The Company You Keep... In the Garden

Season 5, Episode 17, March 8, 2023

In this week’s episode, Dee and I talked about annual flowers that attract butterflies, sowing seeds for early spring vegetables, a card deck of helpful veggie growing info, and more.

The “and more” includes talk about a sea of daffodils and sea monkeys, and… aren’t you just a tiny bit curious about how sea monkeys relate to gardening? Do you remember sea monkeys?

If you listen to us chat on about gardening for about 50 minutes, you’ll find out from Dee how sea monkeys relate to gardening.

Yes, this episode clocks in at 50 minutes. Last week’s episode was our longest at 58 minutes. For the past little while, we talked weekly for about 40 minutes, after we decided we couldn’t stick to just 30 minutes, like we did in the beginning. That was after we added garden updates, rabbit holes, and garden commissions to go with our “flowers, veggies, and all the best dirt.”

Do you prefer these longer episodes? Or do you want us to go back shorter episodes? Here’s a little poll so you can tell us!

The poll will be good for three days. Thanks for weighing in!

Shall we get on with this episode?

Dee and I went through a list of annual flowers that attract butterflies. Is anyone surprised we started with Zinnias? The rest of the list included: Marigolds, Lantana, Pentas, Tithonia, Sunflowers, Salvia, Sweet Alyssum, and Ageratum… and I snuck Dill onto the list.

Here are a few links to seeds for some of our favorite marigolds:

'Phyllis' Marigold at Botanical Interests
'Kee's Orange' Marigold at Select Seeds
'Gem Blend Signet' Marigold Seeds at Botanical Interests

If you need help finding seeds for anything else we mentioned, leave a comment or send us an email.

In the veggie department, Dee, as usual, is a few weeks ahead of me, but I’m not too far behind. We talked about how the soil temperature makes a difference when sowing the early veggies directly in the garden. If you are looking for more info, we found two articles that might help you:

Optimum soil temps for vegetables grown from seed, compliments of Oregon State.
How to raise soil temps faster, from Penn State.

I think Dee was making fun of me because I own a soil thermometer. If you want to be a cool gardener like me, I found two thermometers on Amazon that look pretty good: a basic soil thermometer and something fancier that measures temperature, pH, moisture, and sunlight intensity. 

On the bookshelf, I got a pocket card guide from Hardie Grant publishers to review:   Home Harvest: Your Pocket Card Guide to Kitchen Gardening by Bridie Cotter and Tom Gaunt. (Amazon link). I liked it and can see how flipping through these cards might be easier than flipping through a book when planning your vegetable garden. You can read about each vegetable and then toss the cards onto either a “grow” stack or a “not going to grow” stack as you make your plans.

We’d also like to give a shout out to the illustrator, Edith Rewa, who did a wonderful job. I looked her up and found out she also illustrated some botanical wrapping paper and a botanical coloring book.

For our dirt, Dee talked about A Defense of Hellebores, by Marianne Wilburn. If you don’t love hellebores, we can’t be friends, you’ll love them after reading what Marianne wrote. Then check out this FrostKiss Anna’s Red Hellebore that jumped into Dee’s cart at her local Lowe’s. (Jumping hellebores… be careful out there, fellow gardeners!)

Down in our rabbit holes, Dee alerted us that Gardeners’ World is getting ready to start its new season next week. We recommend getting a Britbox subscription to watch it every week. You can get caught up now by watching the three episodes from February where they looked back on highlights from last year.

 And I found another Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Grace Woolson, while cataloging my books.  I’m trying to make a quote from her book, Ferns and How to Grow Them, go viral. Will you help me?

“Thus did Nature artistically adjust my failure.” ~ Grace A. Woolson

And that’s it for this week’s episode!

Here’s the business stuff!

Our Affiliates:
Botanical Interests
Farmers Defense
Etsy
Territorial Seeds
True Leaf Market
Eden Bros

If you use one of the links above to start your shopping with any of those affiliates, we’ll earn a small commission and it won’t cost you anything.

Book links and links to Amazon are also affiliate links.

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Email us anytime at TheGardenangelists@gmail.com 

For more info on Carol and her books, visit her website.  Visit her blog, May Dreams Gardens.

For more info on Dee and her book, visit her website.  Visit her blog Red Dirt Ramblings.

On Instagram: Carol: Indygardener, Dee: RedDirtRamblings, Our podcast: TheGardenangelists.
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