneen an e-mail.