Growing Together: A Gardening Podcast · Forum Communications Co.

Breathe new life into your floral arrangements with tips from Kimberly Hess at Prairie Petals

·43 min·4 clips

The conversation opens with John and Don catching up on late November garden work and the last jobs before winter. Don talks about the muted colors in the perennial garden and getting ready to finish up for the season. John brings up a listener who sent in a photo of an amaryllis planted out in his flower garden. That note sends the discussion toward flower behavior, blooming time, and the kind of surprises gardeners like to compare. Kimberly Hess joins from Prairie Petals and starts talking about what she grows and sells. She explains that Prairie Petals offers flower CSAs, where members pay for 12 or 16 weeks of flowers and pick up fresh flowers once a week. The conversation makes that sound practical and useful rather than delicate or fancy. John reacts like someone who has just learned about a local option he might actually use. The tone stays neighborly and informal, with questions rising naturally out of curiosity. From there, the talk turns to bittersweet, which suits the season and opens the door to wild harvesting. Kimberly and Don joke about people guarding their own patches the way they would guard a fishing hole. That leads into a story about how Kimberly got into flowers in the first place. She says her original email address was ditch picker, which gives the whole thing a very plainspoken, practical origin. She describes agreeing to grow flowers for someone and then realizing she needed to find enough material fast. A deadline pushed her into a more improvisational way of looking at the roadside and ditch edges around her. What looked like a problem became a source of flowers and a path into the business. That idea of solving a floral need becomes one of the episode's steady threads. Kimberly and the hosts keep returning to the idea that a problem is something to work through, not something to freeze up over. The conversation also lands on drying flowers and keeping things lasting longer. Don thanks her for the tips and says he appreciates the practical advice. The episode closes with the usual friendly wrap-up and Don's email address for listeners who want to reach out.

As heard by us

Practical flower talk that treats drying, CSAs, and seasonal gaps as problems to work through.

This episode stays grounded in a grower's point of view, and that helps. Kimberly Hess and Don keep circling back to questions that actually matter in the garden, like drying flowers, running a CSA, and what to do when the floral calendar leaves a gap.

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Why you'd press play

You want flowers to last longer without making it fussy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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