We have gathered only good news, because things have been stressful and we needed it.  News about how gardeners like you are helping with climate change, how architects are designing skyscrapers that are covered in gardens, how Maine has put itself in the forefront of the right to grow your own food and how a gardener in Atlanta created a sitting garden for her neighborhood.  And more!  Also, an unsolved garden mystery involving a huge zucchini and a bad assed gardener who takes his cue from Clint Eastwood’s persona provides laughs -- because laughter is its own good news. 

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Find Your Persephone Period

In this Encore Episode, we talk about tools - not humans with appalling behavior but garden tools that help us out.

Christy’s cartoon thumb bears witness to the importance of tools.  She has definitely paid the price for yanking the cosmos.  Hori knives in holsters, hand weeders, hacks you find in your kitchen or garage. Tools that blow which might make you feel like you’re licking the sidewalk. Waste of money tools. Tools with cancer warnings that has Edith playing detective.  Meet Janelle the strict parent of her seedlings and Rowena, the very nervous gardener who stunts all she touches. It’s all here.  Plus the most beautiful inspiration we’ve found yet.  Gardening: It’s like falling in love with the ground.

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Find Your Persephone Period

It's go thyme! This week is all about how to grow an indoor herb garden. But first, Edith encounters a persnickety security system demanding a “secret word”, Christy is starting a produce section in her attic, and we both had a fennel fail. What is the Persephone Period? We will tell you.

If you’re as determined as we are to grow fresh herbs indoors this winter, give us a listen. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme - not just an old Simon and Garfunkle song. It could be part of your kitchen herb garden.  We share what materials you will need, best practises and how to trouble-shoot. 

Also, we’ve got a joke, an inspiration, and a sauerkraut recipe from a listener. Thank you Catherine, thank you faithful listeners.  

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Find Your Persephone Period

It’s Halloween 2.  We’ve got Tom Cruise, Ichabod Grain, and Canable Pectin.  Wrap yourself in our Halloween quilt with the best stories from last year, new stories from our listeners, and two new podplays. We have tricks: how to eat an eyeball if you have to; and treats: The Silence of the Lamb’s Ear and a headless garden ghost.  Revisit the haunted Fordney mansion which holds a true ghost story and find out what could happen if you garden after dark on Halloween.  We’ve got tricks, treats and laughs. As Rosemary Clooney would say: “Come on-a my house, my house a come on - I’m gonna give you candy.”

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We share new things we tried last summer and how they worked out. Good, bad, and ugly things. Important things like which tomatoes to plant to get rid of a soil fungus,  the easiest beautiful annual to care for, how to have fresh greens in your garden for 8 months, and what is and how to grow a successful moon garden. Do you know what a Maximillian sunflower is and why it’s great to have it in your garden? And for chuckles, pod plays about being the quarterback in a garden football game and a new interpretation of “boxing tomatoes” starring Howard Cosell-ish.

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Do you want to have a headstart for your plants in next year’s garden?  We have the details on bringing in geraniums, rosemary, and peppers. The harden off/soften on method, the pruning, misting, microclimating, and dormancy inducing techniques that help your plants survive the winter in your house. Plus how to grow plants from cuttings. As well as a question about broccolini, a story about beavers, a 172 lb. cabbage, and a 76 pound rutabaga.  It’s a supersized episode! Both of us laugh, both of us cry, but one of us is just kidding.

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We are not an “organic proprietary mixture”, although we get a little ticked off by something that claims it is. We go into all the dos & don'ts and pros & cons and easy tips for how to freeze and can your harvest for the winter. Plus more drama: what died all by itself on Edith's hügelkultur? Why does Christy's pumkin look like Walter Matheau?  Why is Edith afraid of canning equipment?  And what, in the garden, will give you more, the more you use? These kind of miracles, giving trees, and why birds might be pooping on cars. It’s all here. 

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A spanking new episode exploring upcycling for your garden: toilet paper rolls are not just for making chunky necklaces anymore. Second lives for soda bottles, boots, toilets, broken tools, bathtubs, tires and more. Learn to make your own pots for seedlings and then use a ‘seedling apartment building’ to shelter them. Whether it’s a recipe for drying cherry tomatoes with zero energy use, or a recipe for roasted tomato salsa, or the recipe that might have kept Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara together, this episode’s got it.

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Everything you wanted to know about growing, curing, and storing garlic.  The difference between hardneck and softneck garlic. What they have in common are fantastic health benefits.  In Romania it is often considered as good as antibiotics!  Plus eat the rainbow that’s not Skittles - a vegetable’s color is an indication of its health benefits.  We explain. What we’re planting now - hoping it will overwinter and give us vegetables early in Spring 2022. And we pepper this barrage of information with two very funny Podplays that deal with a better way to awaken Sleeping Beauty.

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Eating raw fruits and veggies is not only great for your health, but for your energy bills, and the environment as well.  Not enamored of eating a pile of plain raw veggies for dinner?  We have suggestions: recipes for cold soups, sauces, salsas and smoothies. If a Colorado garden zone 5B can produce fresh greens allowing you to eat uncooked nutritious foods for about 7 months, so, most likely, can your zone. Better skin, great gut health, improve your immunity: eat it raw. Plus we solve the blossom end rot on grape tomatoes but lose the battle of the pumpkins to squirrel saliva.  It’s always something, isn’t it?

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