Dorothy and Shauna talk with Winnipeg landscaper Keith Lemkey. He has worked on gardens in Canada’s Local Gardener and Manitoba Gardener in the past and has contributed stories to the magazines over the years. Hear about why you should consider hiring an landscape professional for your garden.

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Mike Rosen, the former President of Tree Canada, joins Dorothy and Shauna to talk about these gentle giants who influence our gardens. Tree Canada is the only national non-profit organization dedicated to planting and nurturing trees in rural and urban environments.

For more info, click here.

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Colin Remillard is a co-owner of St. Leon Gardens in Winnipeg, a seasonal shop selling locally grown fruits, vegetables, seeds and plants. He talked to Dorothy and Shauna recently about the business and they traded tips about what he’s doing in his brand-new yard and what gardeners should look for when buying plants at the garden centre.
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Larry Hodgson is a blogger and broadcaster in Quebec who has written over 60 books on gardening in English and French. His blog can be found at laidbackgardener.blog, and he adds to it every day. Dorothy and Shauna have a chat with him about so many things, ostensibly on the topic of “What’s growing in your garden?”

Along the way, they find out about his favourite tool (a Proplugger he picked up at a Garden Writers’ convention), an insect coming to destroy your aruncus (the goat’s beard sawfly, or Nematus spriaeae), and a new plant disease coming to Canada (Septoria rudbeckia, which attacks black-eyed Susans). Larry is ready for S. rudbeckia, gradually replacing all his black-eyed Susans with ‘American Goldrush’, a resistant variety.

For more info, click here.

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Guest: Greg Auton of MaritimeGardening.com
Greg Auton is The Maritime Gardener, a podcaster and YouTuber in Nova Scotia, with 2500 square feet of vegetable gardens. Shauna and Dorothy set out to talk to him about extending the gardening season, and they did. In part. But they talked about so much more. 

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Guest: Sherrie Verslius of Preferred Perch

Sherrie Versluis, the owner of the Preferred Perch in Winnipeg, speaks about backyard birds, what they eat, how they survive winter, and how you can keep them singing in your own backyard. Bit of advice? Don’t feed them bacon fat in place of suet and watch the type of feed you are providing. Some of it can be contaminated. In fact, if your birds are turning up their beaks at your offerings, chances are it could be mouldy seed or worse. . .

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Guest:  Jan Pedersen of Shelmerdine Garden Center

Flowering shrubs are a giving type of plant in gardens across Canada, with every season bringing a different bloom or colour or shape. Jan Pedersen of Shelmerdine Garden Centre talks about various varieties with Dorothy and Shauna, giving a few tips about pruning and cultivars that really perform.

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Guest: Kevin Twomey of T & T Seeds
Starting tomatoes from seeds seems like an easy thing to do, but once you actually do it, there are a number of things to remember. What do you plant them in? Do you need a heat mat under the seedlings? Do you need special lights?

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Every gardener ordering seeds has one big question: what the heck happened last year? And will it continue this year? And next?

Dorothy and Shauna speak with John Barrett from Veseys Seeds, on of Canada’s largest and oldest seed order companies. 

John talks about the pandemic explosion faced by seed companies as well as the viability of seeds, pelleted versus non-pelleted, organic verses standard and the Safe Seed Pledge.

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Country Cue 1 by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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