Snakes Alive and Busy Summer Gardening

This week, we discussed sunpatiens, going organic in the vegetable garden, a new book on floriography and more.

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Links!

Carol's blog post on thinning seedlings.

Flowers:

Article about the origin of Sunpatiens in Green Profit magazine
 
Vegetables:
 
Our friend Doug Oster talking about pesticide use in the veg garden on Instagram

 On the Bookshelf: 
Flowers and Their Meanings: The Secret Language and History of Over 600 Blooms by Karen Azoulay  (Amazon Link)

 Dirt:   
Our friend Jim Charlier announces his new book on Harry Potter Herbology Magic.
Bookshop Preorders, Amazon Preorders

Rabbit Holes:
SB Mowing on Youtube.

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

Book and Amazon links are also affiliate links.
Email us anytime at TheGardenangelists@gmail.com 
For more info on Carol  visit her website.  Visit her blog May Dreams Gardens.
For more info on Dee, visit her website.  Visit her blog Red Dirt Ramblings.

Transcript

Dee: 0:04

Carol, I am out of breath. What happened, Dee? Okay, so I was getting ready for the podcast and I saw a small snake in the laundry room on top of the clothes.

Carol: 0:17

Okay, stop right there. A snake. How small was small snake?

Dee: 0:23

It was about 18 inches, but it had a pattern, that's not small.

Carol: 0:28

That's horrible. I don't like snakes. I don't like snakes at all. I've never seen a snake in my garden, so where's the snake now?

Dee: 0:37

Okay, so it was patterned, And so I wasn't sure if it was. you know, if it was poisonous or not.

Dee: 0:45

There's a couple of. We have a couple of poisonous snakes in Oklahoma And so I grabbed a pot and a plate and I was going to try to get it in there And then when I walked back in it had gone down into the sheets, which were what I had pulled out of the dryer, and I just took that basket and I started dragging it. I watched it go down, so I knew kind of where it was And I just dragged that basket out through my bedroom and out onto the back deck And then I proceeded to start taking out small things and getting rid of it. So did you get rid of it? I did get rid of it. Sorry, i thought Marshall was knocking on the door. Anyway, yeah, it had gone way down in the basket So I had to pull out like sheet by sheet, and anyway, long story short, it went down through the boards, which was what I wanted, and then it kept popping its little head up And I was like no, go, go away before I have to kill you.

Carol: 1:37

So I wonder if it has friends and family nearby.

Dee: 1:40

Yeah, You were. You were saying before the podcast that I might have a whole family of snakes in my laundry room. I highly doubt that. I just looked through all those cabinets the other day.

Carol: 1:51

Hey, what's that behind you? You're so crazy.

Dee: 1:56

Anyway, let's start the podcast. Oh my gosh All right, all right.

Carol: 2:00

No, it's snakes. Welcome to the Garden Angelus, where we talk about flowers, veggies and all the best dirt. I'm Carol Michael from Indianapolis, indiana, where I have a suburban garden measured in square feet. It's about a third of an acre.

Dee: 2:12

And I'm Dean Ash from Guthrie, oklahoma, where I garden on several acres out in the country, and I do occasionally see snakes in my garden not in my house, though.

Carol: 2:22

We call ourselves Garden Angelus because we are evangelists for gardening. We love gardening, except for snakes, and we want others to love it too. Yes, we do.

Dee: 2:30

And we aren't afraid to spill the beans and tell all of our gardening secrets, the good, the bad and even the ugly. But that's enough of who, what, when, where. Let's move on to this week's episode. So, carol, in your snake free garden, how are things going?

Carol: 2:44

Well, dee in my snake free garden. I hope it's snake free. We had three quarters of an inch of rain yesterday, which was wonderful because I don't think we'd had substantial rain since May the 20th. So it had been a while. So I'm going to go backwards. So yesterday it rained. That was Sunday, saturday. I knew it was supposed to rain on Sunday, so I weeded the vegetable garden and got that all in shape And I thinned out my zinnius seedlings. I put a little post up on the on the web about the hardest thing for a gardener to do is thin out seedlings. That was cute. Friday I fertilized and I watered in a mode. Thursday, wednesday, tuesday, hmm, i know I spread some mulch. I stopped by the greenhouse once, didn't buy anything. We did in a few places, but I walked around the garden this morning and I'll talk about in the commissions. The work is never ending. How about your garden? Oh wait, i picked peas, snow peas, snap peas and the first of the shelling peas. Yum, yum. What's in your garden?

Dee: 3:50

So I realized that my spice bush had really gotten damaged by the fire and it had a lot of dead wood in it And I saw that it was. It was sitting up a bunch of shoots from the base, and so I went out there and cut it down. It took a battery operated chainsaw, which I like the dualt ones, and it also had a lot of it, had a lot of it, had a lot of it, had a lot of dead wood in it, and it also took my big Fiskars loppers And I got it all down and it looks really good And it's coming up and it looks happy again, and that's something that I wanted to talk about very quickly.

Dee: 4:25

If you have dead wood on a plant like a shrub or a tree or a rose bush or whatever, cut that dead wood out, because that dead wood is robbing energy from the plant And that's where disease can get into your plants and you don't want that. You have still not cut back to the ground from the ice storm of 2020. People. It's time. So I did that And I also weeded like crazy. The crabgrass is sprouting here and there in the garden, the weeding when you get rain And oh, by the way, we got another three quarter inches and it's raining right now. Again, when it rains, you get snakes and you also get a lot of weeds, so I've been weeding a lot.

Carol: 5:07

But I don't get snakes when it rains. Just for the record, just as far as I know.

Dee: 5:13

I bet there's snakes in your landscape and you just don't know it. I hope not. So let's see What else did I say? I wrote this whole thing right before I left. I also went out of town. That's the other thing. You went out of town and you went to a Menard's. I did, and that was going to be our teaser, until the snakes showed up.

Carol: 5:35

So you love me, you love you. Some Menards now, huh.

Dee: 5:38

I do love Menards, although they didn't sing the song, they just had regular music in there. But I tried to give you hints, because I said 11, but I didn't tell you 11%.

Carol: 5:47

Oh yeah, I should have said everything's 11%, 11% off.

Dee: 5:52

But I bought a rose and it's called All the Rage and it's really pretty. It's a landscape rose from Easy Elegance.

Carol: 5:59

I should tell you that 11% is a rebate. So you got to take your receipt and then there's a rebate receipt and you got to fill a little form, put an envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it, And then you get a coupon worth the value of your rebate that you can then guess what, spend that Menard's so they keep you coming back.

Dee: 6:16

Yeah, that's kind of smart, really. There you go. So anyway, that's it for my update. I mean, i can't figure out what I wrote at the top, so that's it.

Carol: 6:26

Okay, so now it's our new segment. Did you see? I had a little musical interlude last week for the new segment. I did. It made me laugh, i liked it. I might do it again.

Dee: 6:40

So tell me your favorite.

Carol: 6:41

My favorite, right this very minute I went outside, is that lavender that I don't know the name of that I've planted near the big boulder in the vegetable garden. It doesn't matter how I prune it or not prune it, that thing just comes out like gangbusters and blooms like crazy, and it is in bloom right now. I took a picture. I'll try to go take a picture when there's bees out, as kind of overcast right now, but the bees love it And so that's yeah, bees love lavender. That is my favorite thing right now is that hunk of lavender out there. My favorite thing right now are the day lilies.

Dee: 7:17

I went out early this morning and even before it was fully light and brave the mosquitoes, because there had been some standing water while we were out of town and a couple of buckets and stuff, brave the mosquitoes and everything so that I could deadhead them, because we're just at the beginning of day lilies season And you know I want them all fresh when I go out there. I'm also looking at a Naccia that I think is Powwow Wild Berry and it's out in front of the sneeze weed which isn't blooming yet, and it's just this beautiful shining pink. So that's pretty cool, cool.

Carol: 7:55

Well, i'm going to do a quote so that we can go into our flower topic. Cool, it was June and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside and that is Maud Hart Lovelace, and I did not have time to look up Maud.

Dee: 8:12

I know who she is. Oh, okay, she wrote a series of books and I want to make sure I look it up and get it right. But I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I want to. Yeah, her books. Hang on just a second. I think she did. Yes, she did Okay. So when my kids were little, they read Betsy Tasey, the Betsy Tacey series. This series almost went out of print but partly because of homeschoolers it has become really, really popular again. And Betsy Tacey are, if I remember right, they're friends And she wrote the whole series. So she's known for that and some other books too. But she is definitely known for the Betsy Tacey's And they are a darling, darling books Sweet, sweet, sweet, and they were written in the 50s and 40s.

Carol: 9:00

I have never heard of those. How interesting is that It is.

Dee: 9:05

It is interesting And I used to read them to my girls and they loved them, especially Megan, she loved them so much.

Carol: 9:13

Well, i'm going to read one just for the fun of it. Thank you, you're welcome.

Dee: 9:19

So our flower this week are the sunpatients.

Carol: 9:22

I don't think we have ever talked about the sunpatients And I know And whenever, whenever I see sunpatients, all I could think of is those poor shade gardeners. all they had for color were the impatience. And you know you can't grow impatience in the sun, they'll just wither up on you. But by golly somebody thought those sun gardeners who don't have many flower choices, let's give them impatience that grow in the sun.

Dee: 9:48

Grow in the sun or the shade. Yes, they'll grow them both And so they're like the suncholias And they. If I'm remembering right, i actually had dinner with the guy when I went out to California Spring Trial Trials. We had dinner with the guys who created sunpatients And they I think that they were the first of those plants that they worked on really hard to get them so that they were sun tolerant. You can grow sunpatients in the shade and grow them in partial shade and you can grow them in sun, and I actually found an article from our friend, katie Elzer Peters in Green Prophet Magazine where she talks about how they came to be And it was kind of complicated. The cool thing is, when there was a problem with impatience a few years ago, having that horrible disease that they got, they got like a powdery mildew, that just yeah

Dee: 10:43

mildew, something I don't know, But it turned them to mush And for about three years you couldn't have any impatience at all, And I still don't see very many of them. The cool thing about sunpatients is they come from New Guinea impatience, which will only grow in the shade And they also come from it's a collaboration with Indonesia, the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development. So it's from a native, Indonesia's native species of impatience. So maybe they don't come from New Guinea. Anyway, they look like New Guinean patients, but they're really sun tolerant as long as they have water. Sunpatients like a lot of water, So you want to put them, and they like a lot of fertilizer too, frankly. So what I do with them is I use them in pots sometime, And right now in my Mary garden I have both elephant ears and I have that coleus, the coral candy. What is it called? Sun coral candy? Is that the name?

Carol: 11:41

Coral candy.

Dee: 11:43

The slowest, slowest coleus I've ever grown, but really pretty and it's starting to come along. I've got it out there and I've got the wonderful Dr Cho elephant ears And then in a pot behind them I have another elephant ear in the center, and then around it I have the new begonias that are so tolerant of sun that everybody's starting to grow. They've been in production for like the last seven years. I've got some of those and I've also got sunpatients, and I in fact I think I wrote down which sunpatient I had, but maybe I didn't.

Carol: 12:17

Anyway, at the Burpee website, and they've got electric, orange, white, lilac, vigorous corona, blush pink, royal magenta. They're all sold out though.

Dee: 12:32

Yeah, they're probably all sold out. You might be able to find them locally. I found mine locally. I'm trying to remember where I found them. I think I found them under the sun maybe, but it might have been ACE hardware, Who knows. Anyway, I bought some because I saw them over there by themselves and they were like they were really healthy And I thought, oh, I'm going to put sunpatients in there And mine are dark, have really dark leaves. I'll look up the variety. They have really dark leaves And then they have light pink blooms.

Carol: 13:01

Really pretty. That sounds really pretty And I know the sunpatients. You can find those in like six and eight inch containers right now. Yes, there's a lot of annuals that you can find in the bigger containers for people who just, for whatever reason, didn't get around to buying smaller plants. Those greenhouse people are smart. They've got the bigger ones, so you can make an instant container right now with the bigger sizes.

Dee: 13:29

Well, that's exactly what I did, Carol. You just told my secret. I'm just joking.

Carol: 13:34

Well, no, if you want instant container, just wait and buy the bigger plants later in the spring and plug them in there. Right, and I needed them.

Dee: 13:43

I needed them popped in there. It's a great big container and it sits behind Mary and I needed it to look good, so I did. Okay, so mine are sunpatients compact blush pink, very nice. I will take a picture of them and we will put it in the newsletter Not the main picture, because the main picture is going to be your flower.

Carol: 14:02

Oh what's my flower? The lavender. Yeah, the lavender problem. Oh, okay, that sounds good. What else have you got to say about sunpatients? I am not growing any for no particular reason other than I am not growing any. I could end up down at the greenhouse and I could think maybe I should buy some of those, huh.

Dee: 14:24

Well, one of the things that they point out is that they are less disease prone than inpatients Right And New Guineas, and they also can handle high heat and humidity, rain, all those things. So they just do really well And I think there are great plant for containers where they get a lot of fertilizer.

Carol: 14:43

You know if you're doing your fertilizer Friday if they're like other inpatients, they just keep blooming. You don't have to do a bunch of deadheading You don't deadhead them.

Dee: 14:51

No, they do it all by themselves. So if you want a plant that's not hard to grow, now if I I don't know if I would put it in a pot in full sun, full Oklahoma sun, they might not make it, They might elongate and get kind of pale. But if you've got a partial sun pot, but you can do them full sun in the ground here, because I've done Cool All right, they're pretty So before I am tempted to go buy some sun patients, why don't you do that?

Carol: 15:17

next quote, let's talk about the vegetable garden.

Dee: 15:21

In early June, the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes and every sunset is different. John Steinpeck, who is a depressing writer but a very good one.

Carol: 15:32

Great American author. Yes, the Grapes of Wrath. Yes, he is Canary Road.

Dee: 15:36

I read I read, yeah, I read. Did I read The Grapes of Wrath? this year, I read one of them. It was really good. Okay, vegetables. What are we going to talk about? Oh, I know what we're going to talk about. I came up with this topic.

Carol: 15:50

You did come up with this topic and I got an interesting thing that I found related to that.

Dee: 15:58

I saw that picture. Do you want to talk about that first, or do you want to talk about the topic?

Carol: 16:02

Well, the topic is, you know it, transitioning from using chemicals in the vegetable garden to growing organically. There are some pains you have to go through, but our friend Doug Oster, over there in Pittsburgh, where he's the organic gardener guy, he had an Instagram picture yesterday, sunday, about the very topic. It was very prescient, considering our topic. So here's what he wrote and I will quote him. I tell the story often of my organic epiphany.

Carol: 16:35

In the mid 1980s my son, matt, was a toddler walking through the white powder of an insecticide called seven, searching for snow peas. The seven was applied on the recommendation of a gardening friend. I didn't know any better. I was gardening like my parents and grandparents. I didn't know what seven was, how bad it could be. I got it at the local hardware store. I was terrified reading the back of the bag It's a nerve toxin. That was the day I went organic and never used another chemical in the garden, he says. This morning my granddaughter Hazel found her first garden peas. It only took one short lesson to show her how to shell them And then she feasted on shirah's purple snow peas, thrilled to discover the plum colored snacks. As a child, her father taught me an important lifelong lesson, inspired me to create a safe space for our family, wildlife and those living downstream. I hope you do the same.

Dee: 17:31

So I saw that yesterday when we were driving back from Big Cedar, which is where we were all weekend because of Bill's conference, and I actually read it out loud to Bill and showed him the picture which is Doug running behind Hazel as she runs through the garden, or is it Matt? It's Matt or Doug.

Carol: 17:48

Yeah, it's sweetest can be.

Dee: 17:51

It is the sweetest picture, and maybe it's a picture of Matt when he's a little, it doesn't matter, it's one little child running through the garden. And so what we wanted to talk about today was when you have that epiphany and I think all gardeners have it at some point you have to make certain choices in your garden, and I would say it takes a good three years before the plants snap back from being on chemical fertilizer. And I'll tell my epiphany real quick. Okay, so I started out wanting to grow ornamentals. Unlike other people, i did not start out in the vegetable garden.

Dee: 18:34

I started out and I had three roses, three hybrid teas, and then I added some begonias and just your basic stuff, and I loved the roses. They did very well. I put chemical fertilizer on them. They did great. And then I did the spray schedule. The spray schedule was one week you sprayed them with pesticides. The next week you sprayed them with fungicide. By now I have more roses, right, and so I'm living in a house, right.

Dee: 19:01

And I just had an epiphany one day when I thought to myself I wonder what these sprays do. And I went and read the label And when I read the label I was like I need to stop this, because I'm going to hurt myself. You know what I mean, right? Let alone other people, let alone insects. I didn't, you know, i didn't make all the connections at first, and so people sometimes don't believe me when I say I don't use anything in the garden. I mean occasionally. I'll be honest. I use glyphosate if I have a real problem with, like, say, poison ivy for example, but that's it, because you got to get the poison ivy out of there And that's. You know it's not good either for the environment, but I'm not spraying it wholesale. You know what I mean. So when was your epiphany?

Carol: 19:53

Well, i think it was. I don't think I had this aha moment, but I just kind of gradually realized that. And, as I tell people, you can buy pesticide laden vegetables at the grocery store. So in your own garden, don't put that stuff on.

Carol: 20:10

And I grew up my dad, you know they shook the seven dust all over everything And oh, hell yeah, he used to mix diazinon into the soil when he tilled it to kill off grubs and things. Sure, and even I don't know, has to be about 12 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, right before the neighbors that we grew up next to, next door to right when they moved out, i mean, there were a bunch of Japanese beetles on his grapevine And he, just he got out this big old can of stuff and just started spraying it. No, no protection of any kind. And I'm like, well, you know, you're in your eighties, i guess, but but I, it's just like. And I got this DVD one time This is before everything was online I got this DVD about Rose care, about this Rosarian lady out East, sweet old lady being interviewed Boy, when she went to spray she had on a hazmat suit And I thought, lady, what are you doing? Right? And then now here's the start, and I I don't think my neighbors listened to this, but I just want to say this little thing My neighbors are very good people. We've had troubles with that silk mimosa worm on honey locust In my garden. I just tolerated it over the course of the years. I mean, i tried to pick up the leaves that had all the massive webbing and stuff in them and dispose of that, but I didn't spray anything. I'm assuming that there was feast for the birds. There are a lot of birds in those trees Across the street, though the guy pulled up and starts spraying.

Carol: 21:48

He had no protective gear on whatsoever. He just starts spraying that tree. When he was dying, i said what are you doing? He said well, we're going to kill the leperdopera up here. I'm like all the butterflies in front of my neighbor. She would get the idea that they just made a horrible mistake. I didn't want to say why are you spraying?

Dee: 22:11

Right, because the problem when we've talked about that particular story on the podcasts before and the problem is when you spray for one caterpillar, if you're wholesale spraying, even if you spray BT, which is natural you're going to hurt other caterpillars. It's better, if you're going to use BT, use it very specifically. Maybe not a spray guy with a deal on the back of his truck. He probably wasn't spraying BT anyway. He was probably spraying a broad spectrum pesticide. We're not being preachy on this episode at all. I think everybody has to make the decision for themselves. Like Doug, we hope you will eventually go as organic as you can. A good way to start is with what they call integrated pest management. That says do the least bad thing first. I know Oklahoma State University now suggests that too. When you watched all of the university information back in the 70s and 80s it was still spray, spray, spray. But everybody's changed their mind because the insect population is way down. Here's the good news It takes some time for your garden to get adjusted, but once it gets adjusted then you have birdsong in your garden And if you have birdsong in your garden you have birds that are eating a lot of caterpillars, and I noticed the other day on my Dill that I had black swallowtail caterpillars all over it and they were just eating it to nothing. And I just I don't care, because I don't really care about Dill. I actually just planted some more seeds, but the next day a bunch of them were gone, and that you know who loves the black swallowtail caterpillar Some kind of a bird, a bird or a wasp? The wasps love them. Oh yeah, yeah, it's kind of sad, but the wasps eat them in abundance And so I don't know who ate them, but somebody ate them And that's the way this works.

Dee: 24:07

And so my occasionally I get help from a lady in my garden And she came over a couple of weeks ago and she said do you have any ladybugs? And I said I'm all over my tomatoes because I've got aphids. And she goes really. And so I went over there and I showed her. I said here are the ladybugs And she goes Oh, is that a baby ladybug? She goes I never see them. Because she said all the other people I work for they spray. And I said no, this is what a ladybug lady, a baby ladybug looks like. It's called a lion.

Dee: 24:38

And she goes that looks like a bad bug And I said it does, but it's not.

Carol: 24:43

So there are, like you learn.

Dee: 24:45

Yeah, they're kind of ugly in it, but I think they're kind of cute and ugly sort of way. Once you incorporate plants that bring in more pollinators and bring in more insects, then you have more birds and it all eventually works in tandem. I don't spray anything anymore And I just deal with the Japanese beetles by knocking them off. I have a lot of people I know who use systemic on their roses and I'm not willing to do that.

Carol: 25:10

No, i understand. You just knock them off, and if your ground gets naturally a little bit harder in July because of it being dry, it does make it difficult for those Japanese beetles to lay their eggs and burrow, and for those grubs, and so the best years we had as far as Japanese beetles not being around was after the drought of 2012, and the population gradually builds up again, but I don't get particularly a nerve about it.

Dee: 25:39

So you have written in here about being in the Cunningham Garden. Was that you, or is it? Oh, you know. I don't know why it says you know why it's a typo in our notes. It's actually me who wrote this And it says that I was in the Cunningham Garden. It's not the Cunningham, it's the Cunning Garden. I must have dictated this, and so I noticed I had a ton of aphids on my showy milkweed And then the next day I saw a bunch of baby ladybugs on them and an adult ladybug and they were eating those. And so if you see little white casings from where the aphids were, those are gone aphids. So it'll all eventually, you know. It'll all eventually do its thing, but it's it's. You know, when you have a buggy garden, other bugs come and eat them and stuff like that.

Carol: 26:24

Because I was looking at that. I thought I used to work at Cunningham Gardens down in Walden Indiana, in the summertime, before That's why I thought it was you, but no, it was cutting. No, we did. ground covers and climates, the mums, those back in the day. I I've asked forgiveness several times for being a propagator of some Now considered to be invasive, not very good ground covers. We're talking about you. You want them as a sphortuny?

Dee: 26:53

I winter creeper. Oh, my goodness that one. Oh, that was bad.

Carol: 26:57

We used to never mind.

Dee: 27:00

Yeah, my bad. OK, so do you want to do the next quote? We're done talking about this. I feel like people have turned us off because we've been preaching about being organic.

Carol: 27:09

Don't turn us off people. The best is yet to come. Yeah, When I begin to write about flowers, I lose all sense of restraint. Beverly Nichols, famous British garden writer.

Dee: 27:21

He was, and Beverly is a man.

Carol: 27:23

Beverly is a man's name in Great Britain. Yes, it is Funny stuff. So on the bookshelf. So on the bookshelf is flowers in their meanings, the secret language and history of over 600 blooms by Karen Azolay.

Dee: 27:37

So tell me about this book, because I didn't get to read it.

Carol: 27:40

So I got a copy from the library and you know, i never remember, did I? did I see this somewhere and asked the library to get it for me? This could have been one that was sitting on the shelf as I was leaving. I thought, oh, i'll check that one out too. But somehow the universe sent me this book from the library. And you remember the old floriography where flowers had meaning and depending on what type of flower you sent somebody, you were sending a message to them, right?

Dee: 28:08

Yelah Rosa's mean jealousy, for example.

Carol: 28:11

Exactly So she's. This is a book that just came out this year And so the author has sort of updated and has 600 meanings of flowers in here And she's got the history of floriography and kind of comparing how, back in the 19th century, teenager, teenage girls would communicate with flowers for special meaning, and today it's emojis. That's funny.

Dee: 28:38

I hadn't thought about. I hadn't thought about patterning, patterning them with you know, comparing them to emojis, but they are kind of.

Carol: 28:46

Yeah, they are kind of like that, and so the author also did all the artwork for the book. So I'm going to show you a page here with the drawings and stuff.

Dee: 28:56

Oh Carol, i want this book.

Carol: 28:58

So, anyway, i thought you know what. It's got a great bibliography of old books that she references, and new books too, everything from she's got braiding sweet sweet grass by Robin Wall, kimmerer, 2013. Great book Then Flora's Dictionary by Elizabeth Gamble Wirt, 1829. Yeah, she's got a big list of books And so I was looking at those and going online. I thought you know different types of. She's got the flowers arranged alphabetically, obviously, and then, if you have certain feelings you want, she's got suggestions. So if you wanted to send a flower that says my gratitude exceeds your care, you send Dahlia's, really A bunch of Dahlia's, yeah, well that's cool.

Dee: 29:49

It just looks like a great book.

Carol: 29:51

Looked up Lavender and she didn't make up these meanings. These are been in the 19th century and stuff. So, lavender, you send. Lavender to mean distrust. Distrust, oh, having been used by Romans to send bathing and washing water. The name Lavender comes from the Latin to wash. Love it, yeah, love air. To lay someone out in Lavender is to prepare a corpse in their burial attire and to mask the unpleasant odors. Well yeah, this aromatic camouflage is why Lavender was associated with distrust. Some say that Cleopatra was killed by an ass that was hiding in a bundle of Lavender. So there's that snake theme again.

Dee: 30:31

D. Goodness, we can't get away from the snakes.

Carol: 30:35

Well, and I didn't. I chose Lavender because I'm in love with that flower right now, not because of the Well, because you didn't know the snake thing. It was a snake thing. I didn't know the snake thing until that, And then I was going to. I looked up Sweet Pea, because you were all gaga, Of course. I looked up pansies.

Dee: 30:50

I am still all gaga about the sweet peas. I just took them on top of the refrigerator because of Masha, because she wanted to eat them and their poisonous. I was like stop. That was the reason. I was worried about the snake too, because she attacks anything that is in the house. What if that snake had been poisoned this and bit my Masha?

Carol: 31:09

That would have been very, very, very, very, very, very bad Yes.

Dee: 31:13

So I got rid of it.

Carol: 31:15

That would have been. Oh, we can't do the podcast today. D has to rush the cat to the vet today, Hang on, i'm finding sweet peas. Sweet peas means delicate pleasures. They are delicate. Sweet peas are beloved for their petals that curl in a gentle, dainty way. At one time this species was barely noticed, but crossbreeding during the Victorian era produced new, sensational varieties, has been extremely popular ever since. Folklore suggests that planting sweet peas before the sun rises on St Patrick's Day will not only bring luck your way, but will also help the sweet smelling flowers grow abundantly. Okay, there's your tip of the day. Anyway, there's just full of sweet little stuff like that all through the book. So I ordered a copy from Wild Geese Bookshop.

Dee: 32:08

Oh, it is a beautiful book. I want it to So anyway, that's Okay Well we've linked to it.

Dee: 32:14

We've linked to it on Bookshop and we've linked to it on Amazon. So if anybody else fills the need for this beautiful little book and the cover is just beautiful I have to say that's my favorite thing about the new gardening books that are coming out. The covers are these gorgeous decorative covers, because they finally figured out that people love beautiful books on their bookshelves. It's gorgeous, it's dark green and it has a whole bunch of flowers on the front of it. It's beautiful.

Carol: 32:40

And very impressive, that the author also did all the artwork. Flowers and their meanings the secret language and history of over 600 blooms by Karen Azulay. My copy is coming and when that I get it I'll send this one back to the library. That is our book.

Dee: 32:57

I'll do the next quote. June is the gateway to summer, Jean Hersey.

Carol: 33:03

And of course, we've talked about Jean Hersey. Lost lady of garden writing.

Dee: 33:07

Yep, So we're going to talk about our friend Jim.

Carol: 33:13

Jim Charlet. Yes, so he co-authored Buffalo-style gardens with Sally Cunningham and lives in Buffalo, new York. He's very instrumental in the Buffalo Walk garden tours. Right, you and I have been to his garden and it is known for the Harry Potter theme.

Dee: 33:34

Right, there's a whole section of it that is themed Harry Potter, and so he is in the process, where he just finished writing Harry Potter, herbology, magic And you found all this. I didn't know that Jim was writing a book.

Carol: 33:52

Well, he wrote a blog post about it. His blog is called Art of Gardening, and Jim is not only an excellent gardener, but he's also a graphic designer very, very talented. But anyway, the subtitle of this is Botanical Projects, terrariums and Gardens Inspired by the Wizarding World. It's coming out in September and he goes through the whole story about how they contacted him. Because of you, right? Because?

Dee: 34:19

of his garden. It's gone viral. The garden has gone viral on Pinterest and on Instagram.

Carol: 34:26

Well, this book, i mean the photography. He's got some sample pages. The photography is amazing And he, as he says, he was under like lock and key, non-disclosure until you know they got the book out there and ready to go. Such cute projects. But he will tell you this is not a children's project book. This is aimed at those kids in their 30s the Harry Potter generation that were like my daughter. Yes, but when you look at his blog posts and you see all the fun things that they have, it's going to be very popular at Christmas time. In fact, I think my sister, whose daughter-in-law is a huge Harry Potter fan, she and her girlfriend still have Harry Potter weekend. Usually it's in October, but she's due to have a baby then, so I don't know when it will be. Maybe they do it in July. Harry Potter's birthday is July 31st or something.

Dee: 35:22

I need to send this to someone. Go ahead and finish, sorry.

Carol: 35:25

I was going to say my sister may want to get this for her daughter-in-law for Christmas, you know, because what comes out in September, she could get it for her birthday. But anyway, that's Harry Potter, herbology Magic by Jim Charlet And it's going to be very good. And there's another, there's a co-author, but I don't know who it is. This is Jim's book in my mind.

Dee: 35:47

Right, and it is because he's yeah, he's a very talented writer and very talented photographer and all kinds of stuff. I actually just sent it to Bill's cousin, who's a huge, huge Harry Potter fan, And I think she'll like it too. So there you go.

Carol: 36:07

There you go. So that is our dirt new book on Harry Potter gardening coming out in September.

Dee: 36:13

Yeah, she's just a. She's a year older than me And she's a Harry Potter nut, so it isn't just people in their thirties, nope, all right. So let's go on What. You're not in your thirties, dee, i wish You know what. No, i don't, no, i don't. I watched all the moms at the big theater at the convention for the Oklahoma Municipal Contractors Association. I watched all the moms with all the little babies and kids And I thought, oh, i'm so glad I don't have to do that anymore, because I did it for years and brought them to the convention. It's a lot of work, all right.

Carol: 36:46

So what's next Quote is next Ah, there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. Jane Austen.

Dee: 36:54

That's so fitting, since I just got back home. I'm so glad to be home. And then we're to our rabbit holes, and so can I do my rabbit hole first.

Carol: 37:03

Yes, you can. I've been down this rabbit hole. I know I love this rabbit hole.

Dee: 37:10

So there's a guy and he's up in Wichita, Kansas, and he has a YouTube channel and it is called SB Mowing. He also has SB Powerwashing. I have no idea what SB stands for, but maybe it's his name, Who knows. Anyway, he goes. he's a landscaper guy. I mean, he's a landscape, he takes care of people's yards. But the cool thing is this guy has more energy than anybody I've ever seen. He's probably in his early 30s and he picks one lawn a week in the area that needs help And it's usually an elderly person or a handicapped person or an abandoned house And he goes and cleans up that yard. And I have decided that the reason it is so soothing to watch is it's like ASMR, because he speeds everything up right.

Carol: 38:02

Yeah, it is.

Dee: 38:04

It is. It has the sound of ASMR, it's repetitive, it's like when you're beekeeping. Anyway, it's very soothing. So, and I skipped through portions of it because I've watched a number of them now so I know what he's going to do, but it's really cool to watch him. You know my favorite parts The before and the after. No, when he uncovers the sidewalks.

Carol: 38:27

Oh yeah, You should see my sidewalk edging D. It's just magnificent, by the way. But yes, I think it is.

Dee: 38:33

Explain why it's so. There's something about the fact that it's all covered up and horrible. And then he gets in there with his shovel and his weed eater and his edger and his blower And all of a sudden people can walk down the street or they can walk up to the door. It's magical. That's my rabbit hole.

Carol: 38:52

There's a couple of guys that are doing this And the one guy there's one in Australia. Their grass is different from RSD, but on Instagram And what they say is they make enough from their YouTube channel views to be able to do this for free. Like, take an entire work day, a Friday generally, and just go and knock on somebody's door And this one he knocked on the. It was a woman, she had a couple little kids and she just moved there and had a chance to get a mower, and so he did her whole yard. And then he says and here, by the way, go ahead and take my mower, and it's one of those big riding mowers, it was not.

Dee: 39:28

Yeah, they gave it to him. They gave it to him, the mowing company gave it. I mean, the mower company gave him a mower and said, here, try this out, use this, and then, if you want to give it to somebody and she had a huge yard, yeah. And so the other day was like a triple plot He gave her the mower, he gave her glasses, you know, so she wouldn't hurt her eyes, and he gave her earplugs. And she had. Actually, she was a lady who cleaned houses and she had gone and cleaned a house for free for an elderly woman she knew. So it's just all that, pay it forward, good karma, it's just good karma, it's just good everything.

Carol: 40:04

Okay, so what was yours? So mine is basically the bibliography from flowers and their meanings that I talked about. There are several lost ladies of garden writing from the 19th century that I had not heard of. Now, a couple of them, you know. They have Wikipedia pages, which always kind of disappoints me, because then it's like, oh, the thrill of the hunt, it's.

Carol: 40:25

It's like you think that something's obscure, and then it's like, oh, it's right there, but there's a couple of little questions I have about a few of them, so some of those ladies might end up on a blog post or two, but this was a nice way to spend some time on a Sunday afternoon. Reading through Sounds lovely. That was my rabbit hole.

Dee: 40:45

That was my rabbit. That's a good rabbit hole. So now we're on to our garden commissions. I'll go first. When it stops raining, i'm going to go out and finish deadheading all the dailies, because it's deadheaded season in the garden And when you got 200 plus dailies, you're going to deadhead every single day. And then I also need to cut back some more shrubs. I need to dig out one of the aromatic asters, and that's what I was going to do this afternoon, and I may still get to, because when the ground's wet that's a good time to dig out an aster. And then I've decided I'm going to put that rose bush where the aster the new rose bush, all the rage. I'm going to put it where that aster was. I'm digging that aster completely out. I'm done with that aster. It takes up too much room and it's rude, rude, rude.

Carol: 41:31

So what are you doing? Well, i just want to say, before I say what I'm doing, d your videos that you did this past week. I know you recorded them all last Monday and then you Sunday or Monday, yeah, and then you put them all out. They have been excellent, excellent videos, well thank you.

Dee: 41:45

Thank you so much. I love doing videos with Claire because she can pan back and forth so that you know she's a good videographer. I don't get it to it very much, and today she starts her new job. She's starting a new job and she's going to be a counselor for people in crisis. That's two of my children who do that That is very wonderful.

Carol: 42:07

So my commission is. I'm going to get after it, as they say. I went around a little bit this morning and I got some big edits. That got to happen. I just didn't get enough done last week and there's more peas to pick, obviously. But I mean I have a redbud seedling and a mulberry tree seedling that are growing up and out of a honeyberry shrub And that that just shouldn't be like that. That's just laziness on my part. I need to as soon as it dries off enough. I got to get in there. You know I got to wear protective eye gear and something on my head. I got to crawl under there to find that thing and cut them out.

Dee: 42:42

Anyway, you know what happens here is elm seedlings, elm tree seedlings They're terrible about that. All of a sudden, you'll look and you'll go oh my gosh, I have an elm tree in the middle of that.

Carol: 42:55

You know, whatever, Oh yeah, Well one day I was looking out at my, my spruce tree, which is pretty tall, i mean it's, i don't know, 20, 25 feet tall, And now the top of it's like that's those are mulberry leaves. And I look down there. I mean I pulled out a 15 foot tall mulberry. Quote unquote seedling.

Dee: 43:18

I'm just like, and sometimes they get so big that you have to just cut them off it underneath the, you know, in the dirt.

Carol: 43:24

I did, i did.

Dee: 43:26

That's what I had to do, and then you, and then you just have to keep doing it over and over again until you convince the stupid thing to die.

Carol: 43:32

Exactly So. anyway, that that's my week, pretty much.

Dee: 43:36

Busy. We're both busy, oh, and I have a garden coaching client this week. On Wednesday too, i'm a busy girl.

Carol: 43:42

And I have to write a family handyman article. Busy, busy.

Dee: 43:46

Oh, and I'm speaking in on the 27th, so I've got to finish up that talk. Wow, we are busy, shall we go.

Carol: 43:54

We shall go. We got, we got to go. Thank you for listening to The Garden Ancholess. I hope you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a single episode. We publish every week on Wednesdays at 12am Eastern time.

Dee: 44:05

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Carol: 44:12

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Dee: 44:21

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Carol: 44:33

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Dee: 44:50

It was lovely to chat with all of you over the Garden Gate. Bye, until next week, bye, everybody.