Episode 59  Kathy Jentz of DCGardener, Spring Ephermerals, Sanguinaria Canadensis, Camellia Pruning

Leslie: Gosh, we interrupted this previously scheduled spring programming with a special presentation of bloody winter last week. Looks like we're getting back to normal now. Fingers crossed!! Welcome to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. This show is sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping and Color Blend Bulbs. I'm Leslie Harris, and in winter I will garden in the 40-degree range, but in spring, I immediately become a total baby who builds fires and does jigsaw puzzles and waits for high 50s. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this, I am back outside.

Our plant of the week is just the kind of native bloom I want more of at this time of year, and you will too, after you hear about it. I'll be chatting with Kathy Jentz, who is the author of The Urban Garden, but she's also a lot of other things. Wait to hear. The playlist is about what to do in your garden this week, and it actually includes what a bunch of other people are doing in their garden this week, because I was such a baby, I was like, well, I'm not outside. What are other people doing? So we have lots of good contributions.

Last week, I mentioned that I have a goal, and this is one of many gardening goals, but it's top of mind because it's about this time of year - to have more native spring ephemerals in my garden. I love spring bulbs. They are the best, except many of them are not native so I wanna keep adding spring bulbs to my garden as well, but I'm determined to have native playmates for them such as more Trillium, more Mertensia, which is the Virginia bluebell that we had as the plant of the week last week, more bloodroot. Blood root is our plant of the week this week. You're gonna hear about it in just two seconds. But I also wanna add some other native plants, such as Erythronium albidum, which is the white trout lily and the Claytonia virginica. Anybody out there grow that one? Has a rather insipid common name, spring beauty. I mean, my gosh, it's all about spring beauty. I think we'll go with Claytonia on that one, but white trout lily is much easier than Erythronium albidum. Anyway, those are two that I wanna get into.

But along with these natives, as I said, I also constantly want to add more to my spring bulb collection and I get my bulbs from Colorblends, which is a company that I have mentioned many times on this podcast, but now I'm going to mention them with more sincerity and vigor, because they're sponsoring me. So let me wax even more eloquently on Colorblends Wholesale Flowerbulbs. Colorblends is a third generation bulb company offering top size flower bulbs directly to ambitious residential gardeners and landscape professionals at wholesale prices. Well, I like to think that I am ambitious and I buy my bulbs from Colorblends every year. I used to do it as a professional, and now I am doing it as a personal gardener. There's going to be a giveaway that I will conduct of any tulip blend that comes in a quantity of 100, and the winner can choose which blend specifically that they would like. The details on this giveaway are coming up in next week's episode of the podcast - episode number 60 - so more on that soon.

This week's plant of the week is the bloodroot, which is a bit easier to say than its botanical name, Sanguinaria canadensis. I mean, I guess that's not too bad because sanguine is a good word. It's based on the Latin root for blood, though most people now use it as an adjective for optimistic, like that's so sanguine, she is very sanguine apparently because a ruddy-faced person is historically cheerful and gardeners have ruddy faces - or they can if they don't wear sunscreen - and they're always cheerful, so this all makes sense to me.

Bloodroot is a native from Nova Scotia to Florida and out west to Nebraska, a huge range of native. This is a very happy little white perennial. It's just a couple of inches off the ground, and it blooms right about now for me here in Virginia. In late March. It's self-sowing in my garden. My first little bits were from my friend Kathy, but I have more than a handful now. And of course with that native range, you know that its hardiness range is extensive also, zones three through eight. It can tolerate drought, but it naturally grows in moist soil, lots of choices for where to put it. It could even grow under black walnut trees. It can take partial or even full shade. I don't think it loves full-on sun. It might get a little crispy. They spread by rhizomes, but also by seeds and the stem, which connects to the rhizome and the root system. All of that is red so that's probably where it got its name bloodroot.

Each flower emerges kind of curiously from a single leaf. So picture a small gray-green kind of fig-shaped leaf but it's quite small. I'm gonna put pictures on my website, because it's really kind of cool the way it unfurls. It opens up on sunny days, but the flower closes up at night and it actually isn't even all that open on a cloudy day. They only bloom for a day or two, quite ephemeral, but it's really fun to see them. The foliage stays nice for a month or two until midsummer, and then the whole thing goes dormant. Apparently they are quite poisonous is the blood root so if your relations - human, canine or otherwise - have peculiar eating habits, then do be aware. That does make them deer resistant however, which is quite nice. I grow mine along woodland pass and they look so charming in among the Eranthis hyemalis, that Winter Aconite, you know that little yellow thing that I said looks like a jaundiced choir boy that was our plant of the week a few weeks ago. I grow it with Blue Squill, so it's a really beautiful white, yellow and blue combination. And guess where I got those last two bulbs? Yep. Colorblends.

This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, kindly delivered by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. And coming up, we're gonna be talking with Kathy Jentz of the Garden DC podcast and the Washington Gardener Magazine. Kathy has co authored a book called The Urban Garden so we're going to get into that.

Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. We are very happy to be chatting with yet another author of yet another - guess what? Gardening book! Yeah. It's Kathy Jentz, and she has written a lovely book full of wonderful ideas. It's called The Urban Garden: 101 Ways to Grow Food and Flowers in the City. Have I got the end of it right?

Kathy: Beauty.

Leslie: Beauty. Okay. So this would appeal to anybody who even lives in the country, but has a small space that they wanna decorate. It's a wonderful book. Hi Kathy. Thank you for joining us.

Kathy:  Glad to be here. And I would say the beauty part and the city part is very flexible. I just call it a small space gardening book because like all of us, we have limited resources. We have limited time. Even if we own 20 acres, we're only probably gonna garden in that little area around our homes.

Leslie: I find that as a good design thing. You're much more accustomed to making the things that you're looking at every day right outside your door. And my garden, for example, gets wilder and wilder as we walk away. So this book can really come up with some good ideas for every gardener. So, tell us a little bit about yourself because you are not just an author. You are into so many things about gardening. Tell my listeners what you do, all the things you do.

Kathy: Whew! So when I start to list it out, it starts to sound a little crazy. Yes, I do sleep. I do love my sleep. I am the editor of Washington Gardener Magazine and that's based in the Washington DC area, and we cover everything that grows in our region from edibles to ornamentals, to exotics, to natives. If it grows here, that's what we talk about. I am the host of the Garden DC podcast. I am involved in several other garden organizations on their boards and doing volunteer work and helping out. And I think one of my biggest hats is being on the board of the Garden Communicators Association that we are both members of. And that I'm president of Silver Spring Garden Club, which is one of the largest garden clubs in the DC area.

Leslie: Oh, and by the way, you're president of the garden club. Wow! That's a really hard job for somebody who's just not doing anything else. Is that a two year tenure or is that something longer?

Kathy: It seems to be for life right now because we haven't had an election in several years and I inherited the post from Lady Alice Franson who had it for 17 years prior to me. We have kinda gone off the rails and the bylaws, but I'm slowly trying to bring in a group of people to help me run it. I'm just calling it a leadership group and we're not so formal with the titles.

Leslie: All right. Wow. That is a lot. All right. So this book is The Urban Garden. Tell us about your garden. Are you an urban gardener?

Kathy: Yes, I'm right on the edge of the city of Washington DC. I am between two Metro stations and next to a community college in a really older neighborhood. I have a historic Victorian neighborhood off to one side of me and then a train/commuter-type neighborhood on the other side of me, so we were the old 1930s working class between World War neighborhood. I'm on a super busy urban corner, kind of a pie shaped lot that sticks out there, so I have weird full shade on one side, full sun on the other.

Leslie: And how much land is there?

Kathy: It's a little less than a quarter acre and then diagonally across the street is a community garden, and that I have a 10 by 20 plot at, and that's where I grow all my vegetables.

Leslie: Okay. So you keep your ornamentals to themselves and then the vegetables, the edibles are over there. Do you ever mix it up in your garden? Bring some edibles in like okra or something that's pretty to flower kale or something?

Kathy: Mostly I do the herbs in pots here, or I might do some greens in pots. It's really because I have a rabbit family that's established themselves under my gazebo. So it's great to be able to say across the street has a deer fence and I can keep bunny fencing around my little plot, so it's a lot easier to maintain a barrier there that I have to the open street here.

Leslie: Yeah. That sounds like a good plan. Oh, those bunnies! Golly! I disturbed a fox in my backyard yesterday and I was so friendly to him. I'm like, please come back. Come and dine.

Kathy:  You can send him my way. I need that little foxy.

Leslie: So with all these pulls on your time, about how much time do you have to devote to your puttering and enjoying your own garden?

Kathy: That's a really great question, Leslie. That's one of my goals for this year is to carve out some daily time or at least weekly time because my garden is just the wild jungle at this point. I get out there at least weekly into my garden plot because I have a couple interns that were growing something to write about, so we are at least maintaining that. And then at home, thank goodness I have tons of bulbs and shrubs and other things that are pretty much very low care that can get on without me.

Leslie: Yeah. On autopilot. That's great to have something like that established with things that are gonna bring you joy every year. The magazine, how big is it? Is it online or is it an actual print magazine?

Kathy: We started off in print and bimonthly. Now we're monthly and digital, so it's sent as a PDF to subscribers' inboxes, and it's about 24 pages every month. It's really intense, like what to do in the garden for the month, local garden profiles of people you might wanna know, and then plant profiles. Maybe we'll focus on a native plant that is really of importance in the region, so we really try to go in depth. I always say that my readership are the 'dirt in the nails' gardeners, so we try to be really realistic. We're like this is what it looks like in your garden. We're not gonna give you those glamor shots with a bunch of flowers photoshopped on top of a shrub.

Leslie: No. It's the real life and the real dirt. And how does that correspond with the podcast?

Kathy: The podcast grew out of the magazine and that I wanted to start some type of audio and video channel for it. So we have a YouTube channel as well. And a lot of the people that we might be profiling or using as sources or subjects that I've met over the past decade-plus are my expert guests on the podcast. So it's an interview format and we get to really pick their brains in depth on the podcast.

Leslie: All right. So now we sort of know you better in your garden and all those various things you do, so let's talk about your book. The Urban Garden is broken down into really inviting chapters. Things like containers, food growing, privacy, supporting urban wildlife, so let's take a radio break and then target a couple of your favorites. This is Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA, and we're chatting with Kathy Jentz about her book, The Urban Garden, and when you flip through this thing ...and by the way, this will be available in April. April 12th, did you say?

Kathy: Correct.

Leslie: So you can pre-order it on Amazon and I will put a link to it in the show notes and put it on my Amazon storefront. I was able to look at a PDF copy and it is very inviting with awesome chapter names. So tell us a couple of your favorite bits. You co-authored it. Tell us about your co-author and what are your favorite bits that you wrote.

Kathy: My co-author is Teri Speight and she lives around the Beltway on the other side of the city from me, and so we just picked our favorite topic. We came up with 101 ways. We made a spreadsheet, then we both said, this is the topic I want and then we had about maybe 20 that were left. We're like, I'll take it. Oh, I'll take it.

Leslie: The dregs.

Kathy: Yeah, they were really dregs, but we were like, I guess I could write about that, but we were super happy about our topic. Hers are mostly on the theme gardens so you'll read about a moon garden or a shade garden or a Asian garden, and how to recreate that in a small space. And mine are more kind of the concept and privacy barriers, and how to make an urban garden safe and feel beautiful. And so mine is more, I guess, a how-to technique parts.

Leslie: Okay. So do you have any favorite ones that you wanna tell the listeners about?

Kathy: Yeah. I really loved what to decorate and how to outfit a small space garden. I am a huge believer in frugal lifestyle and reuse, so I have lots in there about reusing something. It could be a rain gutter into a system of lettuce gardens, or we took an old mailbox and we put it on its end so it's standing upright so you could plant into that. So just fun things to find like an old Tonka toy truck that your kids might have played with that would make a great place to put your soms in, and then is also a great conversation piece. It also tells you a little bit about the gardener. I love gardens that have the flavor of the gardener, a little bit of whimsy, a little bit of their character, rather than those cookie cutter gardens that you can go to anywhere.

Leslie: Yeah. That you can see I've seen those containers before, or I've seen that look before. So are you a dumpster diver? May I just ask?

Kathy: Yeah, I'm kind of beyond the dumpster diver. I actually go to the salvage yards and we'll pick through things and yeah, trash day, I'm looking around and then of course I'm a member of buy nothing lists and that sort of list, and people are putting up things that you're like, hmm, even though I don't need this, maybe I will need this. That's really a bad habit to have, Leslie, but you know it's incurable at this point.

Leslie: But I bet you have some fascinating containers in your own garden. Do you actually have a mailbox container?

Kathy: I do.

Leslie: It's so cute. I saw the photograph in this PDF copy of the book that'll be coming out in April, The Urban Garden, and it was so cute. It was these old gutters and you had painted them this wonderful kind of bright blue, and they were just lined up on this fence and you're like, oh, what an attractive system. And then you realize, wait, those are gutters! Is that in your garden?

Kathy: That I can't lay claim to. That I saw at a garden tour in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC, and it was just this beautiful little postage stamp backyard garden this lady had decorated, and she used that blue paint all throughout her front porch and her garden. She painted her little strawberry fencing that same blue. Her front door was that same blue. I always say paint is cheap, and that's one of the chapters too to just make it bright. Make it your favorite color. There's no reason that small urban gardens have to be just green with white flowers, which I see happening a lot. I would say, go for it

Leslie: A color like that can really catch your eye, and then if you repeat it, even in a small space, it can pull things together, right?

Kathy: Yeah. Definitely. Repetition is one of those real essential design elements, so you don't wanna have it look like a hodgepodge, or like Fred Sanford's backyard like mine does.

Leslie: So you're talking the talk, but you're not walking the walk. Good to know.

Kathy: But I do try to coordinate containers. I try to collect the same type of container so it has a coordinated look. So, whether you love terracotta, whether you love blue ceramic, whether you love whiskey barrels, wood containers, try to at least amass a collection of the same type of thing.

Leslie: Okay. Can you think of any other chapters that were your favorites?

Kathy: I would say the portion that Terry wrote that I really loved and I'm opening it back up here is on the clever containers, and she was talking about having them above, like suspended or vertical containers because I love the look of things spilling over. I've always been a big fan of weeping plants like weeping cherry trees or anything that kind of spills over and has that drama to it. I've even been to a garden that's where a man had collected - he was outside of Atlanta, Georgia - every type of weeping tree there was.

Leslie: Oh my goodness!

Kathy: I was like, I didn't know this was a possibility. This might be something for the future that I think about. But yeah, I love the spilling over and growing up. So both types of vertical growing should be considered because a lot of people, when you say vertical growing, they're just thinking about vining that goes up or maybe hanging pots, but think about also going down.

Leslie: Okay. All right. There was a chapter about supporting urban wildlife. Can you explain that one to us?

Kathy: Sure. So that's almost the most important part of the book in this 21st century is we got this biophilia movement going on that we wanna get back in touch with nature. So it helps the gardener themselves, but of course we wanna support wildlife and have a place for them to rest in the city. So if we can have these little pockets, one per block, a couple per block that a Monarch could rest at, the birds can have some feeding from say your coneflower seeds that you leave up during the wintertime, that will really help bring back a lot of the urban wildlife. And I'm talking about the good side of urban wildlife, because there is the other side of urban wildlife that we do address in the book as well and how to deal with that. But yes, we wanna promote getting nature back into our lives and I think with the past couple of years of COVID, we've been really all feeling that really heavily.

Leslie: Yeah. And it has been a comfort, those first weeks of the pandemic when you really didn't even hear cars going by, but you did hear nature. It was short lived, but it was lovely. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and we're chatting with Kathy Jentz about her book, The Urban Garden. A couple of other chapters, or topics actually that were interesting to me, can you explain to the listeners trench composting?

Kathy: Sure. That's a technique that is used on industrial-sized farms that I was translating to an urban or small space setting. So literally instead of making a compost pile that might attract vermin, compost big space taking up your landscape, your precious little postage stamp backyard, what you're doing is instead of creating a raised bed in your vegetable garden, you're digging basically a trough, and then you can add into that a slurry of anything vegetable matter. So this could be your cut up banana peels, anything. And I always say collect them over the winter time and put them in the freezer. So a little bit at a time as you're making your green shakes or whatever. You can just grind them up in the blender and then add them cup by cup into your freezer and then take that whole slurry in the springtime, make that trough, pour that into the bottom of the trough, and then cover that back up with soil.

You're gonna make it at least 6 to 12 inches deep. It doesn't have to be like super, super deep, but deep enough. And then it decays under the surface there and it is the best organic food for your micro rises, for your worms, for everything under there. And, then next year or next season even, that's where you're planting into. So you can do a succession of three rows of these trenches, and the trench from last season could be what you're planting your carrots and stuff into this season. You've got a new trench going and that could be your in-between area, and then your one from the previous year could be with your lettuces or your tomatoes or what have you in your garden.

Leslie: All right. That makes really good sense. But the small space gardener would bemoan the fact that they're just looking at just soil so it's great that they don't have a compost pile and they are saving space, but it's just soil. I suppose it would be a kind of a curious-looking blank space in their garden. If you dig down 12 inches, say, and then you layer two or three inches of food on top and then pile your soil on top of that, could you think about growing shallow rooted plants? I don't know, petunias or something just on top of that.

Kathy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could definitely throw a cover crop on top, like peas or something. Something shallow rooted like an annual could be thrown on top, or you could just mulch it over. You could just add shredded leaves, and leave that fallow for just that one growing season.

Leslie: And touching on the design aspects of a very small space, you would be sad if you had a blank space in your small space because the tendency would be to fill it. I know that you can get into trouble with too many ... I don't know, we're all plant collectors. I mean, you talked about collecting a few minutes ago and it's like, I want one of those and I want one of those and I want one of those, but it can not lend harmony to your space if you're a victim of that type of purchasing. Do you have some good design points for people who are gardening in a small space?

Kathy: Yes. So if you want that one gorgeous specimen plant, that could be your focal point. That could be that weeping Higan cherry tree I mentioned before, so that could be your one focal plant in the middle of your small backyard or front yard, and then you would purchase plants in odd numbers. Three, five, seven is ideal to place groupings around it, and then you could repeat those in other places in your garden as you have the room. So you might do a small grouping of rudbeckias, black-eyed Susan with a small grouping of grasses next to it, with a small grouping of some type of a ground cover in the front of it so that would be your little grouping there. And then you could repeat that in two or three other spaces. But yeah, there is the desire to accumulate when you go to the nursery or garden center and you pick up a plant and then you say, I don't have a space for this, but you still bring it home. And that's the great use of containers at that point. You put it in a container grouping until you find that perfect space for it, or a companion plant for it.

Leslie: That's good advice. There was one other thing that caught my eye. I love the look of bamboo, but it is a thug and really a dangerous plant. I do have one specimen - I can't remember the name of it, you might know - that's a clumping type. It's dwarf; grows to four or five feet tall, but you suggested using bamboo as a privacy shield in an urban space. Can you tell us about that project?

Kathy: Sure. So you're definitely gonna be planting into a large container. You could use one of those big horse troughs. Those metal troughs could be it, or any other large container. You might shop for, as you said, one of the dwarf or clumping bamboo so it's still not trying to burst out of that trough even. They make great barriers between you and your neighbor's deck. You would just line up those pots or have one large pot built in. They are great, not just for visual barrier, but the sound. I love the sound of the wind in bamboo. And of course bamboo can be an invasive plant, so if you plant it in the ground, you wanna put some type of steel barrier or something in there so the roots don't run. But some of us have inherited landscape with bamboo, in which case we could just have to keep on top of it every year, stomping down those new runners that come out. But yeah, as a barrier, it can also be cut and dried and you could make a barrier. Knit them together or just stab them into pots and have it that way too.

Leslie: Yeah. You get your own staking system going forward if you use it. That's a really good project. So when you and Terry imagined this book, what were your goals?

Kathy: Our goals were to activate some of the urban gardeners out there who would say things like I have no space to garden. I run into that a lot when I'm doing say a home and garden show in the city, and people would come up and they would look at the magazine with loving eyes and look at the roses and things or whatever else was featured in it and say, I wish I could garden, but I have no space. And I'd say, oh, you have space. So I wanted to give people those solutions to find space to garden, and also the permission. I think that's a big thing. Permission and inspiration that Terry and I discussed a lot that people feel tentative, they feel timid. They feel like, oh, I can't do that or I don't know how. We wanted to give you permission and empowerment to be able to do these gardens.

Leslie: And many of the projects have really hands-on instructions on how to carry them out. I mean, I didn't see lots of diagrams. You would say make a box and you didn't say what size screw to use or anything like that, but there are plenty of ways. There's plenty of other resources, so what this book does is get your imagination going on all these things that you can do. How did you and Terry research it? Did you visit lots of small spaces?

Kathy: Yeah. So both of us have been on tons of garden tours in our cities and other cities. And of course, as we've been gardening and I've been writing about gardening for my magazine for over a decade, I've been focusing mostly on small space gardening and collecting these. And I've been giving talks on small gardening so I've accumulated a lot of those ideas into those talks as well.

Leslie: Can you tell the listeners what might be some of the smallest spaces that you've seen?

Kathy:  I use one in one of my talks where it's literally a parking pad in front of a row house in DC on Rhode Island Avenue. She is in the basement apartment. She walks out onto the parking pad and that's her entire growing space is a concrete pad. I love the photo that I used in the talk because she has lined up cinder blocks on each side, and you can imagine where she can pull in a VW Beetle or maybe a little Mini Cooper, and that's basically all that could park in that spot right there. Maybe a Vespa and then the rest of it, she's just surrounded by stacks of perennials and shrubs and pots all around it, but it looks like a layered garden and then it goes up the wall all the way around it, and it's basically 10 by 10.

Leslie: Wow! That is tiny. And any balconies? I think you talked about some balcony gardening in the book, right?

Kathy: Yeah. So definitely balcony, patio, rooftop gardening. Of course, great if you can dictate what side of the building you're on and get as much southern exposure as possible, but it's possible to grow on any aspect of those. And we also address in the book, one of the troubles of rooftop, patio or elevated gardening is the wind. Sometimes that can be really drying for plants, so you have to take that into account, and sometimes the weight of the water in the pots can be an issue as well. So you definitely wanna check before putting out large pots onto a patio that it can take that.

Leslie: Yeah. And I saw that you all had at least one photograph of an example of a large container that you really don't have to fill up with soil. Most of the things that somebody plants, they don't need two feet, three feet of soil going down. Especially if you're planting annuals or vegetables, their roots are only gonna go down about a foot, and so you just don't need to fill up those big containers with soil all the time. You can fill them up with recycled plastic milk cartons or something like that.

Kathy: Definitely. And that's definitely part of my frugal gardening aspect too is that who wants to waste another sack of good potting soil filling up the bottom of these huge containers? They don't need to have that in the bottom. So you just have to have the good stuff for that top 18 inches, maybe even 12 inches.

Leslie: Yeah. We used to switch them out. When I was a professional gardener, we would go and tend to my clients' containers every year and just sort of root around, make sure that the bottom layer, which was old, was not compacted with roots. That's an issue because you do want free drainage, but we would only add new soil at the top 8 inches or so because otherwise it's a waste of resources. Can you think of anything else about the book, any projects or chapters or anything that I haven't asked you and you would want to be asked?

Kathy: I would say one of the things that I always emphasize in my talks about small space, urban gardening is that you always wanna place somewhere in there to rest and sit. There's several chapters and instances where we're talking about seating in the garden or a place for you, because we tend to forget that, right? You tend to get super, super busy. Even in a community garden plot, you should have a stool in there. You should have somewhere that you can sit for a little bit and rest and enjoy your garden.

Leslie: I totally agree. And it's not just to rest your weary bones. It's also to rest your mind because those are the times when you're sitting back and hopefully your phone is out of reach and you're not doing that. You're just thinking for a minute or not thinking for a minute. And that's when an idea about, oh, but I could move that there, or I could start this here and they pop into your head when you're just sort of sitting back and panting and sweating. So that's really good advice. I find that that inspiration comes to me often that way. Well Kathy, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I think that the listeners will learn a lot from this book and The Urban Garden will be available on Amazon and any place else that the listeners should look for it.

Kathy: Yes, you can order on bookshop.org and anywhere else that you can get gardening books.

Leslie: Okay. And the DC Gardener podcast and magazine are available to all listeners and I hope everybody checks into all those things. Thank you, Kathy.

Kathy: Thank you for having me.

Leslie: This is Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA, and next we'll be talking about what to do in your garden this week.

Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA and it's time for the playlist. Kathy's book is full of great ideas for small space gardening. But as she said, these are actually great ideas for every type of garden. So I'm gonna put a link to her book in my show notes on the website so that you can buy it from my Amazon storefront, but you also wanna go there because I will be having a giveaway for her book and the instructions for the giveaway will be there if you want to enter. And that's LHgardens.com. I asked my listeners questions on Instagram this week, as I was sitting inside looking outside with no earthly intention of going out there. 45 degrees and high winds. Plus, I've become a princess who is used to 60 or 65. So I built a fire and chatted with some followers on Instagram. It was fun and I was warm. Here's what's going on.

Maricella is totally over the low temperatures, but unlike me, sounds like she was out there doing spring cleanup. Laura is doing some rehab on ground covers that got mushed. There was evidently a painting project on the outside of her home. Ladders and everybody walking; it's made things sad so she was working on that. Tessa is going to have a chat with her clematis, and she's going to tell it how well it's doing and she hopes that her other plants will get jealous and look as good as her clematis. Sally's running around covering up tender perennials. She is a very good plant parent. I didn't do any such thing. Good luck fellows, I said. I do have some rather frosty looking foliage to show for it, but I suppose I could always cut that off later if it's driving me crazy. The plants definitely survived.

Dawn up in zone 6 was not deterred by low temperatures, and she put compost on some beds and then mulch over that. Such lucky beds she has. And with that kind of activity, she probably actually did stay warm. Leanne was potting up her Leycesteria formosa, which is something I had to look up. It's the Himalayan honeysuckle. She had some volunteers. It's a really cool looking plant. I had not heard of it before. It's a shrub with deep red flowers. Well actually they're bracts, but anyway, it blooms in late summer and looks really very cool. Petra is waiting for her first bulbs. She gardens in Northern Illinois. My goodness, that is late! I hope she gets them soon. And somebody named Big Labs 1 is running around covering and uncovering hydrangeas so that she will have some blooms. Good on you, Big Labs 1. I gave up. I'm gonna make do with my Annabelles and paniculata. They're gonna bloom on new woods so they're okay. The buds haven't formed, but my macrophyllus, I bet you I don't get a lot of flowers this summer.

Temperatures are supposed to moderate toward the end of the week. So hopefully by the time you are hearing this, I will have come out away from the warm hearth and into the warm sun, and my intentions this week are division of early bulbs such as snow drops. Let's review - so you dig up a clump, you throw half of the bulbs or a third of the bulbs back into the same darn hole, and then you dig a new hole or two for the other bits. I know that people actually then take each bulb and dig little holes. Yeah, I don't do that. I make it really quick. If you don't have too many snowdrops - and this can be done with any bulb, by the way - you can double your supply in very little time. And it's a great thing to do this activity right before rain, unless you enjoy hauling water around.

I'm gonna sow more seeds. I think I will try direct sowing some poppies that I ordered and a few sunflowers and vines. They're kind of a drag if you put them in a pot because they grow so fast and then all of a sudden you've got a mess, so I think I'll direct sow. I might get unlucky with frost, but I think it's worth it because I'll take that packet of seeds and I'll just try a few and if it doesn't work, I'll have more to deal with in a few weeks.

Some of my boxwoods are getting a bit wooly looking. So for those that I like to keep in really tight shapes, I will be sharpening up the shears. Let's see what else - deadheading bulbs. So if you know you're gonna replace tulip bulbs and some people do treat tulip bulbs like annuals, replacing them each year, which is very fun, then you don't have to deadhead those, but remember to think like a plant. If you are a plant, your end game is to reproduce, and the easiest way to do that is to produce seed. If your seeds are removed, your little plant brain will put more energy into your flower for next year. So as I'm tooling around the garden, I just snap off the end of any daffodils or tulips or any early things if they're still hanging on so that seeds aren't formed and the energy goes back into the bulb itself. It's quick and easy. I don't even collect the old flowers in a bucket or anything. I just toss it because it's so tiny. I do deadhead my tulips because I'm okay with a smattering next year, knowing that the full on collection from the first year's purchase will eventually peter out and that usually is all I get.

Oh my gosh. Did you see my garden tragedy on Instagram this past week? Brutish, impertinent, squirrels. I mean, I guess they were squirrels. I think they were squirrels. Whatever they were, I hope they were within hearing distance of the outburst of very blue words that I had for them. They dug up my tulip bulbs and simply bit through the stem. So I go down on the lower terrace to find desolate, destroyed bulbs, which never had a chance to bloom. It was sad. I will not be planting tulip bulbs down there again, by golly. We just don't go in the backyard with as much frequency as it would take for critters to stay away from that bed. And Jenny, our dog is getting older, so she doesn't go down there much. I think tulips are best for containers and high traffic areas for a lot of gardeners, and clearly, I am one of that population.

And lastly, I will prune my camellias. They're all done flowering and they could wait. I don't have to do this anytime soon. I have two of the japonica types that just finished flowering, so all you need to do is give them most of the summer and into the fall to form next year's buds. But right next to them is the sasanqua type. Now that's the type that bloomed last fall, and I do need to prune that soon because that one would take some time to form next fall's buds so I better get on it. As long as I'm getting the ladder out, I'll do all three. Camellias don't need to be pruned at all, but mine do because I like them just so. They grow in a tree form that fits just under the gutter of my glass porch, and then I limb them up so I can look under them out into the garden. So out comes the ladder and I'll get that done, I hope this week.

I think writing and recording this podcast early in the week is good pressure. If I say I will do something, well, then maybe I will do it. Oh, I had some really good follow up on last week's plant of the week, which was the Virginia blue bells from this fabulous local gardener that you may know of. Her name is Fran Boninti. She has a lot more experience with Mertensia than I do, and she wanted me to know that she would've been able over many years of gardening here to see lots of potential deer damage on Virginia bluebells, and she opines that they just don't go for them, which is such great news. Now it seems that deer all over the country get together in different cooking clubs and foodie groups and are into different cuisines, so you can never say never about what deer will eat, but Fran was very confident - more confident than I and with better reason, because she has more experience - about bluebells being deer resistant, at least around Charlottesville. So that was very heartening.

I had also talked about dividing bluebells and I've never done it. She has - a lot - and she reassures me that it's perfectly possible to do. It's not a big deal. Probably best to wait for May or June when the leaves start yellowing up. So the leaves are finished feeding the black rhizome that stores the plant's energy and you're gonna dig it up, and she said not to worry that I break off a piece of the rhizome and that the new piece, if I like where it is, I'll just put most of the plant back. But the new little piece of black rhizome should not be planted too deeply, too far below the surface of the soil. That was very good to know.

Also, she had great tips about planting the bluebells with some early bulbs like snowdrops, acanthus. You could do bloodroot, squill, and it just makes sense to throw a bunch of things like that all into one hole, as long as you're digging a hole. So I wondered how do you time it right. In mid-or late-May when you would be doing this, it might be difficult to identify the foliage of the other early ephemeral bulbs that you might wanna plant with your bluebells. If you think you can keep it straight, if you're like, I know that that's the foliage of my crocus or my winter aconite or whatever it is, then you can just wait for a fine May day right before we get rain, and collect a bunch of those things and throw them all in one hole. I think it's excellent advice to only dig one hole and put lots of great things in it.

Alternatively, she told me that she sometimes digs up bulbs, even big ones like daffodils, I think and it's called digging them up in the green, so before the foliage ripens off, and she saves them in pots or trays in full shade, under a layer of compost or leaves. They ripen off there and she plants them later. Keeping the foliage, as you know, dear listener is imperative because that is what feeds the bulb. I was intrigued by this method, and I wondered if you could do tulips this way. You know, a lot of the reason that tulips and other bulbs, maybe hyacinths, they peter out by and by is because our gardens cannot supply a dry summer, which is what they would normally have in their native condition. We keep our borders wet for the next plants all summer long. But if you were to lift the bulbs and store them, well, that's dry, isn't it? But it seems like a ton of work. I didn't hear back from Fran before recording this to see if this method could sort of take the place of shopping for bulbs. Now don't get me wrong. For me, it would never take the place of shopping for bulbs, and that is not because Colorblends bulb company is sponsoring my podcast. It's just that I love to shop and I won't be digging up hundreds or maybe even dozens of bulbs each year.

But if you had a few really special ones that you might not be able to purchase anytime you want, well, that might be different. You know, like this was my grandmother's tulip and I wanna make sure that it doesn't peter out. It's an interesting idea, and I would love to hear from any of you who have any Intel on saving bulbs yourself in the dry in summer when they're dormant and then planting them out again in fall. Shoot me an email or message me on Instagram if you've done this or if you know anything about it.

Not sure why, but I haven't talked about what to listen to while you garden for a while. This week, it might have been howling winds, which is why I was indoors. But how about the first concerto of Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Spring, which describes musically its freshness and beauty. The music actually includes bird song and a spring storm, and the second movement has a shepherd who sleeps with his faithful dog by his side. I will have to listen closer because I have no idea how a sleeping dog could be interpreted musically. The third movement is a lively spring dance. That's sort of easier to conjure up in your head. This was fun.

If you have any questions or comments or corrections, please reach out to me at Instagram. I am @LeslieHarrisLH or to my website, LH gardens.com . And please go to my website, LH gardens.com and have a look at the blog that accompanies the podcast. There are some really cute photographs of bloodroot, and add your comments and consider buying me a coffee to help support the podcast.

I'd like to thank our sponsors, Colorblends Wholesale Flowerbulbs and Dos Amigos Landscaping. I name the show Into the Garden with Leslie because I am really into my garden. I wanna get you into yours and I will see you next week.