Replay of episode 62. Miriam Goldberger | Author of Taming Wildflowers and Developer of Eco-Lawn™ low-maintenance grass | Wildflower Farm Southern Ontario

Published: April 24, 2018, 12:05 p.m.

Replay of my interview that originally aired July 16, 2015. I thought it was good to do a bunch of landscaping episodes for Earth Day and the spring season! Taming WildFlowers Miriam Goldberger is the author of a new book that is not just informative but absolutely elegant called http://www.tamingwildflowers.com (Taming Wildflowers). Miriam and her husband Paul Jenkins have been tending the http://www.wildflowerfarm.com (Wildflower Farm) in Southern Ontario, Canada since 1988. They also developed http://www.wildflowerfarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=20 (Eco-Lawn) which is a drought-tolerant, low maintenance turf grass that is grown at homes and businesses across North America. Tell us a little about yourself. I have been growing flowers since 1985, 1986, and http://www.wildflowerfarm.com (Wildflower Farm) was founded in 1988. I began by being captivated by the process of growing flowers from seed. It originally Wildflower Farm, back in the day it was a dried wildflower farm, then it morphed into Canada’s first pick your own flower farm and I had acres and acres of flowers, annuals and perennials not natives at that time to tend to. I became interested in wildflowers because they were low maintenance, I needed some gardens that weren’t for the pick your owns, that were for display that tended to themselves basically. So I researched the topic and found that perennials; North American Wildflowers and Native Grasses that are such low maintenance! It astounded me! Once they were established, they didn’t need to be watered, they didn’t need to be fertilized, they just took care of themselves they lived for a very long, long time. So I put in some gardens, little gardens just to decorate the place that weren’t for pick your own. And people started asking me about the gardens, and they wanted us to landscape places at their gardens just like those gardens and they also wanted us to sell them wildflower plants. And we received so much interest in the wildflowers, the landscaping the plants, that eventually we succomed to the  customers, and began to seriously study wildflowers and indeed became wildflower landscapers and started a native landscape nursery  and destination point that was in existence for over 25 years! And so I really learned a lot about wildflowers over the years, I learned how to grow native plants from seed, how to landscape with wildflowers either using only wildflowers or to incorporate flowers into an existent non-native garden. And also how to truly grow a wildflower meadow, the way most of us think the way wildflower meadows should be grown isn’t really the case, and it’s not a hard thing to do, but it is different then what you think it might be and then we also developed http://www.wildflowerfarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=20 (Eco-Lawn) which is a low maintenance turf grass that really is such a great answer to drought problems and high maintenance expensive. There’s been a busy time, never a dull moment. Well how do you grow a wildflower meadow? I guess you don’t just broadcast the seeds on to a pile of dirt? There are a lot of people who ask: Can you just throw the seeds anywhere? Can I throw them on my lawn? Can I just throw them on my garden? If I throw them out into a ditch will they grow? Well, most of the time the answer is no, and there’s a few key reasons for that. First  of all, when most of us North Americans encounter seeds being sold, there in a big bag of seeds, with pretty pictures on it, or a can of seeds, or a pack of seeds and they’re usually not true North American wildflowers, most of the time they’re some random blend of European wildflowers, or not even wildflowers but plants from somewhere else that don’t tend to do well in here in the hot, very difficult conditions that we have through much of North America. If you and I happened to live in England where it rained a... Support this podcast