Let Your Garden Put You in Your Place

Season 6, Episode 37, July 31, 2024

and

Jul 30, 2024

Surprise lilies, *Lycoris squamigera*, blooming in my garden

On this week’s episode, we decided to introduce a new series we are calling “fall is for…” which is all about getting ready for fall in the garden. The more we garden, the more we realize that fall is a pivotal time in a garden and one of the best times of the year for planting all kinds of marvelous wonders for future seasons.

We started off this series by talking about planting bulbs for spring flowers like tulips and daffodils. Now is a great time to order them.

Of course, a couple of books came to mind, in particular Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden: Innovative Techniques for Combining Bulbs in Every Season by Jacqueline van der Kloet (Amazon Link), which we talked about when it first came out earlier this year, and her first book Colour Your Garden: Exciting Mixtures of Bulbs and Perennials (2018) (Amazon Link) which seems to be quite hard to find.

Tulips in Dee’s garden from past springs.

If you have problems with critters eating your bulbs especially those tulips, we’ve both had good success with using Plantskydd to keep them away. Dee’s friend, Teresa Dawkins, makes her own bulb cages with her husband and then buries them. In the past, she bought small mesh trash cans too.

Daffodils in Dee’s garden last spring. Check out the stepping stone Bill made of their children when they were small.

What we did not talk about but should have mentioned was a few places where we order bulbs. There are many good mail-order bulb companies, so at the risk of leaving some out… oh, forget that risk. Check out Brent & Becky’s Bulbs, a family-owned business of some of the nicest people we know (yes, we really do know them!) and John Scheepers. If you want big quantities of bulbs for mass plantings of flowers like crocuses, you can also order from John Scheepers wholesale site, Van Engelen.

Moving on to the vegetable garden, we talked about amaranth and the closely related celosias. I wrote an article for FH about growing celosia last year and am growing two All-America Selections, Flamma Orange and Burning Embers. Dee found her Instagram video from last fall about growing the amaranth, Hot Biscuits, in her garden.

Celosia ‘Flamma Orange’ and ‘Burning Embers’ growing in a container on my patio. I haven’t figured out why the leaves are curling on ‘Burning Embers.”

Dee read the book we featured on the bookshelf: Women in My Rose Garden: The History, Romance and Adventure of Old Roses by Ann Chapman (Author) and Paul Starosta (Photographer) (Amazon link). She found out about this book from our friend Teresa Byington of the Rose Chat podcast.

Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ is named after a famous English ballerina.

Another book Dee mentioned that both she and her daughter enjoyed reading was The Last of the Moon Girls by Barbara Davis (Amazon Link). I looked at the description, and now I want to read it too.

After we finished recording, I mentioned a book I had just enjoyed reading/listening to, and we decided to feature it next week. It’s… we’ll tell you next week! (That’s a tease, by the way.)

For our dirt, Dee talked about the Verry Cherry Plum, which she purchased at her local Sprouts grocery store. Discovering more about that fruit was her rabbit hole. My rabbit hole was the author/illustrator Anne Ophelia Dowden, my latest Lost Lady of Garden Writing.

That’s a wrap for this week and the month of July, except for our discussion about Siri. For that to make any sense at all, you might want to read a blog post I wrote about Siri last week.

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