This week we’re so excited to air the first listen to one of our CP LIVE conversations, recorded live in front of an audience on the home ground of the Cultivators of Place with whom we are speaking.
If you want a fun visual experience of our time live, make sure to check out the CP LIVE trailer for this episode here - a full video CP LIVE episode will be rolling out with the other CP LIVE's in late 2025/2026. So stay tuned for those, but enjoy this sneak peak:
As you might imagine, I am personally thrilled to kick airing this series off on my own home ground in Northern California - back and in conversation with Sandy Fisher and Durl Van Alstyne of Golden State Linen, previously known as Chico Flax, a small-scale regenerative flax farming endeavor striving to grow a local, circular, and organic fiber cycle in the North State of California, and integrated into the Fibershed network across the wider region and country. This regenerative fiber farm integrated into this larger network grows more than flax - rather they’re growing biodiversity, community, economy, and LINEN to help build out a better fiber economy for people, place, and planet.
The live audience, comprised of people from the wider community, can be heard behind our conversation, as can the birds, the train, the wind going across the hipped metal roof of the processing barn in which we sat. Imagine yourself there with us – the doors of the barn thrown wide, the drying flax plants in the view framed by one open end of the working barn, and the blue flowering flax being grown for seed stock out the other end. The train tracks flank the west side of the almost 4-acre property and suburbia’s rougher but swelling edges flank the other edges….this is a precious and precarious and persistent little farm…as so many are…
Sandy and Durl are the visionaries behind Golden State Linen. As they say: we’re growing a regional fabric and regional fiber economy one thread (and flax plant) at a time.
Many of you will remember our previous conversation with Sandy many years ago now….And I’m so pleased to welcome them back and check in on all that they are growing.
Sometimes it is catastrophic events that catalyze positive change in our world, in this case, the 2012 Textile Warehouse fire in Dhaka Bangladesh, which caused Sandy, a weaver and textile artist to rethink her own approach to textiles. After years of rethinking and researching, Sandy and her husband Durl ultimately became organic and innovative flax farmers in order to source the linen fiber for weaving into cloth. In our conversation, we talk about the flax plant botanically speaking, and Sandy reminds us just how long the human relationship is with the flax plant for food, medicine, and fiber - recorded fragments date back more than 6,000 years. This is a plant/human relationship with a long lineage in many places around the world.
We also discuss the valuable relationships Sandy and Durl have interwoven into their endeavor and learning - from regeneration farming to the design and engineering of small scale machinery to process their flax more efficiently. These diverse relationships with, among others, a variety of departments at California State University, Chico, including the University Farm, Engineering, and Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, mean that the growing research, experimentation, and results of Golden State Linen have radiated out into the academic and student body of their community. At the same time over this past decade, their farming methods - including organic, low-to-now-no till, cover cropping, composting, and robust native plant hedgerows (that include a great many dye plants for Sandy's dyeing of fibers for her weaving), mean that their endeavor has also brought back to life a once neglected and battered post industrial "remnant" 3.5 acres of land. It now hums with bumble bees, other native bees, honeybees, birds, frogs, snakes, foxes. And people - from community volunteers to summer interns, and Sandy and Durl.
In collaboration with the North Valley Community Fund, Golden State Linen is pursuing their 501c3 status and is now accepting tax-deductible donations of support through their NVC incubator Capital fund. All support goes to furthering their pursuit of on- going efforts to heal the farm, create more mechanical processing equipment, and acquire a Spinning Lab.
In celebration, they are hosting an on-farm celebration and fundraiser on October 26th from 2 – 5 pm – live music, farm tours, flax processing, and locally sourced food and drink – a perfect October afternoon. For more information and to secure a ticket, please visit chicoflax.com/events
Follow along with Golden State Linen (formerly Chico Flax) online:
And on Instagram:
Photos courtesy of Golden State Linen by Paige Green Photo; other photos courtesy of Jennifer Jewell or EM EN filmography. All rights reserved, Cultivating Place Live.
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JOIN US again next week, when we continue with our wild side regenerative theme in conversation with Jared Rosenbaum of New Jersey’s own Wild Ridge Plants, the Rooted series of Plant Videos, and author of Wild Plant Culture..That's right here, next week.
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey, it's Jennifer—
I am very very proud to air at least this first audio version of one of our first six Cultivating Place Live event experiences. Especially in support of Golden State Linen and its next growing chapter!
To have gone from wanting to get past what our gardens look like to really focusing in on helping to make more visible all of the connections and benefits of more fully encouraged, empowered, and supported gardeners and growers in our world is a big wild dream of mine and legacy project in honor of the many lessons and lights that have landed for me in this first 10 years of Cultivating Place.
It’s something.
It really is – gardens, and gardeners, and gardening at their best really are something. To work with the creative eyes and energy of Myriam Nicodemus and Khoa Huyhn of EM EN is a dream I didn’t even know I had.
And look forward to far far more coming your way. In 2025/2026 we will keep airing the audio portions of these CP LIVE experiences but we will also be working behind the scenes to gather a few more and to craft them as a cohort into a video-based docuseries elevating the many impacts of a great diversity of gardeners across the country as a tangible way to model that when we value – when we elevate and expand the way we think about, talk about, see and hold gardens and gardeners – the happier, the healthier, the more prosperous and more robust all of us are – from the beneficial microorganisms to the charismatic megafauna – like us.
One of the things that I am reminded of in all of my conversations for CP and now CP LIVE is that there is nothing new under the sun. AM I the first or only person to talk about gardening in these ways? Absolutely not. And is that a good thing? YES it is – we don’t need one tree or one bee or one flower or one drop of water – we need forests and colonies and meadows and oceans.
And are Sandy and Durl the only people thinking about, trialing, and striving to regenerate a thriving local fiber economy and environment – no, and thank the Universe and all that is divine and good for that.
Thinking back to the prismatic land based Indigenous ways of knowing and growing - from this continent right here and now on over and all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia – humans have always strived for exactly this.
Fibershed and other groups like it across the world are striving as a group to do just this. And in part because land based peoples everywhere have fought to keep this knowledge close and dear in our human histories and ancestries – we still have a chance to reintroduce and support the best parts of these lifeways - adapted and evolved - for what we need to course correct today….starting with one farm and garden here, another few over there – and so on.
We know we can grow this alternate path forward – and we know it starts with each of us right where we are – recognizing the knowledge and knowledge holders that come before us and growing them and that knowledge on even more deeply if we can for the future.
We are never alone – and that is a blessedly good thing.
WAYS TO SUPPORT CULTIVATING PLACE
Cultivating Place is a co-production of North State Public Radio, a service of Cap Radio, licensed to Chico State Enterprises. Cultivating place is made possible in part listeners just like you through the support button at the top right-hand corner of every page at Cultivating Place.com.
The CP team includes producer and engineer Matt Fidler, with weekly tech and web support from Angel Huracha, and this summer we're joined by communications intern Sheila Stern. We’re based on the traditional and present homelands of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of the Chico Rancheria. Original theme music is by Ma Muse, accompanied by Joe Craven and Sam Bevan.
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