Fun in the Garden, Always

Season 6, Episode 43, September 11, 2024

‘Olivia Rose Austin’ blooming at Dee’s house today.

On this week’s episode, we chatted about spring-flowering trees to plant now, steps you can take to be ready for spring in the vegetable garden, a few favorite books by a favorite author, and all kinds of other topics.

But before we got to those topics, we reflected on how we met. Listen for the story and check out People with Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening by Robin Chotzinoff (Amazon link). Also check out Pam Penick’s long-standing garden blog, Digging.

Then, as usual, we shared out favorites for the week. See the pictures above and below!

Colchicums in my garden was my favorite this wee.

With all our updates out of the way, we shared some of the spring flowering trees and large shrubs we think make great additions to a garden, including: crabapples, serviceberries, dogwoods, redbuds, spicebush, southern blackhaw, Japanese ornamental cherry tree, viburnums, star magnolia, saucer magnolia and Carolina silverbell.

Check out Gail Eichelberger’s blog, Clay and Limestone and then read one of her posts about Rusty Blackhaw, another common name for Southern Blackhaw, Viburnum rufidulum.

My ‘Guinevere’ crabapple, blooming in the spring a few years ago.

We also had a brief discussion about whether viburnums are dioecious, meaning some plants have male flowers, others have female flowers. They are not dioecious but often to get them to produce berries, you should plant two different varieties of the same species. For example, for arrowwood Viburnums, Viburnum dentatum, you might consider ‘Blue Muffin’ and ‘Blue Lustre’ or the two Proven Winners varieties, ‘All that Glitters’ and ‘All that Glows.’

Dee’s kitchen garden with the red fountain and veggies, roses and herbs.

Out in our vegetable gardens, we went through some tips for planning and preparing for next year’s garden. My goodness, is it that late in the season that we are talking about next year? Time flies.

On the bookshelf, our contribution this week was a favorite author, Sydney Eddison. Between us, we have three of her books including: 

A Patchwork Garden: Unexpected Pleasures from a Country Garden, by Sydney Eddison (Amazon link)

Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older, by Sydney Eddison. (Amazon link)

A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People, by Sydney Eddison (Amazon link)

For our dirt, Dee indulged me and let me talk about a new botanical Lego kit, Poinsettia, which is coming out October 1st. They also have fairly recent kits for chrysanthemums and plum blossoms that I’ve seen at my local Costco.

Down in our rabbit holes, Dee went looking for vegan markers and settled on Ohuhu Markers. I spent a lot of time researching for women authors who wrote about herbs and found about five of them, so far. Just like today’s garden writers, I think they all knew each other, or at least knew about each other.  I wrote about one of them, Rosetta E. Clarkson, for my Lost Ladies of Garden Writing substack last week. 

We did manage to keep this episode to right about an hour! We hope you enjoy it. When you get to the end, you’ll understand where the title for this episode came from. That’s your prize for listening to the whole thing!

We love hearing from our listeners, especially if you have topics you’d like us to cover. We love gardening, and we want you to love it too! Leave a comment to let us know what you think we should talk about in future episodes or send us an email.

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For more info on Carol visit her website.  Visit her blog, May Dreams Gardens and check out her new weekly newsletter, In the Garden With Carol.
For more info on Dee, visit her blog, Red Dirt Ramblings.

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