Springing Into Busy April
Season 8, Episode 13, April 15, 2026
Greetings to all our listeners and readers. You know it’s me, Carol, writing this edition of the newsletter because the top image is of a violet!
If you are wondering why I’m writing the newsletter this week and not Dee, it’s because on Monday, the day of writing this, Dee is helping unload giant trucks full of plants at Front Door Flowers where she works part-time in the spring and fall.
She’s still getting her “sea-legs” as they say and comes home from a day in the greenhouse pretty tired, so I said I’d write the newsletter this week because I’m not unloading truckloads of plants. In fact, Dee is so tired after work, she hasn’t yet finished reading Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, which I devoured in my leisure state in just a few days. Have any of you read this book? We’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
I digress.
Let’s get started with the usual links that some of you came here to grab-and-go so you can continue your day listening to us talk about gardening. Here they are:
To listen to this episode, click here.
To watch on YouTube, click here.
Onward for those still reading!
Our Question of the Week was about growing flowering tobacco, Nicotiana, in the hot south. We think that would be fine and suggest Select Seeds as a good source for interesting varieties. Talking about flowering tobacco reminded me of Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story by Wendell Berry. It’s a novel, but halfway through, as part of the story, he describes the laborious process of growing tobacco. Good thing growing flowering tobacco is comparatively easy.
Our Insect of the Week was the great spangled fritillary butterfly, whose food source is violets! We haven’t seen any in our gardens yet, but hope to soon. Have you seen any yet?
For our Flower topic, I asked Dee to tell me what plants she’s seeing at the greenhouse that she wants in her own garden. Here are five of them!
1. Mezoo™ Trailing Red (Proven Winners).
2. Graceful Grasses® Queen Tut™ Dwarf Papyrus (Proven Winners)
3. Mandevilla standards (Costa Farms)
4. Needlepoint ivy, Hedera helix ‘Needlepoint’ (Proven Winners)
5. Supertunia ‘Honey’ (Proven Winners)
I added a bonus plant, Sedum makinoi ‘Ogon’ (Info from Missouri Botanical Garden website), that I bought at my local greenhouse.
What are you finding at your local greenhouse that is a new must-have plant this spring? Tell us in a comment and we might feature it next week.
For our vegetable topic, we decided to talk about how to bring the world to your vegetable garden by growing varieties of vegetables that are often better known in other countries. Here’s our list:
Bulgarian peppers, like Kurtovszka Kapia paprika peppers.
German tomatoes, like ‘Old German’ and ‘German Johnson’
Russian tomatoes, the most commonly known and grown is Black Krim
Italian squash, but not Zucchini. We talked about cucuzza, and Dee mentioned Seeds from Italy.
Peruvian potatoes, but technically, aren’t all potatoes Peruvian, since that’s where they are native?
Japanese Bunching Onions like ‘Heshiko’ Onion, from Seedsavers Exchange
What would you add to this list?
On the Bookshelf, we featured a book I got from my local library, The Curious Kitchen Gardener: Uncommon Plants & How to Eat Them by Linda Ziedrich (Amazon Link) (Her website). If you want to grow something different, and learn how to preserve it or eat it, this is a book for you.
Our Dirt was all about growing giant tomatoes, inspiried by a post on Instagram about the tomato seed that cost $2,000. For one seed? Would you pay that much for one seed?
Down in our Rabbit Holes, Dee learned about Mary Magdalene and red eggs for Easter on Instagram and why they dye Easter eggs red in Bulgaria.
I did a bunch of research about Mrs. H. B. Tillotson, another Lost Lady of Garden Writing, discovered the next decorating trend called Burrowcore, and listened to two podcast episodes: one with Adam Frost of Gardener’s World on the Talking Gardens with Gardens Illustrated podcast, the other with Monty Don, also of Gardener’s World, on the Rosebud with Gyles Brendeth podcast.
Our Garden to Visit was the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island in Washington state. Dee wrote a blog post about it after visiting there in 2011.
And that’s it for this week! We hope wherever you are gardening, you have sunny skies, warmer days, and are mindful of when you are really frost-free.
As always, we appreciate all of you for listening to our podcast and for reading this newsletter!
(If you’d like to support us, check out our affiliate links here. Book links are also affiliate links.)
I'm growing a new-to-me type of artemisia, Silver Bullet. I'm also seeing a variety of artemisia in the stores shown as "Russian artemisia" which I had purchased as "Southern Wormwood" about 4 years ago. It has lovely feathery foliage and is low-growing.