I mentioned last week that I am working on a special episode of Our Plant Stories for December, think Radio 4 Pick of the Year meets plants! 

So exciting news - the first pick is in and it’s from Jane Perrone presenter of the On the Ledge podcast. Jane was one of the first people to contact me when I launched the podcast, offering to mention it in her newsletter. If you have heard all the episodes you’ll know that she shared her plant story in Spider plants. I still love that image (any librarians look away now!) of a small girl, armed with a watering can, in the school library, looking after and watering the spider plants. I’ll leave her pick as a surprise but as we start to think of Christmas I do want to mention a potential present for any friends or family who have fallen in love with houseplants. It’s called Houseplant Gardener in a Box and Jane kindly sent me a box. Its a set of cards with each card written by Jane and featuring a different plant. There are instructions on care and propagation. I immediately reached for the Aloe card as I have a rather neglected Aloe that sits on a hard to reach shelf near a dryer. I think I could do better. Jane’s advice on Spiderplants led me to take my rather sad pale green Spiderplant out to the garden where I repotted it and gave it a summer holiday in a shady spot. It is now back on the book shelf with a wonderful deep green colour and LOTS of little babies.

I did a talk about the podcast last night. I shared what I had learned on this podcast journey and took the opportunity to share some clips from the episodes. For this group I chose Hosta and Mint and Magnolia. It was lovely afterwards to hear people swapping plant stories. One lady loves the smell of raspberries - they transport her to her grandparents garden. The host was French and told us how her mother taught her to forage and cook with the herbs and plants around her. Another lady has a friend who is currently fascinated by a particular heritage vegetable - we might come back to that one! What I love is how these plant stories resonate with so many of us. 

Some thanks this week - to Hilary and Alison for buying me coffee. (You can find the ‘coffee tab’ in the top navigation bar on the website) To distribute a podcast you need a distributer and mine is called Captivate. I chose it because they offered lots of really good, free advice on how to start a podcast. You can end up paying a lot to learn this, despite the fact that there are lots of free resources out there. I digress - your coffees have now paid the Captivate fees for the first 6 months of series 2. YAY and THANKS!

Also thanks to Janet who shared in comments last week a garden called Hill Close Gardens in Warwick. She thought they would make a fascinating episode and I will definitely be following it up, they look wonderful. If you have a story that you would like me to follow up do drop it in the comments or email me sally@ourplantstories.com. I had a lovely conversation this week with a listener about a small plant memory and as we chatted we realised it illustrates a much bigger question - again watch this space.