What we may, or may not, plant

Season 4, Episode 42, August 24, 2022

Crevice garden Dee saw at the Denver Botanical Garden.

Hello friends! Dee here this week!

In this week's episode, we discussed crevice gardens, fall-sown vegetables, flowering houseplants, and more. You don’t want to miss this episode!

First, our garden updates. In my garden, things are a mess. I got overheated because I worked all day in the garden weeding and didn’t drink enough water. Lots of deadheading, mulching, weeding, and adding Happy Frog Soil Conditioner specifically in my potager because I’m thinking about planting some fall vegetable garden seeds.

Carol is also weeding! Mulberry weed, Fatoua villosa), a hanger-on from East Asia is a menace in both of our gardens. She also pulled out all of her squash plants which were done producing and became susceptible to squash bugs. She threw them in the trash. Bye-bye squash bugs, at least for this year.

Carol is also lamenting the end of summer, but I’m kinda glad summer, and its 103° heat, is over. Oklahoma is in the high 80s today. Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief.

We moved on to Margaret Roach's article in the New York Times about crevice gardens and a new book, The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants From Rocky Places, by Paul Spriggs and Kenton Seth. Carol thinks crevice gardens are the perfect home for alpine plants, and I think growing these tiny plants is overrated. I like easy plants unless we’re talking about roses.

There are crevice gardens galore at RHS Wisley, but I also saw them in several gardens, including the Denver Botanic Gardens in 2019 when I went to the Garden Bloggers’ Fling that year. If you want to explore crevice gardens further, check out the North American Rock Garden Society. The succulents I had trouble thinking of when we were talking about alpine plants actually were aeoniums! I love it when my brain actually works off the cuff.

We then considered plants we may or may not plant in our fall vegetable gardens. We both like radishes, turnips, beets, leafy greens, onions, and other fall veggies. I still hate Swiss chard, but if it’s mixed with other greens, I hate it less. Botanical Interests has a great article on this topic. How to Plan your Fall Vegetable Garden (affiliate link). Carol's favorite spring and fall radishes are French Breakfast radishes (affiliate link).

On the Bookshelf this week is Bloom: The Secret of Growing Flowering Houseplants year-round,  by Lisa Eldred Steinkopf, The House Plant Guru.  (Also on Amazon.) We think it would make a great gift for adult children moving into a new home. Flowering plants need more light and fertilizer than their tropical leafy counterparts. There’s a whole section on insect problems too.

For our dirt, we reflected on traffic calming devices like wildflowers: Long Newnton Parish Council using flowers to reduce speeding - BBC News.

More links!

Carol wrote Are Mums Perennials? in Family Handyman. She has to be their fastest writer!

Another book Carol is reading: Appointment with Venus by Jerrard Tickell. This reminded her of Sark Island, again.

Not to end on a down note, but there have been additional sightings of the spotted lantern fly in Indiana, so we are providing this link for more information: Spotted Lantern Fly Info from Purdue University. Keep a lookout and kill them no matter how “pretty” they are.

And that’s it for this week. Here’s the usual stuff at the end.

Affiliate link to Botanical Interest Seeds. (If you buy something from them after using this link, we earn a small commission at no cost to you. This helps us continue to bring this podcast to you ad-free!)  Book links are also affiliate links.

Email us 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.

Don't forget to sign up for our newsletters via our websites!