Oshkosh Seed Savers is led by an Organizing Committee made up of founders, Jason Mills and Julia Chybowski, along with five other dedicated volunteers.
Julia Chybowski balances her professional life as UW Oshkosh Professor with plenty of digging in the dirt. With Jason Mills, she tends their child and crops. Isolating and hand-pollinating squash blossoms is her idea of fun. She loves giving away locally adapted seed as much as she enjoys growing it. Her food and garden interests include unusual legumes, edible flowers, winter harvest of greens, fermentation, vegetarian cooking, and naturally leavened baking. She’s got a plan for the day and season; it will probably involve the pressure canner.
Jeni Meyer is part of the UW Oshkosh Department of Early Childhood and Special Education, where she focuses on early childhood development, field supervision, American Sign Language, and Deaf Culture. She homesteads with her partner and five children in Black Wolf, cultivating a wide diversity of flowers, food, and fowl in the ecological garden and landscape. With both she and her partner being certified yoga instructors, health and wellness take priority in daily life practices. When she is not in the garden, on the mat, or in the classroom, Jeni can be found in the kitchen making cultured, fermented, and scratch foods with love.
Jason Mills put his PhD in Botany to use as a university lecturer and researcher for years, but in 2020 he stepped out of paid work to supervise his child’s education and manage the organic urban microfarm that supplies their family with much of their food. He makes wine, beer, cider, and mead; and mills his own flour for baking naturally leavened bread. An active trader in Seed Savers Exchange and seed grower for nonprofit Experimental Farm Network, his seed saving interests include landrace corn and grain, food of Indigenous people of Wisconsin, food forests, and global crops with cultural importance to Fox Valley newcomers. He’d like to save that old apple tree by grafting a new one for you. If you can’t find him in the garden, he might be out foraging or floating a canoe or sailboat.
MaryBeth Petesch grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm where at age four was given her own plot of garden to grow seeds. Always a nature lover, she attended UW Stevens Point to major in Resource Management, Biology and Environmental Education. Teaching adolescents science became a career that would take her to the Frankfurt International School in Germany for eight years. After earning a Master’s Degree in Science Education at UW Madison she ended up at UW Oshkosh with her husband in the teacher education program for 25 years. Now retired, she has more time to dive into her life-long passion to hang out with and nurture plants!
Jenn Sattler graduated from UWO with a biology degree and has been teaching children about gardening and STEM concepts ever since. She also completed a permaculture design certificate and founded First Fruits Permaculture, an urban permaculture orchard on one acre in Oshkosh. Jenn currently provides in-home childcare to both her own children and the children of other area families, who all benefit from the orchard and gardens that Jenn and her husband Adam cultivate. When not tending children, gardens, and orchards, she loves reading books and embarking on hiking adventures.
Celia Sawicki credits her father, a microbiologist and “gentleman-farmer” and mother who was the 4-H county agent in rural Crown Point, Indiana, for complementing her artistic nature with a scientific turn toward gardening, foraging, and cooking. She’s never given up these passions, through career changes and geographical moves—from an art teacher in the Newport, Rhode Island school system, to a stay-at-home-mother in Oshkosh, and into a career involving decorative products. She has taught culinary and gardening classes and has always enjoyed taking classes too (even one with Julia Child!). Celia continues to supply most of her food from her organic garden in the city of Oshkosh. That’s what she calls “real food” (e.g., non-GMO, not ultra processed, not chemically contaminated). She embraces the productivity of her land and values the process of saving seeds, as she continues the legacy of the plants that her parents and grandparents grew.
Lynn Stuart moved to Wisconsin from Florida in large part to be somewhere where she could cook with seasonal produce and grow a tomato. Her first attempts to grow a tomato were as a child living in Texas and were a total failure. The dream lived on nonetheless through annual visits to her grandparents’ home in Madison. Their residential backyard was a culinary paradise dominated by huge thriving garden beds, fruit trees, berry bushes, and bee hives. Lynn was fortunate in her earliest days as a cook to exchange cooking lessons with people of both Chinese and Indian upbringings, sparking a decades-long interest in international flavors and new cooking techniques. Lynn has a few college degrees, worked some, and raised a family. In this next chapter, she is excited to bring together her interests in cooking and growing native and culinary plants (especially tomatoes!) and in finding ways to share that information with the broader community.