Preparing, Planting, No Time for Pausing

Season 6, Episode 16, March 6, 2024

Carol J Michel

and

The Gardenangelists

Mar 05, 2024

Dark Purple crocuses always come up a few weeks after others in my lawn.

Whew, we made it once again with a new weekly episode!

On this week’s episode, we pondered the 2024 Herb of the Year™ from the International Herb Association, the vegetable of the year according to the National Garden Bureau, and a wonderful book about garden making. Plus, we shared the latest info on mulches. Finally, we both went down some fascinating rabbit holes.

I didn’t say much about it while we were recording, but Dee talked about how her garden has generally had its last hard freeze once the turkey vultures return. What? Dee has turkey vultures predicting the weather for her? My first thought when I heard her say that was, “kinda early,” which Dee said it was. Also, Dee realizes that this may just be an old wive’s tale, but she likes it anyway.

My second thought was why don’t I have any turkey vultures or other returning birds to let me know when I’m nearly frost-free for the growing season? Or is there a bird like that around here, and I simply don’t know about it? I’d love to do more research on this, but I have a busy week coming up, as does Dee, so I have no time to spend on it.

So if a listener in my area of the country knows of such a frost-free predicting bird, let me know!

Dee’s front border is making her happy these days. Look at all the orange pansies!

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, shall we move on to this week’s episode? Our flower this week is Yarrow, the Herb of the Year for 2024, as proclaimed by the International Herb Society.

Then, staying “on theme,” we discussed how the National Garden Bureau proclaimed 2024 as the Year of the Squash. Dee and I feel like we’ve talked a lot about squash lately, but we did find some new things to say about it.

On the bookshelf, we featured Garden Maker: Growing a Life of Beauty and Wonder with Flowers, by Christie Purifoy (Amazon). Dee found this book at her library, and then I checked out the Kindle edition from my library. Listen to find out what we thought about it.

For our dirt, we dug into mulching, partly due to a new article about problems with using cardboard for smothering weeds from the Garden Professors. Their latest blog post will hopefully convince you to put your cardboard in your recycling bin and not on your garden. Dee also fussed about landscape fabric and showed why you shouldn’t use it on a recent Instagram reel. We had some other stuff to say about which mulch to use, before wrapping up by talking about “chop and drop” for garden clean up, which this guy showed how to do on Instagram.

Ready for some rabbit holes?

Dee found Genexa OTC medications manufactured in the U.S. that contain far fewer allergens.

I discovered more interesting information for my recent Lost Ladies of Garden Writing Substack article about Buckner Hollingsworth.

Then we wrapped up with Dee’s favorite part of the episode. (Insert wink here.) I gave an update on the upcoming Solar Eclipse! I bought some good eclipse viewing sunglasses for the big event. Then I found a Smarter Every Day video about the upcoming event, featuring the guy who developed an app called Solar Eclipse Timer. He also has a play list of several other videos about the solar eclipses.

And that was our episode! Whew!

Wait, one more thing! Don’t forget to sign up for National Garden Bureau’s Book Authors Talk Gardening webinar on March 7, 2024 at 7 pm EST. It’s free! (And while you are on their page, check out all the other webinars they offer. Incredible info, from experts, for free!

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