Leafing Out - a podcast about gardening
Leafing Out - a podcast about gardening
Our Fave Late Summer Flowers & How Rebecca Learned to Love Bugs
We're in the dog days of summer when lots of blooms have come and gone, but a few of our favorites (echinacea, hydrangea, clematis) are carrying us through! Plus, follow along as Rebecca describes her journey from bug phobia to bug appreciation.
Welcome to leafing out a podcast about gardening. I'm Rebecca.
Gabe Long:And I'm Gabe.
Rebecca:And we are not experts at all. We are amateur gardeners, sharing what we learn as we learn it on our gardening journey.
Gabe Long:What are we learning about today?
Rebecca:Well, let's see. Today we're going to talk about what our favorite plants in the garden are right now. And we're also going to talk about bugs that I have a tormented relationship with.
Gabe Long:We're working on a journey, the journey is that you, you have an interesting relationship drink every
Rebecca:time you hear us use the word journey on this episode, I'm gonna really try to rein it in. I feel like I'm using that every other sense these days. Gabe, what's your favorite plant in the garden right now,
Gabe Long:my favorite plant in the garden is the akinesia. Because aka corn flour, I planted it from seed at the beginning of last spring, so spring of 2020. And it was just little tiny plants throughout the summer, I had planted some purple ones and white ones, but there were no blooms at all. And now it's like this profusion of color that has, I think it started blooming at the beginning of July. And you know, I feel like a lot of the plants in our garden, they have a really spectacular bloom period, but it might be 10 days, two weeks, maybe three weeks. And those akinesia have been blooming for a month and a half at this point. And they just are rock stars of this period of time when a lot of things are a little faded in our hot, humid climate. And also, I have to say that I know you're not the biggest fan of growing things from seed. But I do feel like a very special connection to those ectasia because I grew them from seed because I had to wait through all of last year and then the beginning of this year to see them bloom. I really have like, I just I focus on them every time I go outside.
Rebecca:You're so right about all of this, which it pains me to say sometimes, but you're totally right. I do. I was just thinking, yeah, I do remember last year, all these little akinesia plants that kind of like I don't know, they looked like weeds sort of like I had to keep remembering not to pull them out. And it was worth it. Because now they look so good. And I noticed that there are more of those flowers this year than there are of the neighboring white coneflower that we have. That is that comes from a plant that I bought and planted like I think three summers ago. And so we kind of got like a faster, better result, even though the first summer kind of sucked. So that's kind of an interesting point of comparison, actually, because I'm just you're right, I'm so impatient. I don't love planting certain things. There's some stuff that you can grow from seeds so easily that it's not worth doing anything else than that. But there's some things especially like perennials, that a lot of perennials, I always am like let's just buy the plant, let's just buy the biggest plant we can because I want to like get to cut to the chase and get to the point where it looks really voluminous and abundant. It's really filling in the hole in the garden that I stick it in. And you know, I want it to have that like English cottage garden, feeling right away as quickly as possible. And the way to get that is to have big, bushy shrubby great looking plants and growing from seed take more patients, but in that case, yeah, you're right. They do look really good.
Gabe Long:I think there's a place for both. I mean, I'm not trying to grow our rhododendrons from seed,
Rebecca:oh my god. But thank you for not trying to do
Gabe Long:our ferns are akinesia the you know the herbaceous perennials, I think you grow them from seed and like you're saying
Rebecca:ferns are different though ferns are totally probably not the best example because they aren't even grown from seed, right?
Gabe Long:They
Rebecca:here's the thing, we can Google that. firms do not have flowers or seeds, they reproduce sexually by tiny or I
Gabe Long:knew that they had something that spread it's not just they're not your listeners,
Rebecca:please do not try to grow ferns from seed. Let's see. If you buy anything on the entire internet. Burned seed. You're gonna get something else. But yeah, Fern like it's not even pop pollination. But the way that ferns reproduce is really like worth digging into on a different episode because it's really it's fascinating, crazy and interesting. But that's not we're talking about here what a tangent. We've
Gabe Long:got what
Rebecca:now, you were gonna say that Let's do
Gabe Long:both. And like yeah, with herbaceous perennials, I think, if you don't mind waiting the you know, the year or so for them to come into their own, then like you're saying with our side by side coneflowers, the ones that you plant from seed might be a bit better suited because they will have grown from infancy in that spot.
Rebecca:And another really different scenario that would make a lot of sense to grow something like coneflower from seed and is if you do have a lot of space, you know, if you have, if you're someone who like, was living in the city, and then decided during the pandemic to relocate to a house in the country or something, and you have like tons of space, and you can set up a bed somewhere where you're just doing your kind of messing around experimenting stuff, then you could plant a whole bunch of akinesia from seed. And soon enough, you'll have tons of plants and you can relocate them wherever you want them. And that is way more economical than trying to buy all of those at like $15 a plant at the nursery or something. That's totally The thing that I would do if I owe to have that much space. Where where's that kaneesha happy, where does it like to grow.
Gabe Long:So, um, it's technically a full sun plant, but I would say ours is in pretty part sun, maybe four hours of direct sun, it doesn't have any immediate large competition, I will say that and that's a difference between where I've seen our garden do better and worse is like we have some that you you bought as a larger plant by the witch hazel. And it's a little bit like tucked under the witch hazel and does not seem to like that sort of flops and seems to be stretching for the light. And I don't know if there's like water and nutrient competition going on happy over there. If not happy there.
Rebecca:I will say and I was good. This is what I was going to mention next about akinesia is if you do grow at home At home, I really would encourage you to grow the the typical coneflower varieties, and not these new, crazy looking akinesia that are double blooms. And this
Gabe Long:has something to do with
Rebecca:dogs. We need like an audio cue something Oh God, something. Um, so we have in our garden, a whole bunch of these beautiful purple and some are white coneflower. And they're great. And the pollinators go crazy for them go out there. And there's like, you know, 10 different species of bees, and wasps and stuff buzzing around them and butterflies, and it's fantastic. And you know, and then the ones that are growing under the witch hazel tree that aren't doing so well are actually this stupid new thing that I bought, because I couldn't resist I was an impulse buy at Home Depot. I'm not proud of it, but I gotta be honest, they look like they have these long flower long petals on the edge all around the edge of the flower, like a regular akinesia flower. And then the center of the bloom instead of having like a little spiky orangey yellow part in the center. What they have instead is this big, roughly fluffy, compact, half globe of petals. And so they're cool looking. And you might see them in the garden center and say that's so cool looking, I have to have it. Okay, here's the thing, anytime you see something that has all of those really tight, fluffy petals in the center, that is what we call a double double bloom or double, double double blossom. That is usually going to be like a Frankenstein of a plant that the pollinators can't utilize. They can't use it because if you look at the way a bee uses a flower, it's going to the center of the flower to get the pollen or get the nectar. If there's all these petals in the center instead of nectar and pollen, the the insects can't access anything useful about the plant because there's all of those petals in the way there choke, it's choking out access.
Gabe Long:This is an I'm stretching beyond the limits of what I really should be talking about here. But I think also that secondary part of the blossom that you're talking about that center part of the blossom is actually the statements. I think that's what's called the pollen containing part of the plant. It's been bred in such a way that instead of statements, it has petals, but it's like that has have taken over that part of the plant.
Rebecca:I think it depends on the class. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different types. And listen, like some of them are so beautiful that it's like Dude, you got to do it's not we're not we're not like Crazy native enforcers who will only plant only the things that are best for the insects and the birds and everything. Because you can you can take that road really, really far. And I think it's nice to straddle the line a little bit of what appeals to you visually and what is supporting the ecosystem. There's a lot to talk about on the subject of natives and insects and the ways that the plants interact with the environment. But the but the long story short is that like that, that Demacia with the double blooms that I thought were so cool looking, they're a bust, like no, no insects are over there. They're not doing anything. As someone recently I heard someone recently say that that flower might as well be a statue of a flower, like it's doing nothing in the garden other than how it looks. So it's cool to see that like the actual native species is thriving in the garden. It's beautiful to look at. It's very happy. And also the insects are loving it. And then right next to it. Here's this dumb, stupid double blossom thing that I bought, that I learned my lesson on, and like it's not doing well.
Gabe Long:And I think you made a very good point about the native nature of being so pretty to look at I think, you know, if I think of like, I have a certain allowance of non natives, where do I want to use that allowance? I'm going to use that on the things that are like the real stunners that you know all we have the section that's dry shade. And we need a climber and there's like this one thing that's not a native but it'll be perfect there and all great like, use your non natives there for the place where you want to put the egg in Asia. That's such an easy like, place to use the native that the pollinators are going to love. We're going to be contributing to the ecosystem. It's gonna look great. You don't need to mess around with that and use this this, as you're saying, Frankenstein, right of a plant.
Unknown:Yeah, that makes sense. I feel
Gabe Long:like we have covered our favorite plant.
Rebecca:I wouldn't say my favorite plant. So sorry.
Gabe Long:I didn't realize I thought we were here. And we want to do a favorite plant.
Rebecca:So great. So I've been thinking and thinking about what my favorite plant in the garden is right now. I always find it so difficult to choose a favorite right now. I kind of
Gabe Long:like choosing a favorite child. Oh,
Rebecca:we all know who the favorite child is. Just kidding. It's just kidding. It's me to know that I've got no, I think it's hard to choose a favorite because I feel like there's like a shell effect of the garden where like the whole is more than the sum of the parts. And just picking a favorite plant in particular, I don't know takes away from like, oh point is how they work in concert with each other and the context and stuff. But um, one favorite plant right now is our Limelight hydrangea. It's so beautiful. And we planted it I think this is its third year in the garden. You know, as small as like in a gallon and a half pot, maybe or a one gallon pot, it was a little plant. And it's six feet tall. And the blooms are larger than my head. And they're really fun because they're so bright, called they're so large, they're really bright, almost almost great on the line between like green and cream colored. And they just are a nice focal point in an area of the garden where like you said not allowed a lot else is blooming there right now. So having such a kind of stunner, you know, at this point in the summer in that spot where it's part shade, there aren't a ton of things that produce big flowers, you know, at this time of year in Perth shade anyway, I just look at it every day when I walk outside and I'm like, Ah, it's so happy. It's so cheerful and the blooms last a really long time. And that is really key about it. Also
Gabe Long:like you can leave the blooms on there to dry like Yeah, yeah, kind of will and rot and
Rebecca:as summer turns to fall, what's going to happen is they're going to turn more of a pink tone I think. And then like a dusty rose pink color. And then as frost happens, the leaves will brown and fall off and the blooms will dry. And then usually when we're doing like spring leaf like general cleanup out there, I'm picking up the little tumble we if they turn into kind of these tumbleweeds that tumble around in the wind and the snow and stuff and it's cool. It's just a nice sort of one plant that gives you a lot of seasonal interest and kind of threads that needle of like you're observing the plants throughout the seasons, not just the flowers when they're at their maximum but kind of spending time with the plant as it goes through this whole metamorphosis as it goes through its life cycle each each year. So that's, that's my one favorite. But I want to give a little like footnote bonus favorite to the clematis that we have growing up the side of our house right next to the back door. I had read that it's really nice to put a climber right next to the back door just to like, draw attention and make it really beautiful because the back door of your house, a door to your house is always going to be a focal point. So you might as well make it as beautiful as possible because it's always going to be a focal point it's always going to be a place where people look at it from far away and from close up. So it's called clematis macro pelada Mountain Dale, and we got it just this year from brushwood nurseries, which specializes in clematis and other climbing vines. spawn COP is not spawn con only Hey bro. nursery freak, send us some climate? Um, no, I think they I think they sponsor Margaret roaches podcast a way to garden which is really really wonderful and our status so much. So anyway, I thought if they sponsor Margaret they're probably pretty good. So I might as well look up and spend some some money there. And this climate is is unbelievable. It's so beautiful. The blooms when I think of traditional climate is the blooms are kind of like these flat discs of petals. That you look at head on and you see the center of it and all the petals kind of go out. Macro pull out a mountain down has hanging blossoms that hang down they're described as hanging like ballet skirts, and the petals are what I would describe as almost like a purple highlighter a purple like like blue purple. Shockingly bright, beautiful, true blue, purple. A lot of purples in the garden are like maybe lavender, but more of like a almost pinky purple.
Gabe Long:dusty like I see it.
Rebecca:Yeah, it's hard. It's rare to find like really purpley purple, blue, purple saturated. Yeah, saturated purple. And man, this has it and it's blooming the set for the second time. We planted it this spring. It bloomed. Now it has grown. I don't know maybe four feet. Oh, it'll grow a lot taller. It'll add ultimately, it'll grow eight to 12 feet high. And I dead. Yes. trellised on the back of our house, it won't damage the house, it will die back to the root and we'll just pull the dead plant material off of the trellis at the end of the year. And it's blooming for the second time. It's so beautiful. Like I everyone should have this plant in the garden. It's so gorgeous. So that's those my faves.
Gabe Long:Yeah, those are good face. Oh, yes.
Rebecca:Okay, so let's talk about bugs.
Gabe Long:I'm excited to talk about bugs. I fucking love bugs, and you fucking hate but
Rebecca:I am one of those people who has what I now have discovered, I guess people are saying it's maybe a genetic thing or something where mosquitoes really love me and they will go to me and find me even in a crowd. I will be like covered in mosquitoes. So growing up that way, I think made me sort of bug phobic. And I don't love spiders. I think I'm in very good company with people who just don't love bugs.
Gabe Long:You have a reasonable like, you have a very average.
Rebecca:Probably Yeah, I would say that's right. But what's been really cool is getting more and more interested in gardening and spending time in the garden. I have been experiencing the way that bugs work in like a different way. And it's made me more interested in them. And definitely more of a bug hater of bad bugs. But kind of a bug lover of the good bugs on our bug friends.
Gabe Long:I guess I want to set up your bug journey by talking about many years ago in Brooklyn. We had our first garden together and i was growing some kale and there were a lot of aphids on the kale was eat a lot a lot of and that I think not only put you off eating the kale in our garden, but maybe put you off eating kale period.
Rebecca:Quite freaked me it really freaked me out. Yeah. So gross. You know, aphids, like don't bite or anything. I don't know. They shouldn't be so bad, but they're just gross as hell.
Gabe Long:They're so gross. pretty gross. But we still have aphids, and we're in a new garden and the aphids are on the plants that we eat from time to time, but I feel like you've really I want you to take us through the journey has come
Rebecca:a long way. Yeah, it's come a long way.
Gabe Long:What happened? What did you learn?
Rebecca:Okay, here's the thing that happened. What happened? What happened was We planted some honeysuckle and I went out to the garden and I said, Oh, the honeysuckle is growing so fast. It's doing really well. There's so much of it. I started inspecting it. Oh, it looks like some blooms are starting to form some buds. And I started looking at it and I saw aphids. Oh my god, there's aphids on the honeysuckle. And I started Googling it. Oh, what should we do? We blast it off with water. I don't really want to use insecticide. They're kind of harmless but like not grit, which we do. And I kind of was lazy and I didn't really do anything. Because it seemed overwhelming and hard. And I didn't want to interact with the aphids even enough to treat the plant for the aphids. So I just was like Yeah, whatever. And then I went back out like a week later or two weeks later, and I was like whoa, whoa, let's see how many aphids there are now. Oh, God. And then I noticed Oh, ladybugs are here. Look, the lady but this isn't spring and I noticed that I was seeing a couple of ladybugs flying around and kind of landing on the icicle. Long story short, The LadyBugs were laying eggs on the honeysuckle, which I found they're cool looking. They're kind of bright orangey yellow, they lay them on the underside of the leaves in these neat, really cute tight little rows. And I watched the eggs and then they hatched into little tiny Ladybug nymphs that look like alligators without much like so much like alligators. They have these weird little tails but they wag around, and they have little tiny legs on the front. And these nymphs will go up to the aphids and just start chowing down. And their tiny little nymphs and like big ass aphids, and they just unhinge their jaws, and they're just like no home and it just start inhaling these aphids, one after another after another. And it was so cool to watch. And within like days, the aphids were decimated, no aphids remained on the plants. And I was like, wait, this is the coolest thing ever. And that was like three or four years ago. And ever since I see the aphids, and I wait for the ladybugs. And sure enough, The LadyBugs arrive and the leaves get you know, I look at the leaves and I find the eggs, I find the nymphs and the aphids disappear. And it's really like just fun and cool to watch. I feel like a little kid. And yeah, it was like this big turning point for me of like, oh, they're like bad bugs and good bugs. And there's a whole thing and we're really supporting the ecosystem, we're probably attracting the good bugs. And so often the good bugs can kind of take care of the bad bugs, and kind of set me off on this course of being more and more interested in a more like holistic approach to looking at our garden and, you know, bugs playing one role of the many, many, many processes that are all taking place simultaneously in the garden.
Gabe Long:Yeah, I would say maybe just one, like reframing or something that I would think about slightly differently is rather than sort of good bugs and bad bugs, maybe it's like destructive bugs and non destructive bugs. Right?
Rebecca:Yeah, like like tests versus, versus, you know, pollinator pollinators that are helpful between
Gabe Long:them, because I'm leading to the kind of idea that like, doing research on this, trying to have a garden that is sort of organic, and yeah, chemical free, and whatever. A lot of what I have come across is this idea that, as you see with the aphids, and the ladybugs, there's this kind of whole circle of life, circle of birth and predation and whatever that is happening. And if you support it in its totality, if you say like alright, all, you know, come on in bugs, there's not going to be insecticide here that we're not going to, you know, sort of do these like carpet bombing things, then, often the problem will take care of itself and you won't get a population of a single destructive bug that's way out of control, you'll get, you know, things will kind of reach a balance, as opposed to when you do these big chemical interventions, you often wind up with some destructive bug that is immune to that intervention. Or you know, you've Okay, you you know, got rid of your aphids, but you also got rid of all your pollinators or you know, you you've kind of messed with this like, very complex miniature ecosystem in a way that is ultimately not helpful, even taking out of it any sort of ecological questions. have like your larger impact? And are you doing something good or bad? Even just based on like, are you going to get a lot of aphids or not on your kale, you're probably not going to wind up with a positive result just because there's no way for you to interfere in a way that is so targeted that you're just going to get rid of one thing.
Rebecca:And exactly on that topic, some people are like, Oh, I have effects, I should buy a huge amount of ladybugs from the internet. You can do that. But um, ladybugs travel pretty fast, pretty far. And what's going to happen is they're all going to just scatter to the wind and fly away. And you might get a few on your plants. But it's not really what I've read over and over from all the experts is that it's not worth doing because you might be introducing a type of neat Ladybug that is not native to your particular environment, which might not be helpful. And they're just not going to probably make a dent. They're going to just fly off and you will have wasted your money. Yeah, I just looked and the University of Kentucky Extension Service reports that a single Ladybug will eat 5000 aphids during its lifetime. And that one Ladybug nymph will eat about 400 aphids in the three weeks before it pupates.
Gabe Long:That's a lot of aphids.
Rebecca:Yeah. And when they hatch, you're getting like dozens of the little nip sometimes Yeah. So that's, you do the math, you do the
Unknown:aphids.
Gabe Long:I guess the other thing that I would say is that I feel like I'm really harping on the sort of complexity of nature here. But, you know, you take something like ants and you're like, Okay, well, we've got all these ants like around our foundation or whatever, like who likes and nobody likes ants, what the fuck are they doing? And then come to learn. And so I'm learning this as a very amateur, but I feel like even scientists, entomologists are, you know, endlessly learning new things about plant bug relationships. So come to find out that Trillium, which we just bought, and it's like a wonderful plant. That seed is spread by ants. The Trillium plant creates a seed that is attached to this little high calorie ant food bite. The ants go into Trillium, they grab the food, they take it back to their nest, which is of course in a little tunnel underground somewhere, eat their little high calorie by leave the seed buried in a perfect place for the Trillium for the Trillium seed to root and grow. And you know, so you might think, like, Oh, well, the ants, like they're annoying. Let's get rid of the answer your Trillium stock gonna spread.
Rebecca:And Trillium is like a prized by native and booziest kind of plant. It's pretty hard to propagate. It can take up to seven, maybe more seven years or so. For to go from seed to flowering plants. So we love the ants for doing this with the Trillium like it's true all the people like
Gabe Long:the Trillium Oh, the answer doing what propagators struggle to do, you know, like, there's this kind of any interferences that we make in the cycle of things should be very like pro buck, as opposed to anti bug,
Rebecca:right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Gabe Long:So something like having the honeysuckle near your vegetable garden as we just kind of lucked into doing. The honey suckle starts blooming pretty early in the season. So the aphids come, The LadyBugs come when the greens and other things are coming into their own. There's already this population of aphids and ladybugs that's relatively balanced. So it's not like as soon as the vegetables are coming up, there's the sudden invasion of aphids. People in the agricultural world would call it trap cropping where you have a crop that purposefully is attracting certain bugs and kind of creating this balanced population of pest and predator so that that's sort of their pre existing and you're not like sacrificing your first crop while waiting for your predators to come. Yeah, okay. You I know what time googling.
Rebecca:No, we're not supposed to be experts.
Gabe Long:Well, not? Definitely not.
Rebecca:Thank you so much for listening to leafing out. It's been a pleasure talking about gardening. We hope you like it. And good. Can people get in touch with us to ask us questions?
Gabe Long:If you have a question that you want answered on the podcast, we would love it if you emailed us. You can just email us a regular email, but even better would be a voice memo. It's leafing out pod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Instagram at leafing out pod we try to post a fair number of photos of the garden so you have some visual reference for what we're talking about. Also Also, if you like the show, you can review it on Apple podcast that helps other people find Find us.