MARGARET ROACH A WAY TO GARDEN Margaret Roach

Let the seed-shopping season begin! The 2024 offerings are being loaded into seed-catalog websites, and the earliest print catalogs are already arriving in our mailboxes, as if to help soften the separation anxiety we may feel if we’ve already put our gardens to bed for the winter. 



One that I always look forward to is Turtle Tree Seed, a biodynamic company where years ago I discovered a few must-have vegetable varieties that I’ve grown every garden season since. 





My guest today is Lia Babitch, co-manager of Turtle Tree in Copake, N.Y., which offers about 400 biodynamically grown varieties of vegetable, herb and flower seeds. 



Turtle Tree is part of Camphill Village Copake, a non-profit intentional community of adults with developmental differences. Lia will tell us more about that, and about biodynamics—and I suspect she’ll entice us with news of some of the upcoming seed offerings, too.  

I don't think I've read a mystery novel since the “Nancy Drew” books of my long-ago childhood, though I will confess to having watched more than a few who-done-it TV series over the years, most of them from the BBC. 



But I never noticed how many mystery writers, from Edgar Allen Poe to Agatha Christie, incorporated elements of the garden into their tales of intrigue. 





Today's guest picked up on all the clues in their stories, and many others, and put them together in her own latest book, titled “Gardening Can Be Murder.” In each of her many books, “New York Times” bestselling author Marta McDowell digs into the way that plants have influenced some of our most cherished writers, including Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now she's focused her latest one on mystery writers, and how they, too, have often drawn influence from the garden and its plants. 

Most of us may automatically think “monarch” after hearing the word “milkweed,” or vice versa. And that's in fact a critical and intimate relationship, the one between monarch butterflies and native milkweed plants. 





But the genus Asclepias offers sustenance to a wide diversity of animal species beyond just that one beloved insect. 



Today's guest is Eric Lee-Mader, author of the recent book “Milkweed Lands: An Epic Story of One Plant: Its Nature and Ecology.” Eric is an ecologist at the invertebrate-focused Xerces Society, where he is the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director. He and his wife also operate Northwest Meadowscapes in Port Townsend, Wash., providing regional native seeds and consultation services for meadowmakers. 

Yes, it’s time or almost time to do some raking, and to dig the dahlias to stash – time to perform the rounds of the so-called “fall cleanup” and put the garden to bed. 





But today Ken Druse and  I want to advocate for a sort of Cleanup Plus: for tending not just to the obvious chores, but also doing some reflection, and making time for often-overlooked late-season tasks like seed-saving, or finally transplanting one of those two overcrowded shrubs that have been screaming for more elbow room that you keep swearing to rescue...but never quite get to. Sound familiar? 



You all know Ken Druse, author of 20 spectacular garden books, an old friend, and my colleague the last few years in our Virtual Garden Club online courses, which resume in January. We’ve been talking this last week together on the phone about how we’re winding down our respective garden seasons, and wanted to let you in on some of the details that we hope will help you in your own Cleanup-Plus. 

Are any of your houseplants edible? A new book by the owners of the beloved rare plant business called Logee’s Greenhouses suggests that we make room for some delicious candidates among our potted indoor plants, including a range of citrus. Their book is called “Edible Houseplants: Grow Your Own Citrus, Coffee, Vanilla and 43 Other Tasty Tropical Plants.” 





My guest today is Byron Martin, who with Laurelynn Martin co-owns and operates Logee’s Greenhouses in Danielson, Conn., a family business since 1892 that specializes in distinctive plants. We talked about citrus suited to growing as houseplants—except maybe when treated to a summer escape outdoors. 

Reducing the footprint of our lawns has been a key environmental message for gardeners in recent years, since lawns lack biodiversity, and involve huge amounts of pollution between fertilizers, herbicides and the gas used in mowing. But what to cultivate instead? That is the subject of a nearly 15-year research project called the native lawn at Cornell Botanic Gardens, in Ithaca, NY, with some interesting insights. 



My guest today is Todd Bittner, a plant ecologist, who with his Cornell Botanic Gardens colleagues began a quarter-acre research experiment known as the native lawn demonstration area. 





“Please DO Walk on these Plants” a sign on a pedestal there tells visitors, explaining that it’s a test of “a mix of low-growing native plants” as an alternative to traditional lawn. I’m so glad he’s here to tell us more about what they have learned along the way.