Media
About Jennifer
Jennifer Ebeling is a home and garden blogger at 6ftmama.com & host of the Still Growing gardening podcast (available on iTunes & Stitcher Radio). Jennifer writes and records in her home studio in lovely Maple Grove, Minnesota. You can read more about Jennifer on her About Page.
You can contact her at Jennifer {at} 6ftmama.com.
About 6ftmama.com
My aim with 6ftmama.com is to offer inspiration and information for your home and garden.
I love what I do and it is such a thrill to get readers excited about being in their garden or enjoying their life at home with their families. I was raised in a small town in Southwest Minnesota, so I’m most excited about ‘the practical and functional’ for strategies and tips.
About the Still Growing gardening podcast
In May of 2013, my husband went away on a business trip to Europe for an entire week and when he came back home, I had started the podcast. Here’s how it happened:
- The first night he was gone, I discovered the Stitcher app. It inspired me.
- The second night he was gone, I ordered my equipment on Amazon.
- By the fourth night, I had a name for the show – Still Growing – which was taken from my signature sign-off for my blog.
- I also wrote a song for the show intro and outro with the Garage Band app on my iPad. This was surprisingly easy and I learned firsthand as a podcast listener that a 5 second snippet of intro music is more than sufficient for most shows.
- When Phil returned home, I greeted him with a quick kiss, and then raced back to my office studio to record my first interview.
Bottom line: It took me ten years to actually start my blog – but just a week to begin podcasting. And, if I can do that while raising four kids, anyone can.
The tagline for Still Growing is “dedicated to helping you and your garden grow”. The guests for the show are people I come across in my own life. I’ll see a flyer, read an article – and my Mom is always sending me clippings of potential guests – and I’ll start to think about interviewing them for the show. If I feel that curiosity about a person – that little sense of connection with someone – I trust my intuition and try to track them down for an interview.
One thing I’ve found is that the guests for Still Growing are so generous about sharing – their time (the show is an hour long), their resources and their experiences. For me, that’s what every show is about – the gift of sharing. Therefore, every guest interview is a gift and every show is a gift. People are going to take what they hear on the Still Growing podcast and do something with it – they’ll show their own kids how to garden, get involved in starting a community garden, or simply make better choices about gardening. It’s making a difference.
My shows offer some unique personal touches, too. I usually start the show with some updates straight from my blog. You know, gardeners are such lovely people -really true nurturers at heart. Podcasting is a great medium for gardeners because I think that connection so much more personal – and powerful – than just blogging alone. It never fails to surprise me that the show has listeners from around the world – places you wouldn’t believe – and listeners get a glimpse of what’s going on in my life as a Minnesota gardener. They get to know me and hopefully when the show ends, they feel like they’ve listened to a friend.
My husband and I are big movie-goers and we’ve always loved outtakes. So, when it came time to produce Still Growing, I wanted to end the show with outtakes or some special extras. It’s another way to connect with people. One of my favorite extras after the show is to feature something sweet from the kids – a poem or a story, maybe a joke or two. It’s a bonus for me – kind of like an audio scrapbook. (I should really make a tape of all their bonus extras). As long as I can still coerce the kids into reading a garden poem or two, I’ll keep at it. It’s amazing to think that they’re growing up in a time where creating media is so accessible and so incredibly simple. They’re learning fantastic skills – quite brilliant, really – from these making these little extra tidbits at the end of the podcasts. I’m so lucky; I get to share my passion for podcasting and gardening with the kids – that’s pretty special to me.
You can listen to a 30 second promo for the Still Growing gardening podcast here:
Media
I love public speaking. For 2014, my presentations include these topics:
- Gardening with Kids
- Building Community through Gardening
- Vitamin G (Gardening)
- Latin for Gardeners
- Garden Therapy
- The History of Herbs
- Girls Love Gardening
- Gardening Apps
- The Joy of a Family Garden
- The Gardening Cook
Most recently, I was featured on the Star Tribune’s My Minnesota and in Maple Grove Magazine.
August: A Time to Re-Energize Your Garden
Save by Preserving Herbs
Still growing...
