Episode 56: Transcript
Leslie: Welcome to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. This show is sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping. I am Leslie Harris and I love to talk about gardening. Our plant of the week is sometimes said to have a resemblance to a jaundiced little choir boy. Now doesn't that make you curious? I'll be chatting with Stephanie Rose of Garden Therapy, and the playlist is about what to do in your garden this week.
Last week, I was ruminating about the pros and cons of dethatching your lawn. I do like to do it. It's a nice little spring cleanup feel, and you get a great mix of bits to add to the compost pile. But then again, I want to do what's best for my lawn. I may have mentioned that my husband gave me a really special Christmas present this past Christmas. It was to get rid of our lawn service. Jeff likes a splendid looking lawn. That's what's right in his eye, probably because he plays a lot of golf. Intellectually, he is fully aware that a few weeds in the lawn are the right thing for nature, and that chemicals like fertilization and weed suppressants and all that, they are not good for nature. So the gift is, and I know this is going to sound like he was Tom Sawyer and I was totally conned, but this is really what I wanted. The gift is that I get to take care of the lawn, and I'm really excited to do it. I want to learn about what it takes to have a good looking - not perfect - lawn without any chemicals. And that doesn't mean I'm going to do it all myself. I found some people to spread some compost and to aerate it and overseed it in the fall, but I want to learn about what it takes to have it, and I want to try to achieve it without those chemicals.
I did a deeper dive into that thing called dethatching this past week, and I found out the following pros and cons of dethatching your lawn. First of all, what is thatch? It's a layer of dead grass and leaves and maybe some small sticks that are sort of hung up and kind of hanging out in the top layer of your lawn. Well, just underneath where your blades of grass are. And is thatch bad? Not necessarily, especially if the layer is thin. Any organic debris spaced out nicely could be imagined to be like a tiny little compost pile all over your lawn. Organic debris is great for soil and you want your soil to grow a great lawn. So why dethatch your lawn?
Well picture the layer of thatch as just being too thick for rain to permeate easily. It's pretty easy to picture if you think about a thatched roof. From what I gathered, those are constructed with a goal of deflecting water. I found out other reasons that too much thatch might be bad, like hidden objectionable pathogens and scientific possibilities that did not capture my attention as much as the simple notion, and I am a simple girl, that if water can't sink into your lawn easily, you need to dethatch it.
Now how to dethatch your lawn. You can simply do it with a rake like I did, or you can hire a machine. You can literally hire the machine, rent the machine and do it yourself, or you could get a crew to do that for you. I tried to look at the source of information that I was reading, and there's no doubt that landscape companies that own dethatching machines were a bit more enthusiastic in their blogs about the latter technique. If you don't have a big lawn, I do recommend it yourself. It's a nice little upper body workout, and it's pretty easy to stay warm in cooler temperatures.
When to dethatch? Well, that was harder to get to the bottom of, but the interweb consensus indicated that a great time not to dethatch your lawn is summer because the lawn is stressed out from the heat anyway. Late fall isn't great either. Leave a little blanket on for winter. That makes sense to me, but late winter or early spring seemed to be good times. I may have gone at it a little bit too early as it was still February when I did it, but I think March is probably good in Virginia. It's great to seed right after you do it too as you may have created some wee bits of soil with no grass, depending on how hard you went and nature loves a vacuum so why not fill those vacuums with grass seed.
This information about dethatching your lawn has come from not even an hour's tool around the Google machine. I did my best to gather from sources that appear to be reputable, but we should all keep in mind that expertise is not a given and it's even considered much less necessary than previously thought. Case in point, the very fact that I'm talking about dethatching a lawn. I'm no expert, but you know me, I'm not claiming to be, and I did find out some good things that might help you.
Let us transition from grass to sweet, tiny bulbs that can almost be a ground cover, but only in spring. This week's plant of the week is the Eranthis hyemalis, and that is the fancy botanical name for a tiny little plant that we could also refer to as Winter Aconite, which is a little bit easier. The Winter Aconite bulb is an early spring bulb that produces a golden yellow flower, sort of like a buttercup. It's only about two inches tall or so. It's a tiny plant and a tiny bulb, and you know the good news about tiny bulbs. You don't have to dig very far down to plant them. Winter aconites are native to Europe and they like to grow in Zones 4 through 7, so that's a lot of the US. The reason that I mentioned a jaundiced choir boy at the beginning of the show is the buttercup-style flower surrounded by a green ruff that really looks like the collar of a member of a church choir. And once I heard that description - and I can't remember where I heard it or I surely would give credit - I can't unsee the image.
Winter Aconite is the third bulb up to bat in my garden, and it overlaps just a little bit with snowdrops and crocuses, which are kind of finishing up now. It will grow in full sun to part shade and like the snow drop, it's so early that what you think of shade in your summer garden could very well be full on sun in winter because of deciduous trees, or because of the lower angle of the sun, or both. It doesn't have any special needs. It'll tolerate deer and jug loans, so that means that it could grow under a black walnut tree.
Like other bulbs, the foliage withers away as spring progresses, but unlike big floppy daffodil foliage, it won't bother you as you go through the ripening off period. You probably won't even notice it. I grow the Winter Aconite as I do my other early spring bulbs like crocuses and snowdrops. I grow it along garden paths. Because it's so tiny, I want it to be close up to where I am. As I write this, we're staying at the Stanton house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and there happens to be quite a lovely stand of it out where we parked our car. Jeff was smart enough to make me photograph it in the afternoon, because a little snow storm moved in today and there are pictures on my website of how much I would like to grow my Winter Aconites, which is the way they're being grown out in this parking lot, and that is in a wide, naturalized patch under some trees. I'm going to keep some more bulbs every fall. Happily, they're not very dear and also spread around patches of it if I am ever lucky enough to have great patches of it, like there are here. Gardeners must be very patient.
This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. Coming up, we're going to talk with Stephanie Rose of Garden Therapy about her latest book, The Regenerative Garden.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie, and we are here with Stephanie Rose of Garden Therapy, and I'm so excited to have her. She has written a lot of books, 10 books, and this is her 11th and she is the most excited about this one from what she told me before we hit record. It's called The Regenerative Garden, and we're going to get into her story, why she started gardening and why this is so important. Welcome Stephanie.
Stephanie: Hi, thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting. I'm really excited to chat with you about this book.
Leslie: Well, good. I think it would be great for people who don't know you to hear a little bit more about your gardening journey because it really has been one, hasn't it?
Stephanie: Absolutely. So for me in 2006, I got a headache and that headache ended up turning into an illness that disabled me for the majority of 10 years. It took me 10 years to recover. The first two years were the worst. I mean, I got this headache. I couldn't get out of bed for two years, and so I was stuck at home. I was isolated. My body was not well. My mind was getting weak from being in bed and sleeping all the time, so I started gardening as my sort of self-directed rehabilitation program. I lived in this little house in urban Vancouver, BC, Canada, where I live and we had the typical square of lawn in the front and in the back, and a couple of overgrown shrubs. And I got every book from the library and I started reading it and started scratching in the soil a little bit at a time, and it was something that just sort of came together beautifully for me. It built my mind, it strengthened my body. It gave me my mental health by getting outside and enjoying the fresh air and smell the soil and watching flowers bloom. So I really found a deep and passionate love for gardening at that time.
Again, this was many years ago, and so how I learned to garden back then was through the traditional methods. You create raised beds and you put your vegetables in rows or square foot gardening or whatever it is that we've learned in our books. And I found that I wasn't as capable of doing it in a really high, laborious way. I had to work for my ability level so I was really creative with how I started gardening. I started writing about it on a website that I started called Garden Therapy, because gardening was my therapy, sharing some of the projects and the creative things that I was doing. They were quite high aesthetically pleasing because I like that sort of thing. I like things to be pretty and high reward so they would grow in quickly and give me results fast and really low effort. And so I started putting this together as garden therapy and from there, really found when I had built up my strength and I became a Vancouver master gardener and started developing children's gardens.
I started a few charity gardens and studied to be a permaculture designer, and a herbalist. As I started pulling this together, it didn't seem to make sense for me to go back to the corporate job that I had. Instead, I decided I'm going to take a chance at making gardening part of my life, my work life as well. So I started working as an author as well. That's when I started writing books. I think my first book came out in 2013. So since 2013 to 2022, I have my 11th book coming out.
Leslie: You're prolific and fast and efficient.
Stephanie: Well, I'm very passionate about it. So not all of those books are on gardening. My very first book was called Garden Made and it was really about these ideas of projects that you could do throughout the year that allowed you to have that ability to get out and get your garden therapy, even if you have limited abilities or space or even climate or fun, all those sorts of things. It was making gardening, high creative gardening accessible to everyone. Then I did a whole bunch of different books. A lot of craft books in there because I'm really a DIYer. So everything in all my books is either recipes or, and when I say recipes, it's not food recipes, they're either recipes or DIY projects, so that it's not about me showing what I've done. It's about showing you how you can do it. And that's part of me making it really accessible to everyone no matter where they are in their lives.
Leslie: And I love the accessible part. Before we hit record, you mentioned that what you do a lot is permaculture and permaculture can be a daunting term. What does it mean to you and what would you like it to signify for others who you want to invite in instead of scaring off?
Stephanie: That's such a great question because there's a whole concept, a whole ethic in permaculture about inclusivity and creating community. And yet the books are written by such smart and amazing people, but they are thick and very difficult to read, so it does feel a little bit overwhelming for the home gardener. When I started studying permaculture, for me like I said, I started learning how to garden the way you know - in raised beds, lots of space between our shrubs, planting things in threes, all the designing. And for me, it felt like a lot of work and so I started looking to the forest. I started looking to the meadows. How is Mother Nature growing things because she doesn't need supplemental water or fertilizers? What is the cycle that's going on there? The answer is really what they've done is they've taken and following the path of nature and put it into permaculture, and so that's becoming really popular as people are moving towards regenerative agriculture and farming. But the home gardener is still creating a bed and pulling everything out of it at the end of the season and then putting in new soil and new plants. All I can think is, that's a lot of work. It costs a lot of money when the plants already know how to do this. We just have to get out of their way.
So I took some of those permaculture concepts that I learned through studying permaculture and doing permaculture design certificates and working with permaculturists and herbalists and studying how we can work with plants as our allies, and taking that and making it really bite size pieces that are easy and accessible and highly aesthetic as well for the home garden.
Leslie: And that's what you've done in this book. I was lucky enough to be able to go through it. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and we're talking with Stephanie Rose, who is the author of many books about gardening, but her latest one, The Regenerative Garden is what we're zoning in on here and it'll be published this spring. As usual in the show notes for this podcast, you will find all the links to Stephanie, who also has a very large presence on both Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and her website is amazing so we'll make sure that you get to see all those things. But let's get back to the permaculture, how in essence, it's inclusive. For some people it's scary and you want to make it inclusive again, like let's bring it even down a level. I just love looking at your projects. You've done all these things in your book. There were so many different things. How did you figure out ... how did you ... who told you? Did you just think this up one night to put a clear umbrella on a rain barrel as a cloche? How did you think that up?
Stephanie: Well, it's a mini greenhouse. I'm an urban gardener. I have a small space and I have to come up with creative solutions on a regular basis. I wish I could have a big greenhouse, but at the same time I have a wine barrel and I have a clear umbrella, which is the exact width of the wine barrel, and that's where I'm growing my early spring greens. And so to give them that little bit of a boost and get them growing four or five weeks earlier, then I can see them, put the clear umbrella on there and it creates a mini greenhouse. And those umbrellas are completely invaluable in my garden because I move them around throughout the season. It extends the season at the end of the year because I can create heat domes if I want to get a little bit more heat in my pretty temperate Vancouver, BC garden. If I want some heat to get some peppers to be a bit spicier, get my tomatoes to ripen and get those eggplant growing, I need a little bit of extra heat.
Leslie: What did you do with the handle, Stephanie?
Stephanie: You can just saw off the handle so that it's a thing. A lot of times I'll just use zip ties or garden twine, or something like that and tie a long garden stake to it, like a bamboo steak or one of the metal garden stakes so the hook will be buried. The U-shaped thing will be buried. They don't all have them. The mechanisms do break down over time so you might have to store them open, because they're meant to get wet, but they're not meant to be out there wet all the time.
Leslie: Like cake, yes.
Stephanie: Yeah. There's some companies that have made something really similar to them that is kind of like a greenhouse and it has the same umbrella function, but it's even got a little zippered vent hole, which is kind of nice. So another thing you could do is create little vents in them, but I tend to just hover it slightly above the soil so that the air flow is at the ground.
Leslie: A little air. Yeah. A glass cloche is such a thing of beauty. My daughter tried to give me one two different times, and two different times it arrived in many small pieces of glass. Isn't that sad?
Stephanie: It's a shame.
Leslie: She got her money back, but anyway, aesthetically more pleasing, but I love that umbrella. I thought it was so cute.
Stephanie: Thanks.
Leslie: Tell me about your concept in the garden of good, better, best because that's how you kind of start off with and you're working for best practices, but good is good, right? I always told my kids to bring home the B-minus. If that's what you're getting, we'll take it.
Stephanie: Absolutely. Well, there's a permaculture ethic. It's the transitional ethic, and what it means is that any work that we can do towards a more sustainable, regenerative, resilient garden space is the right steps to be taken. It means that we don't always have the funds to rebuild our entire gardens. Imagine if we're all taking our vehicles and we're getting rid of them and putting them in the dump and replacing them with electric vehicles. Well, it's not necessarily the right path to go because we've got all these vehicles that are already out there. So how are we transitioning into these more ethical, more sustainable, more regenerative practices? And so we look at that in the garden. If we have say a fence made of pressure treated lumber, it doesn't make sense to rip it down and replace it with cedar. It makes sense to use it for as long as we can, and then take that wood and continue to use it in as many ways and places that we can. And when we replace it next time, we replace it with a sustainable option.
So again, with these projects, we have to balance the cost of them, the effort that it takes, and really what we want to accomplish in our gardens. So out of the 80 projects, there's ideas in each one of them that gives you the starting point. What's good? What can you do right now that can make these changes? What's better? What are some more ideas? We actually called it good, better, and best, but I labeled it with honeycombs so that it wasn't like you're trying to reach this sort of gold standard, and you should feel any less than for reaching good or better. It's even better, rather than best. And so one honeycomb is great, two honeycombs are great, and three honeycombs is also great. These are all different levels of how you can continue to create this regenerative system in your garden, making it really easy so that you don't shy away from the projects and go, I'll never be able to do this. Out of this book, there's 80 different projects and each one has multiple levels. You'll find some ways that you can start to create a garden that's less work, costs less money, takes less time and energy and is going to regenerate itself.
Leslie: I'm buying what you're selling. So many people who get out there and garden have the full use of everything in their body. Are you still having to watch yourself? We always take care of ourselves, but are you at your optimal in terms of how many hours you can spend?
Stephanie: I was for a while, and then I relapsed just this past year. I'm about eight months into a relapse and I'm being very honest about it. I finished the book, but it was harder to do some of the projects. It was harder to finish, but I did. And when I did the editing and stuff, I've taken a lot of time off, but I'm struggling right now. And so I really am practicing what I preach in terms of these things that need to be accessible. As a disabled person, I saw myself as able and recovered until this year and I've relapsed quite severely to some days I can't walk or have a hard time using my arms or legs, or I'm too fatigued to even get out of bed. But as you can see, it's kind of an invisible thing.
Leslie: You look great.
Stephanie: If you watch me get up from this chair, I'm going to look like a 90 year old trying to get out of this chair, but you know what? It's okay. I'm very, very fortunate and grateful to have found the thing that helps me live with this and live a really full and wonderful life because everybody knows how healing plants and soil are for us. So just to have the opportunity to make this my career and be able to bring it to other people, I'm so fortunate because if I had to go and do a different job, I might not be able to have as great of a life as I do, even as a disabled person.
Leslie: I would say that we are all lucky too, because you've made it with your honeycombs and your smile and made it so that we can figure out, oh, wow, okay. So she's doing it. I don't want to do tiptop permaculture. That word scares me. What does she think of it? Stephanie, you're going to inspire a lot of people with your book, and it sounds like you already have on the social platforms and on your website.
This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and we're speaking with Stephanie Rose about her new book, The Regenerative Garden, 80 DIY projects with various levels of, okay, you don't have to spend the rest of your life doing this project. Let's just get the basics. I was particularly interested in the rain garden thing, because that can be very complex, but you see a puddle in your yard. You've given us a simple way to make it so that we're not going to be breeding mosquitoes as much, right?
Stephanie: Well, the rain garden component. There's a whole chapter on water. I'm passionate about all the chapters here in the book, but the water chapter was a really, really fun one to write. I've talked so much and written so much about soil and plants in my previous writing, this was a really fun book to get into to really do practical projects in terms of water catchment, storage, and use. And so I did some tours with the Cougar Creek Streamkeepers and rain gardens. I learned from experts, online webinars, tours, really just digging into rain gardens to see how we can take this concept and break it down and make it really usable for the home garden.
And the idea of a rain garden is very simple. Instead of having our downspouts, which redirect water away from our property and away from where we need it - our plants and our soil - because right now new houses are being built in our area. There's regulations in a lot of places where the downspouts are going into the water runoff, the storm runoff. That means the creeks are drying up and the native plants aren't getting the water. We don't have all of our natural runoff. So we want to try to create systems where if water is puddling, it has the opportunity to slowly percolate, go back into the soil and feed everything around it. And so if you're finding that you've got wet spots, little puddles and things like that on your property, that's a really good place to dig a hole, put in some really great soil, that's going to be a compost mix that allows it to hold that moisture and find some rain garden plants that will really tolerate and allow that flooding to happen, and the slow percolation back to the soil.
It's really hard because I'm in Vancouver, BC, you're in Virginia and so we don't have the same climate, so I can't put the same plants in the book. What I frequently hear about plants is learn the concepts, learn the ideas, and then for your specific plants, you'll know what to ask for when you go to your local master gardeners, when you go to a horticulturist. Go to the garden centers, go to a nursery, not a big box store. Go to somebody who's really knowledgeable and find those plants that are going to work best with your environment. So now you know how to build it, you'll get the right plants and it will become a self-sustaining system that will help you distribute water throughout your property and reduce your overall water use.
Leslie: That's perfect. Especially for somebody like me who's on town water, and I have to pay a big fat water bill. I copied a friend who is doing this and I do have it running. I live at the base of a small mountain and I channel it into some of those beautiful 300 gallon water tanks. Such a pretty thing in your yard, but I kind of hide them and the PVC piping. I do keep as much of that water as possible, but it's great to be able to use it to just build something and you don't have to do any more work.
Stephanie: Absolutely. And the water chapter, I mean the whole book works together as a complete unit. That's why each chapter is based on one of the colors and there's a circle of plants all around and everything is based on these honeycombs. Every project in the chapter of water can work together. So yes, I've got how to build your own rain garden, but also other ideas for capturing water. Little things like containers, like doing little ollas, which are ...
Leslie: Oh, those Terracotta pots! I read about that.
Stephanie: The terracotta pots under the ground that can hold water and slowly seep towards container gardens or raised beds. How to build your own cistern and a rain barrel. You can get them and then how to connect them. Little ideas for how to do the P-trap and why you would do them that way, especially with the water needs. We don't need just one of these things in our garden. We can use all of them. And so you can add a rain garden and have cisterns and create other ways of collecting and storing water in your garden, as well as reducing water and all those things together will make it a lot more low maintenance for you in your garden.
Leslie: I'm loving this. We're running a little bit short of time, but I'm just wondering, are there any projects that you think, oh gosh, I would love to speak about this. This was one of my favorite ones. The water was your favorite chapter. What can you think of what your second favorite chapter might have been?
Stephanie: You know what? It's hard to say which is my favorite because it's like choosing a child. It's very hard. A lot of times when you write a book like this, you're writing about the practical components. So the first chapter is soil, then there's plants and there's water. And then I talk about climate because climate is changing and we can't use our 30-year weather averages anymore to judge what's going to go on in our gardens. So I talk about climate and different projects that we can use in order to work with our micro climates, and how to harness the energy and how to disperse it. Then I get into ethics and so this is a lot of waste management, encouraging biodiversity, these sorts of things. Another one that's really close to my heart is the final chapter and that's on community, and the idea of bringing us all together.
I originally called that chapter wildlife, and then I thought about it and I thought, well, it's not just the birds and the bees that use our garden space. It's also the people in our communities. And since we got locked down a couple of years ago for a global pandemic, I've noticed so many wonderful things that have bloomed in our local neighborhoods. So instead of looking out globally around the world, we're all getting on planes and traveling and doing this and that and the other thing, how are we really supporting, not just at home in our home cities or our towns, but our neighborhoods and our streets? And so in that chapter there's projects for wildlife, of course, but there's also projects for our communities like seed sharing libraries, like urban flower stands, urban....
Leslie: Oh, I remember looking at these. They're like the little free library only they're for seeds and flowers and plants. I mean, it was just so cute and exactly how to make them. Wow!
Stephanie: Yes, exactly. So, for the seed sharing library, the idea is that you're creating a place where you can share seeds with your neighbors, but it's also helping us all to build this community that works together. So we're sharing information on how to grow things, we're sharing our seeds, we're collecting the seeds at the end of the year, and really sort of spreading that idea of gardening and recreation into the people who are living closest to us. I also have projects for a butterfly pathway, so something where you'll have a space for migrating butterflies to stop and get some nectar, have a bit of a rest before they continue on in their journey, and how you can then work with your neighboring neighborhoods to build these butterfly pathways so that there's lots of stop points.
Leslie: It's like at Humboldt National Park, the duck colony. Are you familiar with that concept?
Stephanie: Absolutely. Yes.
Leslie: It's really cool. This has been so wonderful, Stephanie. I really appreciate it. Can you think of anything that you wanted to talk about that I haven't remembered to ask?
Stephanie: I really just hope that if anybody out there has this idea that they want to get involved in gardening or they're a gardener, and if there's ever a time where they're held back a little bit because they can't quite get to it or they can't mentally muster up the strength or the physical strength to do it, that the whole point of everything that I do is to make it really accessible. Because if we all work together on these little things, then we're going to make a big difference. So I really hope that that touches some people and that I give them the red carpet, the easy way to find their own path.
Leslie: Oh, I think you've done a wonderful job and I really appreciate the book, this wonderful as you said, community that you are creating through all of your social media presence and this book. It's just wonderful. Thank you so much for coming to chat with me.
Stephanie: Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be here. I really appreciate it.
Leslie: Oh good! This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and coming up, we'll talk about what to do in your garden this week.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. Stephanie has had such an amazing journey in gardening. You might be tracking that there are more and more studies out there about how gardening is good for us physically, mentally, and even chemically, literally the dirt under your fingernails. It has changed Stephanie's life and she in turn has changed other gardeners' life with her inspiration on her blog, YouTube and social channels. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes, and also there will be a link on how to buy her new book, which will be out very soon, The Regenerative Garden.
Questions from listeners. Here's a good one from Kim Villareal. She's written before, and this is a new topic for her. She wants to know how to keep her new hand pruners or secateurs as sharp as the day she invested in them. Well, there are lots of ways to do this. My method is to keep a sharpening stone tool right next to my holster and belt, so that most times when I get them out or put them away, I sharpen them for about 30 to 40 seconds. Because mine are Okatsune brand secateurs, I use the Okatsune brand sharpening stone. Amusingly for us Westerners, the instructions for using the stone, which I got from Amazon and there's a link in the show notes to how you get it on my Amazon storefront. Well, anyway, those instructions are in Japanese, but here's a hint. I do know that you have to wet the stone before using it. I didn't know that for a while, and then I did know it and it seems to help.
And I got a question from Beth Bass about planting and care of lavender. Beth lives around here and she knew her stuff in terms of trying to choose a cultivar that would survive in our clay soil. She wanted a few more pointers on lavender plant care and pruning lavender. So lavender, it's a Mediterranean plant. You wouldn't be looking around for it now. It's something if you want it in your garden, you'll probably look in April or a little bit later. It's a Mediterranean plant that thrives in normal to poor soil and it needs quickly draining soil, really sharp draining soil. Here in the land of red clay, it's just a bit of a challenge to grow it, but here are some tricks.
One, line the hole where you will plant your lavender with gravel and so that means the water will drain through the gravel quickly and stay farther away from the roots, because it really doesn't want to stay wet down there. Two, don't amend the soil. This plant thrives on neglect and can grow in very meager soil. Three, plant in full sun -really likes the heat. Four, grow lavender in a container and that way you can control the soil very well and you can serve up these conditions that it loves so much - the heat and the light and not too much water. You can control that much easier if it's in a container. And five, if you love lavender and it does well for you all summer but you can't make it survive through your damp winters, well, maybe you just treat it like an annual and you treat yourself to a new lavender plant each season.
In terms of pruning lavender, I like to prune mine after it flowers. It blooms in summer. The flowers look good for another month or so afterwards, but then it's like, okay. I think I need to get you back to what you were going to be, which was just a plant with the sort of rosemary-like foliage. It's gray or green for me. I have no idea what cultivar I have because I inherited my plant. It's a very fun chore to prune it back. You're playing in lavender. It smells so good. I snip back all of the flowers, but I try not to cut into any wood because it usually doesn't grow back if you cut into the wood stems. Mine seems to go on year after year because it's planted in the conditions that I describe. It's in full baking sun. It's in very poor soil right next to an old stump. There's no red clay. It's just dirt, and of course I don't have an irrigation system so that part isn't happening. The good news is that it is a mature plant. The bad news is that it is a mature plant and it has some not very gorgeous woody bits.
As I just mentioned, pruning those doesn't do any good because nothing would grow back so you don't want to cut halfway through a woody stem. What I do is every year when I'm going at it, I just take away an entire woody stem back to the ground, like one or two at a time. And I think that it's flushing out more at the edge. You know, it's not like I hate the look of driftwood, but that's sort of what it looks like. So I take away some of the bits that are just a little bit offensive to my eye, and I think that it's growing quite well on the outside with a little bit less wood. That's so not scientific, but I hope it helps you a little bit.
How did I play in my garden this week? I did not play in my garden this week. If you follow me on social, you know that our sixth grandchild has arrived, and so I was up in Connecticut for that great event, and Jeff got to meet the one who arrived a month ago too. Our two kids live very close to each other and these cousins are very lucky and so are we. But I played in my daughter's garden and that was really fun. She has a tiny garden. It's bigger than a courtyard with lots of retaining walls though and heartscape and nooks and crannies. I edged around her "great lawn". It sounds amazing, but it really took me about half an hour, because it's sort of 15 by 20, but it made such a neat look for her. She loved it. And I pruned her climbing roses.
Keep in mind that if you are pruning climbing roses, you want to encourage the horizontal canes, but you want to cut back the growth of the vertical bits that are coming off to about two inches. So if you picture a T, so the plant comes up and then it goes off into two directions like either side of a T and then more things come off of the top of the T, those things should be cut back to about two inches. Here's a pro tip. If you have a climbing rose that you are training up a vertical element like a pillar or a tudor or a lamppost, you can't train the canes to go truly horizontal because you're dealing with a vertical element. Picture the lamppost. The canes are coming up the lamppost. But if you twist those canes around the lamppost, instead of having them go straight up, that makes them closer to horizontal than just going straight up so that is what is going to encourage the flowers to sprout even better. So I strongly suggest that you twist it around to get some horizontality, if that is a word.
Tyler and Mateo - this is my daughter and son-in-law - their climbing roses are trained through a lattice, so it's really easy to organize two or three canes going out from the main plant in each direction, so it was ideal. I also cut back their liriope. Do you grow Liriope? Some people call it monkey grass. This little activity is like cutting back foliage on hellebores. It just doesn't have to be done. But if you do it, and this is the perfect time to do it before the new growth starts, then what you look at all season is fresh green growth. It's not new green growth mixed in with old brown growth, which is just not as aesthetically pleasing, in my humble opinion.
The perfect tool to cut back liriope foliage, and by the way, to cut back ripened daffodil foliage in a couple of months when it's time to do that, is the serrated edge of one of my faves, the soil knife. My daughter didn't have one, so I just had to go shopping and now the little family with a toddler and a newborn owns a six inch, very sharp blade. I am such a good grandmother. Don't worry, I put it with all the other sharp tools - up and away. Had I been at home, I would've cut back a few more Annabelle hydrangeas way back low, because that's the way I like to do it, but you don't have to. And I would've cut on a few more macrophylla hydrangeas, but that remember would just be cutting off the old flowers and any branches that I can see are dead. Other than that, I leave it alone. The old flowers actually look pretty much charming all winter, but now on the cusp of spring, they're just sort of beginning to look incongruous to my eye, because things will be freshening up soon and I don't want to look at old brown flowers right now.
I have my arborists coming this week to get rid of some big old branches that I could not reach. These are actually on small trees and the storms that we had with heavy snow in January, we lost some fairly big branches on a couple of dogwoods and on a Japanese maple. I know that a few years ago I would've said, well, I'll just do that, but hey, people in their 60s really shouldn't be climbing on ladders. I know I could, but I'd be hanging on with one hand and I would probably make a very poor cut with the other, so the arborists are coming. I need my yard to look good this week because Virginia Home Grown, which is the local cable show about gardening in Virginia is coming to film next Tuesday. The topic will be pruning, but not pruning of those things that I'm not going to reach. I mean, we can talk about that, but that will have been done. It's probably good that I haven't gotten all my hydrangeas done yet and a bunch of other things too. There'll be plenty to film. I'll have more information about that show - when it will air and all the details and stuff on next week's podcast.
I've been asking for you all to go to my website, LHgardens.com, to have a look at the blog and Kath not only did that, but she also left this comment, which I thought I would read, because it makes me happy. Another fine podcast. The humor and music make me laugh, and the gardening knowledge from Leslie and guests keep me coming back. The blog is a plus and it helps my memory. Thank you, Kath. I really appreciate the support.
This was fun. If you have any questions or comments or corrections, please reach out to Instagram @IamLeslieHarrisLH. You might see me on Facebook, but I'm not there very often. And you can also go to my website LHgardens.com . I named this show Into the Garden with Leslie because I'm really into my garden and I really will be in my garden and not this kind of chilly Connecticut garden this week and I want to get you into yours. See you next week.