Episode 34: Grumpy Loves His Collard Greens

About This Episode

In this episode of Ask Grumpy, Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener, addresses a concerned reader’s question about dying ajuga. Plus,Grumpy’s love for collard greens.

Question Of The Week

Why is my established bed of Ajuga dying? It was thriving just a month ago here in southeast Oklahoma.

Grumpy Gardener Answer: Well, if you don't know what Ajuga is, it goes by another common name called bugleweed, which is really a weird name. Anyway, it's a ground cover. It usually grows in the shade. It spreads, it has either purple or green or sometimes, pink foliage. And in the springtime, they usually have these really pretty spikes of blue or violet flowers, and usually it's pretty trouble-free, but what you're describing is a disease called crown rot. And that is promoted by having soil that's too wet where the Ajuga is growing and it can kill a whole bed of it in one growing season. So now it's hard to get rid of because it's in the soil, but you can try:

1. Pull up all the Ajuga plants and the roots and throw them out with the trash. Okay?
2. Replace the top couple inches of soil where that Ajuga was growing because the disease is in the soil. Every time that you use that shovel, you want to try and sterilize it. How you do that is you might put a half a cup of bleach in a bucket of water and dip it in there to kill any of the disease that might be on the shovel. And then, fill in with new fresh soil that contains a lot of organic matter because that will help loosen the soil where the plants are going to be to help improve the drainage. If you have something like, let's say, a downspout or a source of water that keeps the soil there too wet, you're going to have to fix that problem because if the soil keeps staying too wet, you're just going to be dealing with this problem time after time after time.
   

Plant Of The Week

Collard Greens

I never ate collard greens when I was growing up because my mother hated them. She grew up in North Carolina, and they had a big vegetable garden and she'd always say, "Oh, we had collard greens every day when I was growing up. I just hate them. I'll never serve them again." So, when I was growing up we never had them. It wasn't until I moved to Alabama that I had my first collard greens. And I got to say, I love collard greens with a big L-O-V-E. Does that make me Southern or what? My wife and I fix them in lots of different ways. We steam, saute, and add them in all sorts of dishes. And the good thing about them, they're very healthy for you. They're high in vitamins A and C and calcium and fiber.

Now's a good time for you to plant collards in your garden. Rather than sowing seeds, I prefer to buy potted seedlings at the garden center. There's different selections that we know do well, and have been planted for generations. Some of them are called champion and there's another one called Georgia, which I imagine originated in Georgia. And there's another one called Vates, and when you get these from the garden center and bring them home, you plant it about 24 inches apart in a sunny, well-drained soil. A few tips:

• They like the pH of the soil to be around neutral. And a lot of people in the Southeast have acid soil. So to guard against having the too acid soil, sprinkle a half a cup of ground lime around each plant and then just water it in, and then you just grow through the winter.
• They're cold-tolerant. They grow all the way, from fall through spring.
• When they get frost on them, they get sweeter and they just get better and better and better.
• When they get big, it's time to harvest them. You could do one of two things. You can just pick the outside leaves off, harvest those, and leave the rest of the plant in the ground, or you can just pull the entire plant from the ground, take it into the kitchen. It's great.
  

Ask Grumpy

Ask Grumpy is a podcast featuring Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener. For more than 20 years, Grumpy has been sharing advice on what to grow, when to plant, and how to manage just about anything in your garden. Tune in for short episodes every Wednesday and Saturday as Grumpy answers reader questions, solves seasonal conundrums, and provides need-to-know advice for gardeners with his very Grumpy sense of humor. Be sure to follow Ask Grumpy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode.

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.