Episode 41: Winterizing the Garden, Coneflowers, Mugwort & Overmountain

This week’s podcast episode contains a little bit of everything for residents of the Hudson Valley. Teresa Golden (The Veggie Patch) starts it off with a segment about how to put a vegetable garden ‘to bed’ for the winter. Sanitation and composting are covered as key elements to successfully preparing a garden to survive the winter and be ready to get off to a fast start in the spring.

Then Tim Kennelty (Good Plant/ Bad Plant) is back with another segment featuring the purple cornflower (echinacea purpurea), a favorite New York garden perennial and a very colorful native flower, beloved by birds and pollinators. He also discusses the challenges of dealing with mugwort, a common weed in the garden which is also a prolific invasive.

The episode concludes with another virtual tour with Heidi Bock (Trekking the Trails). The Overmountain Conservation area, located in Ancram, NY, consists of 10 miles of trails with awesome scenic overlooks of both the Catskill and Taconic Mountains. It’s also a great place to see grassland birds.

We hope these segments inform, educate, and inspire you to enjoy the natural beauty that exists in New York’s Hudson Valley. Enjoy!

Hosts: Tim Kennelty and Jean Thomas

Guests: Teresa Golden, Tim Kennelty and Heidi Bock

Photo by: Tim Kennelty

Resources

Veggie Patch: Getting Your Garden Ready for Winter : CCE Suffolk County Family Health & Wellness Strengthening Families & Communities (cornell.edu) ; Prepare your vegetable garden for winter | UMN Extension

Good/Bad Plant: Purple Coneflowers: Echinacea purpurea (Eastern purple coneflower) | Native Plants of North America (wildflower.org) ; Mt. Cuba Center | Echinacea for the Mid-Atlantic Region - Mt. Cuba Center (mtcubacenter.org) ; Echinacea purpurea (Coneflower, Eastern Purple Coneflower, Purple Coneflower, Purple Rudbeckia) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (ncsu.edu) ; Mugwort:Mugwort – New York Invasive Species Information (nyis.info) ; Invasive Species Western New York PRISM (wnyprism.org) ; DEC Prohibited and Regulated Invasive Plants (ny.gov)

Trekking the Trails: Overmountain Conservation Area – Columbia Land Conservancy (clctrust.org)

Last updated November 3, 2022