Saving Sweet Pea Seeds and Summer Gardening

Season 5, Episode 37, July 26, 2023

and

Jul 24, 2023

On this week’s miracle episode, Dee and I talked about caladiums, rocket/arugula, saving sweet pea seeds, plus two deep rabbit holes.

Are you wondering why I called it a miracle episode? First, if you think about it, the fact that Dee and I have all the technology that allows us to connect to the internet and see one another real-time—like we are living in a Jetson’s cartoon episode but without the flying saucer cars—and then record our conversation, upload it to some software for a bit of editing, then download it and run it through another program to smooth things out a bit and then publish it so others can listen to it, with notes and a newsletter… well, it’s kind of a miracle when it all works!

I often think about how I’d explain all this to my grandmother who passed away in 1972 or even my own dad who died in 1987. “You can do what?” “You mean like a radio program?”

Sort of.

But the reason why I call this week’s episode a miracle episode is because that technology almost failed me, at least. We had just started recording when my internet went down. Then we picked right back up a few minutes later when my internet came back. A little splicing, a little dicing, and hopefully, you won’t even know where the cutting and pasting took place!

Anyway, we managed to talked for nearly 50 minutes!

For our flower topic, we talked about caladiums, which I’ve grown but didn’t grow this year. Dee to the rescue! She’s growing quite a few this summer and found this list for us: The Prettiest Caladium Varieties 2023 | PLNTS.com

We seem to be stuck these days on new vegetable garden topics but had fun talking about Arugula/Rocket. You can get seeds from Botanical Interests and other fine seed vendors.

And we provided an update on Jalapeño-gate. Here’s a link from Garden Professors for more in case you are wonder what it is all about. To find out if I was affected, you’ll have to listen to the episode.

On the Bookshelf, we featured A Garden Catechism: 100 Plants in Christian Tradition and How to Grow Them, by Margaret Rose Realy, Obl OSB, Illustrated by Mary Sprague (Amazon Link), which popped up on my screen one day, so I bought it. (Those algorithms found me!)

For this week’s dirt we talked about saving sweet pea seeds. You might like to see Floret's Sweet Pea seeds which will go on sale next week.

Down in our rabbit holes, Dee shared her love of Season 2 of Growing Floret which is available on Discovery Plus, Max, and Magnolia Network. She wrote a blog post about it: Not enough time - Red Dirt Ramblings®. If you don’t have access to those channels, you can explore Floret's Blog for interviews with some of the people featured.

And I talked about the biography I read about Hanna Rion and wrote a blog post about it: Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Hanna Rion.

One final note about recording a weekly podcast. Dee and I don’t go back and correct mistakes. And we make mistakes. For example, this week, I said Hanna Rion was the youngest of seven children but it is really nine children and I thought she had been married three times but when I finished the biography I read, I found out it was four times. And I mixed up the name of a famous author!

Oopsie.

And that’s this week’s miracle episode. Leave a comment if you have any questions or additional info you’d like to share with us!

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