Episodes

  • Tomatoes With Craig LeHoullier-A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach February 28, 2022

    Tomatoes With Craig LeHoullier-A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach February 28, 2022
    Feb 26 2022

    Sick of winter? What I find helps, besides the occasional warmish, sunny day, is thinking about tomatoes. And that's what we're going to do today with Craig LeHoullier, author of the hit 2014 book “Epic Tomatoes,” who has over the years grown some 3,000 varieties in his home garden and adds new ones to his list every year

    Craig, who gardens in North Carolina, is a retired chemist with a longtime passion for tomatoes. He's the co-founder of the Dwarf Tomato Project, an advisor on tomatoes to Seed Savers Exchange, and the person who in 1990 named the popular heirloom Cherokee Purple from seed that had been passed down and eventually made its way to him. 
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    26 mins
  • Birds in Winter With David Sibley - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Nov. 11, 2024

    Birds in Winter With David Sibley - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Nov. 11, 2024
    Nov 8 2024
    When cold weather approaches, we humans often have it easy: We can retreat to the shelter of central heating, or pile on more layers of clothing. The path to survival is a lot more complicated for birds, of course, and a new book delves into how they have adapted to face the challenges of cold and scarcity of food that winter represents. The book is “The Courage of Birds and the Often Surprising Ways They Survive Winter,” and one of its co-creators, David Sibley, is here today to talk about some of the impressive suite of tactics that different species of birds... Read More ›
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    29 mins
  • Tomatoes With Craig LeHoullier-A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach February 28, 2022

    Tomatoes With Craig LeHoullier-A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach February 28, 2022
    Feb 26 2022

    Sick of winter? What I find helps, besides the occasional warmish, sunny day, is thinking about tomatoes. And that's what we're going to do today with Craig LeHoullier, author of the hit 2014 book “Epic Tomatoes,” who has over the years grown some 3,000 varieties in his home garden and adds new ones to his list every year

    Craig, who gardens in North Carolina, is a retired chemist with a longtime passion for tomatoes. He's the co-founder of the Dwarf Tomato Project, an advisor on tomatoes to Seed Savers Exchange, and the person who in 1990 named the popular heirloom Cherokee Purple from seed that had been passed down and eventually made its way to him. 
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    26 mins
  • Trees for the Future With George Coombs - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Nov. 4, 2024

    Trees for the Future With George Coombs - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Nov. 4, 2024
    Oct 31 2024
    In the face of shifting weather patterns influenced by a changing climate, the garden can be a really confusing place these days. What stressors are coming next, and which plants will have the resilience required to stand up to whatever those prove to be? With no group of plants is that more essential to think about—or trickier to figure out—than with trees. Because of their long lifespans, a tree planted today will be reaching maturity in what may be a whole different world. At Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, the esteemed native plant research site, a new effort called the... Read More ›
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    28 mins
  • Solving Garden Mysteries, With Flora & Frost - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 28, 2024

    Solving Garden Mysteries, With Flora & Frost - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 28, 2024
    Oct 22 2024
    The garden is my favorite escape from stress, of course, but as I have confessed before on the podcast, I sometimes succumb to the lure of swiping my way through Instagram during non-garden hours, like so many millions of us modern-day citizens. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the short, information-packed videos from today’s guest, a gardener who goes by the screen name of Flora & Frost, and thanks to the way Instagram works, I can see that a number of my keenest garden friends also follow her. So I thought I’d invite her over to chat awhile and get to know... Read More ›
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    28 mins
  • Editing and Dividing Perennials With Toshi Yano - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach August 23, 2021

    Editing and Dividing Perennials With Toshi Yano - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach August 23, 2021
    Aug 20 2021
    Maybe you, like I do, have certain perennial beds that could use editing and some particular plants that need dividing in the process. That’s just one focus of today’s guest, Toshi Yano, in his role as director of horticulture at Wethersfield, a former private estate turned public garden in the Hudson Valley of New York, He’ll tell us the how-to, and also about visiting this special place.  Toshi Yano Toshi is in his third year as director of horticulture at the former estate called Wethersfield garden in Dutchess County, New York, with its 3-acre formal gardens plus 7 acres of wilderness garden and commanding views of the Catskills and Berkshire Mountains.  Toshi and his team are bringing the gardens back to life, and he told me about the place, and specifically about the tasks of editing and dividing that every perennial gardener needs to do, whatever their garden scale. 
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    26 mins
  • Lawn Transformation With Sara Weaner - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 21, 2024

    Lawn Transformation With Sara Weaner - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 21, 2024
    Oct 18 2024
    Today’s guest, Sara Weaner Cooper, and her husband, Evan Cooper, bought their first home a couple of years ago, and before long undertook transitioning the front lawn organically from mown grass into a meadow. Sara’s here to tell us about their hands-on adventure and all the how-to steps—including the importance of communicating your intentions to your neighbors along the way. Sara Weaner Cooper, who has her bachelor’s and master’s in anthropology and education, is executive director of New Directions in the American Landscape, an educational organization founded by her father, the renown ecological landscape designer Larry Weaner, that promotes ecology-based landscape... Read More ›
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    29 mins
  • Birding Journal With Joan Strassmann - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 14, 2024

    Birding Journal With Joan Strassmann - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - Oct. 14, 2024
    Oct 11 2024
    It was almost two years ago to the day when today’s guest, Joan Strassmann, last visited me on the show, right around the time her book “Slow Birding” was released. Now, as then, I’ve seen what are pretty much my last migrant warblers of the year move through the garden, and am wondering how long I get to look at the garden’s masses of winterberry hollies before the robins and cedar waxwings have at them … and whether the black bears will let me put up the bird feeders as early as Thanksgiving this year or not without a run-in. ... Read More ›
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    29 mins