HACK YOUR POTS: SMART PLANTS. PERFECT PLACEMENT

It’s prime container gardening season, and everywhere gardeners are spending more than they should to achieve the dream of pots that stop people in their tracks and make their neighbors slightly jealous. But as anyone who has watched a lovingly assembled pot turn into a crispy disappointment knows — it’s not quite as simple as thriller, spiller, filler.

(Those words. So useful. So annoying.)

Today on The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne are getting into the real business of containers: placement, proportion, pairing, and the hacks that professional container gardeners actually use — the ones they learned the hard way, so you don’t have to.

There will be opinions about sweet potato vine. There will be strong feelings about saucers. And somewhere in there, a 95-year-old gardener named Donna is going to redefine your potting vocabulary. If Leslie can remember what she said.

Grab your trowel. And maybe a dark and stormy.

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Before “microclimates” became a gardening buzzword, Leslie and Marianne were already having hot flashes in the garden. 🔥🌿

In this vintage One More Sip episode of The Garden Mixer, we talk about:
• hot vs cool pockets in the garden
• why some plants fry in summer and freeze in spring
• raised beds, slopes, walls, and heat traps
• tropicals, hostas, wisteria heartbreak, and elephant ears
• Thomas Jefferson’s surprisingly clever vegetable garden design
• and how understanding your own garden is the real gardening superpower

Also included:
🍸 Marianne’s legendary goddess dress
🍸 Leslie comparing gardening to golf bunker shots
🍸 Hot Girl Summer Gardening™
🍸 More botanical pronunciation adventures than anyone asked for

This episode originally aired for paid One More Sip subscribers and is now being released publicly one year later.

#gardening #gardenpodcast #microclimates #gardeningtips #plants #thegardenmixer #horticulture #gardendesign

HIGH IMPACT, LOW EFFORT FLOWERS THAT DO THE WORK FOR YOU

When the growing season is moving at breakneck speed, an easy win in the form of copious, gorgeous, hey-I-forgot-about-THOSE! flowers is not only cherished, but longed for. Even gardeners who insist on making things more difficult for themselves (ahem…Marianne?) can enjoy the guilty pleasure of high impact, low effort blooms that do a disproportional amount of the work, and make you look like you know what you’re doing.

In this week’s episode of The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne share some of their favorite flower-power plants, and confess that sometimes, their best laid plans are made better by plants who showed up, grabbed a drink, and quietly got on with the business of being beautiful.

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Flamboyant, sophisticated, blousy and beautiful - the peony tops the favorites chart of so many gardeners (and non-gardeners), that we had to devote a spring episode to them.

They are delicate, but tough, and can live for up to a century -– so it makes sense to figure out what you want and where you want it before you plant one. Leslie & Marianne start that conversation with their favorites today, on The Garden Mixer.

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Leslie and Marianne have ground to cover today. And possibly, so do you.

Spring hits, everything wakes up and suddenly your garden looks like it’s got a bad case of bedhead. Bare spots and awkward tendrils abound. What can pull everything together and literally connect the dots? Our suggestion is a strategic toupee in the form of a good ground cover that also protects the soil, cools the roots, & pampers the wildlife.

But which ones? Some ground covers don’t just fill in, they take over. And what makes a ground cover anyway? It’s time to expand our definition beyond the ubiquitous three-inch mondo grass.

Ground covers. The ones that behave, the ones that absolutely do not, and how to tell the difference before you plant yourself into a corner.

And what do eighties big hair and cheesecake pans have to do with gardening anyway? Today on the Garden Mixer.

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Just when you thought winter would never end, spring comes and clobbers you with seeds, weeds, and a list that just won’t quit. Cue the panic. There is a TON to do — so how do we prioritize what’s important, what’s inconvenient, and what’s seriously not getting touched for a couple months?

Leslie and Marianne thought that the best person to tell them was friend and Founding Mixer Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener. With her down-to-earth Wisconsin wisdom and general smart-assery, she’ll get us all in good shape — or at least slap us around a little over a cocktail. Today on The Garden Mixer.

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Absolute certainties make Marianne’s Spidey senses start to tingle; Leslie simply ignores absolutes and does her own thing. Which means Leslie would have been much more fun in high school. But where do they come down on the native/non-native debate?

Bouncing off a recent article in GardenRant, where Marianne laid out the development of a powerful movement in US horticulture, the girls dig into the tension -- and once or twice, into each other.

In an industry where plants are happily termed ‘good’ and ‘bad’, invasive plants have now been joined in purgatory by the new baddie term of ‘emerging invasives’, and not a little zealotry informs policy decisions that affect what we can buy, grow, work with, and write about, can we afford to ignore the issue?

Have some thoughts? We would love to hear them AND read them on air in a future episode. Send them to comments@thegardenmixer.com or drop them in The Garden Mixer Chat on Substack with other Mixers from around the country.

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It’s that time of year when we put blade to wood and help our shrubs and trees to become the best versions of themselves. Pruning is a big job and many gardeners are right in the middle of it by the beginning of March. Some of us are excited by the challenge. Others are dreading the many decisions still in front of them.

Leslie and Marianne aim to channel that excitement, alleviate any anxiety, and set you loose on another pruning season. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even weird science. It’s working boldly and courageously — throwing in a little curiosity, and having fun. They’ll tell you why, how, and with what. And they’re definitely going to need the Dixter bell. Today, on The Garden Mixer.

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