Gardenig in New York. Tips & Guides

Yes, I am kidding—sort of. But what I mean is this: Producing the segments each week keeps me ferreting out answers to questions I have, in journalistic style—reaching out to possible expert source for some answers. I learn so much, all of which I then get to share. Win-win. (Some of the year’s top topics are listed below.)The show, which begins its seventh year in March 2016, has been named a top-5 gardening podcast by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK (alongsid

On the other end of the equation, Lee and I are both un-planting some particularly un-loved weeds this autumn, and he joined me on my public-radio show and podcast to talk about planting trees, and also fighting weeds.I often refer to Lee Reich, a longtime friend and fellow garden writer, as the unusual fruit guy, because one of the first books of his I read was called “Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention,” and he grows medlars and pawpaws and figs and more at his New Paltz, New York, farm-den—that’s half garden, half farm. His other books

Rebecca, who champions the power of food as medicine and nourishment, is author of the new cookbook “Clean Soups: Simple Nourishing Recipes for Health and Vitality,” and of several earlier books, including the award-winning “The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen.”We spoke about making broth—the basis of many soups, but also a healthful sipping tea in its own right—and more, on the November 7, 2016 edition of my public-radio show and podcast. Read along as you listen in, using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on i

THANKS ANYWAY, drone engineers, but I don’t really want to live to see the day when drones are used for pollination because we let all the bees die. I know, I know; progress and innovation and all, but… Pollinator drones are not brand-new (the one in the video above, from “Science” magazine in February 2017), but apparently Walmart has applied for a patent on just such a device—perhaps a move to offset Amazon’s increasing entry into the fresh-food market, some industry analysts say.

I talked about watering best practices with New York Botanical Garden instructor Daryl Beyers, author of “The New Gardener’s Handbook” (affiliate link). The popular course that Daryl teaches at NYBG is called Fundamentals of Gardening. And now Daryl, who has more than 25 years’ professional landscaping experience besides his teaching role, has put all the fundamentals into “The New Gardener’s Handbook.”Read along as you listen to the June 29, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: Enter to win Daryl’s new book by commenting in the box at the b

WE ALL KNOW that living organisms adapt over generations to their environments, but this recent example made me smile: A bird species in the U.K. (the great tit, above) have developed longer beaks in recent decades, Oxford University reports, perhaps as a result of their attraction to bird feeders provided by humans. (Photo from Wikipedia by Shirley Clarke of Fordingbridge Camera Club.)ebird and ‘all about birds’ sites have new lookSPEAKING OF BIRDS: My go-to resource for information on them, All About Birds from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has had a redesign (look at the new species profile page for cedar waxwings, for instance). So has it

In collaboration with Rutgers University medical toxicologist Lewis S. Nelson, MD,Dr. Michael J. Balick, who is Vice President for Botanical Science and Director of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden, has written the new third edition of the“Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants.”I asked him about plant chemistry—why some plants have the toxins they do–and what we’ve learned from, and about, those plants. And how did people figure out which are poisonous in the first place, anyhow?Read along as you listen to the July 27, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Carol Gracie, a former longtime educator at the New York Botanical Garden who also worked for The Nature Conservancy, has followed her own intense curiosity to become a leading expert on wildflowers. Now her second book, “Summer Wildflowers of the Northeast: a Natural History” from Princeton University Press (Amazon affiliate link), forms the companion to her earlier spring volume.We talked together about all the insects–not just monarchs–who use the milkweed plant in some way (and what they have in common); about a flowering plant with no chlorophyll at all; and even how experts have trouble keeping track of all the asters and goldenrods.Plus: Enter to win a copy of her book by commenting in the box at the very bottom of the page.Read along as you listen to the June 9, 2

Little did she know that Grandpa Roach called me “Marge the Boss” starting when I was about 5, owing to my take-charge inclinations, apparently. (Don’t get my younger sister started on this subject.) Browning also calls me “a natural teacher,” which especially delights me, and recommends the book for both “longtime tillers” and “new gardeners,” which was what I aimed for in choosing what to include, and how to write about it. Read her review for yourself. (Share it!)CategoriesBook.

Except that I didn’t tell anybody. Not my parents (who were journalists, and would have been especially proud to share the excitement ahead of time but instead were startled to see it there on the printed pages one Sunday morning); not my non-work friends, nor my sister.I’ve always been like that: keeping things close to the vest to a fault. (We could exhume Dr. Freud for a quick consult on why, but maybe let’s not bother.)In the

WHEN YOU’RE TALKING plants and not people, how do you figure out who lives where? You can’t send census takers door to door to get a head count, but doing so is a critical step in devising conservation strategies in a changing world, among other key goals. A New York Botanical Garden botanist is coordinating such an effort.

Kathryn is past president of the New York State Ornithological Association, has directed New York’s Natural Heritage Program, and conducted bird surveys for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her new book is “Birding the Hudson Valley”–you can enter to win a copy in the comment box at the bottom of the page–and she’s also one of us, a gardener.We talked about some things you probably didn’t know about sparrows (including the white-throated, above; photo from Cephas at Wikipedia), plus things you can do to up your birding game, and more.Read along as you listen to the

AT THIS STAGE in my long garden career—I’ve been digging holes 30-plus years on this piece of land—I find myself frequently conducting self-styled madcap experiments to learn more, more, more, and meet more living things.Like “un-mowing” areas I’d treated as “lawn” for years to watch what pops up; like plugging in small divisions (or seedlings) of natives to the unmown areas to try to make them into thriving pollinator communities; like figuring out which “weeds” to pull out of those unwown mini-meadows-to-be; like handling the decline or outright demise of big trees in the garden differently; like cleaning up less obsessively in fall, especially, to support more overwintering insects

Jenny Elliott of Tiny Hearts Farm in Copake, New York, is a farmer-florist. With partner Luke Franco and their crew, she grows flowers organically, both for the wholesale market, for subscribers to her weekly flower CSA, and also for events, including weddings that she designs and more. (That’s Luke and Jenny in the shop below, where they also hold classes.)Which are the best annuals, I asked–and how do I get the most out of each one? (Hints: making succession sowings is one key, for fresh blooms all growing season, plus pinching young annuals makes for more productive plants, too.) Jenny is my beloved neighbor and friend and also one of my collaborators May 11th and again June 8th, when we join force

In his new book, “The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees” (affiliate link), he makes the case more strongly than ever, with twists and turns and the tales of all the creatures we depend on, who depend on the genus Quercus.Doug Tallamy is well-known to most every gardener as a longtime leading voice speaking in the name of native plants. His 2007 book, “Bringing Nature Home,” was for many of us, an introduction into the entire subject of the unbreakable link between native plants and native wildlife. He followed up wi

Copake, New York-based Jenny is a farmer-florist with partner Luke Franco and their crew, atTiny Hearts Farm. They’re my beloved neighbors and friends, growing flowers organically both for the wholesale market, for subscribers to her weekly flower CSA, and also for events including weddings.Read along as you listen to the April 6, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).must cutting flowers to grow, with jenny elliottMargaret Roach: Welcome back, Jenny. How are things in bustling downtown Copake, New York?

The first installment appeared April 20, 2020. On March 31, 2021, the paper ran a Q&A with me to kick off Year 2 of the series.The topics I’ve covered so far:Where to begin your spring cleanup in a chaotic season. Bed-prep using cardboard, newsprint and sometimes plastic sheeting. Shopping in your own garden for “free” plants. How to make a late-start flower garden of “annuals,” including many to direct-sow. Pruning Q&A with Jeff Jabco of Swarthmore’s Sco

Kevin’s new book, “Urban Gardening: How to Grow More Plants No Matter Where You Live,” includes many raised-bed construction styles to consider, some impromptu and others more permanent, and his tips for success growing in them.Kevin’s garden [above] couldn’t be much more different from mine. He’s in urban San Diego Zone 10B; I’m rural New York Zone 5B. Most of his garden is in raised beds and other containers, and mine is mostly in the ground, but we have lots in common, too. We talked about successful above-ground growing methods and more, how he plants intensi

That’s today’s topic: top tips I got from 2019’s most popular interviews—like whether to use black or clear plastic to smother weeds, or how to diagnose the presence of dreaded invasive Asian jumping worms. And on a brighter note: when exactly to cut those peonies to have the longest-lasting blooms in a vase, and how to get maximum performance out of our familiar annual flowers.Read along as you listen to the bonus show from the week of January 6, 2020 of my public-radio program and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).So: On to the tips!flo

The popular course that Daryl Beyers teaches at NYBG in New York City is called Fundamentals of Gardening. And now Daryl, who has more than 25 years of professional landscaping experience besides his teaching role, has put all the fundamentals into a new book, “The New Gardener’s Handbook” (affiliate link).It was in its pages that I picked up some new-to-me tips on better composting and more—including the right way to water as you plant trees and shrubs; how to choose which limbs to prune off or keep when shaping and thinning; and how to rejuvenate overgrown shrubs (all at once, or in stages?).Read along as you listen to the March 16, 2020 edition

“Every day, the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world,” she writes.Margaret Renkl—gardener, lifelong student of nature, and writer—lives and gardens in Nashville, Tennessee. Each Monday, her opinion column appears in “The New York Times,” billed under the loose rubric “Flora, fauna, politics and c

Many companies ship extra-early, based on rough frost-date estimates for each area that may not be exactly what’s going on at your place, but is that really when I want the starts to arrive? I asked for advice from Alley Swiss of Filaree Farm, a longtime certified-organic farmer in Okanogan, Washington, whose main crops—garlic, shallots and potatoes—are favorites in my garden, too.(You might recall the popular garlic-growing Q&A Alley and I did together, and our later garlic-growing piece in my column in “The New York Times.” I’ve learned a lot from our ongoing conversations–including that it’s OK to wait a little while for the seed potatoes to arrive.)how to grow potatoes, with alley swissQ. When is the right time to plant—is there a cue in nature to remind us, or a

“Nature Into Art: The Gardens of Wave Hill” lets us feast on the design daring, the color plays, the garden pictures captured in its extravagant photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo, but at the same time it tells us how they were accomplished, teaching us the tenets of the Wave Hill way of gardening that we can put into practice at home.Tom Christopher, a graduate of New York Botanical Garden School of Professional Horticulture and longtime garden writer and friend, wrote the new book, and along the way even Tom, with all his prior training, enjoyed a sort of insider’s advanced course in garden making and maintaining. He shared some of

Kim is also founder of the garden business called EcoBeneficial, consulting on ecological landscaping and design, based in Westchester County, New York. She speaks nationwide to spread her passion for habitat-style plantings, and creates an occasional podcast series on the subject, and teaches at New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Native Plant Center.Read along as you listen to the March 9, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: Enter to win a copy of “The Pollinator Victory Garden” (affiliate link) by commenting in the box at the very bottom of the page.creating pollinator gardens, with kim eiermanMargaret: Welcome, Kim. I think we a

Ronna Welsh, a former restaurant cook who operates the New York cooking school called Purple Kale Kitchenworks, has been teaching chefs and home cooks for more than 20 years. Her new book’s full title is “The Nimble Cook: New Strategies for Great Meals that Make the Most of Your Ingredients,” and in it we learn to look for what she calls “starting points” that the ingredients we have on hand can offer, and to start to see the many potential incarnations of each one. You’ll never take a head of celery for granted again, or be so inclined to let partial bunches of fresh herbs languish under everything else in the “crisper” bin till they’re anything but crisp.Read along as you listen to the July 29, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: Enter to win the cookbook in the comments box at the very bottom of the page, and also get Ronna’

Are you facing any tomato troubles about now? Well, there is help to be had, in this updated interview from Dr. Meg McGrath, a longtime vegetable pathologist for Cornell University. Though people often lump everything into “late blight,” it often isn’t actually that disease at all, and it’s critical to know just what you are up against.Meg knows from tomato diseases—both as a passionate backyard gardener and as a scientist, headquartered at Cornell’s Long Island Horticultural Research & Extension Center in Riverhead, New York.Data and photos from Dr. Meg McGrath’s laboratory research, along with findings from expert colle

And last week I wrote a tomato growing story as part of a garden series I’ve been doing in “The New York Times,” and this week I wanted to continue that tomato theme and talk about them with Mr. Tomato himself, Craig LeHoullier, a.k.a. NC Tomato Man and author of the classic book, “Epic Tomatoes (affiliate link). Comment in the box at the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy.Craig has gardened and grown tomatoes in areas of the U.S. as different as New England and Seattle, Pennsylvania and Raleigh, North Carolina, and lately in the mountains of Western North Carolina, too. He’s one of the founders of the Dwarf Tomato Project that we’ve talked about on the show before, and generally just an all tomato all the time

It’s a soup you can make and enjoy now, or freeze, depending on how many willing yellow onions you can get your hands on, and on whether you can resist eating it all right away. With my first bowlful, I didn’t even manage to wait long enough to melt the cheese on top of the recommended toast. It just smelled too inviting as-is (or was), and then, suddenly, gone.If you haven’t met David Lebovitz, the story, in brief: In 1999, he left Chez Panisse and a career in the restaurant business. He moved from San Francisco to Paris—where he jokingly says Belgian endive is so inexpensive as to be the French version of “trash” lettuce, and reports there are more than 1,260 bakeries. Packing up little more than his best skillet, cookbooks and trusty laptop, David turned to writing, and his 2011 memoir, “The Sweet Life in Paris” (Amazon affiliate link), became a “New York Times” bestseller.His website has likewise been a giant hit (and has an e-newsletter I enjoy); he is lately (as of 2021ish) moving more over to delivering his latest writing via a Substack newsletter.No wonder he is so perennially popular. Besides having a way with food, he is a delicious storyteller, too, always layering in the essential ingr

I asked Marc Hachadourian, author of the new book “Orchid Modern: Living and Designing With the World’s Most Elegant Houseplants” and senior curator of the world-class orchid collection at the New York Botanical Garden, to let us in on some insights.Besides curating the orchid collection, Marc is Director of Glasshouse Horticulture at NYBG, overseeing cultivation of tens of thousands of tropical and temperate plants for conservatory exhibitions and permanent display there. The Orchid Show there each March

But now’s the time, and I’m grateful that Doug returned to the podcast to do just that. Want to plan your most ecologically minded garden cleanup ever, and understand the consequences of each potential action you can take?The subtitle of University of Delaware professor Doug Tallamy’s recent book,“Nature’s Best Hope,” is “A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard.” Meaning: The choices we make all year-round, including the very important one of how we clean up in fall and again in spring, can help counteract an overdeveloped, fragmented landscape that puts the food web to the t

The annual winter-long citizen-science event called Project FeederWatch, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is just getting under way, as it does each year at this time. So what better time to talk about the best practices of what to feed to whom, and also what all the data is telling scientists and can tell you, too.I chatted with Dr. Emma Greig, who leads FeederWatch, which has more than 30 years of history and more than 20,000 participants in North America, whose observations put Northern flickers in the top-25 observed birds list in the Northeast last season, for the first time in project history. (Above, flicker photofrom Macaulay Library copyright Warren Lynn.)Read along as you listen to the November 16, 2020 editi

ROSES ARE ANCIENT plants with a 35-million-year history on planet earth, so maybe it’s no surprise then that they have been a fixture in nearly every culture and many religions, too. In his recent book, “Rosa: The Story of the Rose,” rosarian Peter Kukielski tells lots of the stories of this beloved flower and our relationship to it, and its place in our cultural history.

Marc Hachadourian, Director of Glasshouse Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and I answer “yes” to both of the above. And he joined me to talk houseplants, and which ones make the best longtime companions to grow and even share—and how to match them to your site and meet their needs. Spoiler alert: He wants us all to start growing African violets again, and some of their other Gesneriad cousins.Marc is also Senior Curator of Orchids at the New York Botanical Garden’s 55,000-square-foot Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and author of the recent book “Orchid Modern,” so no surprise that some of his suggestions today are easy to grow orchids because, after all, he’s @orch

I have to admit to being a fan girl of Julie’s, and when I need a lift lately—and who doesn’t in this most challenging year of all?—I often scroll through her Instagram to follow her latest wild bird rescue adventure, or her unfolding meadow showing off yet another sequence of bloom and beauty. Or frankly, sometimes just to enjoy the antics and videos and photos of the newest member of her family, a charismatic dog named Curtis Loew (above), and their deepening bond. And I’m not even a dog person.Julie’s here on the podcast to help us all focus, to keep an eye on the outdoors—on our trail cameras, on her population of monarchs, and more. We talked about goings-on to have your eye on this fall.You’ll hear us get all nerdy the first few minutes and compare recent birds sightings, and then finally get down to it: how these little visitors keep

Nobody I know has more investment plants than the list of 1,600 unusual annuals and tropicals that Dennis Schrader and the team at Landcraft Environments propagates to sell wholesale to nurseries, landscapers, and botanical gardens. (Follow them @landcraft_environments_ltd on Instagram.) With his husband, Bill Smith, Dennis Schrader has since 1992 operated Landcraft Environments in Mattituck, Long Island—specialists plants that add seasonal color and texture, and the look of the tropics to the garden. (Like the coleus called ‘Fishnet Stocking’ above.)He’d like to encourage us to start a collection, too, and offered tips on how to keep them happy—tactical advice on plants we should consider investing in. Our conversation started with a “New York Times” article I wrote a coupl

We even had a question about something you may have seen and wondered about, as one reader did: photos (perhaps from English garden books or magazines) of terra cotta pots placed upside-down on the tops of garden stakes. But why? (Our listeners helped answer his one.)Ken, whose 20th book called “The Scentual Garden” is due out October 15th, 2019, is a longtime garden writer and photographer and friend. That’s Ken’s photo of osage orange fruit, above.Read along as you listen to the September 30