:30 What’s for dinner: Mustards, Cresses, and Peas Spring greens and Peas
What to forage for in early spring, and should you really plant peas on Saint Patrick’s Day?

5:18 Insider Information: Cymbidiums
How to grow Cymbidium orchids, keep them alive through summer and bring them back into flower.

9:15 Eat/Drink/Grow: Cold Frames and Other Ways of “Pushing Spring”
Ellen and C.L. explore the ways we can jumpstart our spring growing with cold frames and other means of protection. See the lyrics for Lou and Peter Berryman’s song that C.L. refers to below.

 21:57 Did You Know: Shamrocks
At this time of year garden centers and grocery stores are filled with several types of Oxalis plants, sold as signs of spring and symbols of St. Patrick’s day. We talk about how to grow these as houseplants and use them in outdoor containers.

26:05 Love Letters and Questions:
Planting pansies as early as possible.

Mustards, cress and other winter weeds are good for foraged meals early in the spring.

This is the musk mustard that Ellen talks about foraging for early in the spring. We also discuss winter and bitter cress, which many people have growing.

Cymbidiums are cool weather orchids. In this Plantrama episode we talk about how to keep them alive and blooming from year to year.

Cymbidiums come in a variety of colors. They are usually available in February or March in stores. Ellen loves this one, while C.L. is wild about the ones with pink or green flowers.

Smart Pots are great for starting plants early in cold frames or solar heated greenhouses because they can be transferred outside once the weather starts to get warmer.

These sprout are baby arugula plants that have been started in Smart Pots in a cold frame.

 

You can find out more about Smart Pots here.

Pushing Spring Tango by Lou and Peter Berryman

It isn’t forty four degrees
There is no green yet in the trees
It may be March but even so
There’s still a foot of snow
Tonight it’s gonna freeze

What green there is is in her thumb
As her seed catalogs have come
She can take those five below nights
As long as she has growlights
Her life is not so glum

(Chorus:)
Don’t try to tell her she has to wait for robins to sing
Don’t ever say she’s jumping the gun by pushing the spring
She’ll wave a dirty trowel and say so what if I do
If you had spent your life in Wisconsin, you’d push it too

You could try wooing her with wine
Although you’ll have to stand in line
Behind a tuber in a tub
An ornamental shrub
And cuttings off a vine

Don’t bring her poems of romance
But know the names of all her plants
Don’t buy a diamond to surprise her
But bring some fertilizer
And you may stand a chance

(Chorus)

Now you are nothing in her eyes
If you don’t photosynthesize
If you have leaves instead of hair
Then you may get somewhere
I doubt it otherwise

Don’t bother opening your shirt
Unless you’re green she doesn’t flirt
She will ignore your conversation
Her mind’s on germination
Her heart is in the dirt…

(Chorus)

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