Shows
Plants Always WinPlant Evolution: Kid Q&AFor this episode, a class of elementary-school students prepared a list of questions about plants for Sean and Erin to answer. How did plants come to be the way they are? Why did they evolve to have roots (or no roots!) and leaves and fruit?
2025-11-2556 min
Plants Always WinEp. 38 Little Shop of Horrorswe’re doing nerdy Halloween horticulture by analyzing the representation of carnivorous plants in the classic musical Little Shop of Horrors—specifically the 1986 movie version.
2025-10-3149 minPlants Always WinEp. 37 Sunflower vs. SunchokeIt’s the versus episode they said couldn’t be done.Well, okay, not sure who “they” are, but something has certainly been conspiring against it. We first attempted an episode on sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, in the fall of 2024, before Plants Always Win was launched. It got left on the cutting room floor. Then in September of this year we recorded a proper Sunchokes vs. Sunflowers face-off, spending two hours in the recording studio. We later found out that Sean’s audio had quit after six minutes.But if you’re reading these words, we have finally succeeded! Wi...
2025-10-0853 min
Plants Always WinEp. 36 Community Gardens with Jessica LetteerThis episode is for anyone who has ever daydreamed about starting a community garden and for anyone who needs the boost of a good-news gardening story. Our guest is Jessica Letteer, who founded the Wilkes-Barre Area Community Gardens five years ago and kicked off a local movement of soil building and community gardening in an area marked by poverty, blighted soil, and food deserts. Jess’ home in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley bears the contamination left behind by abandoned coal mines, and services and infrastructure are chronically under-resourced. But she and a small group of other volunteers reached out to their city c...
2025-09-3040 min
Plants Always WinEp. 35 Bat Ecology with Dr. Dana Green Part 2Dr. Dana Green, a.k.a. "The Eyepatch Biologist" is back for part two! This free-flying conversation just couldn't be contained to a single hour.We plunge straight in this week with an urgent question: how do bats relieve themselves without dribbling on their own heads? From there the facts come thick and fast: microchiroptera (our local insect-eating, echolocating bats) vs. megachiroptera (bigger fruit-eating bats from other climates that don't echolocate); the truth about bats' sense of sight; and the unexpected songs of silverhair bats. Dana shares how to attract bats to our properties without welcoming them into our homes...
2025-09-2343 min
Plants Always WinEp. 34 Bat Ecology with Dr. Dana Green, Part 1Dr. Dana Green is a bat expert who is known online as The Eyepatch Biologist. As a science communicator, a pun connoisseur, and a woman who knows a good joke when it's staring her in the face, she says of herself, "What a wonderful bat advocate to go half blind."In Dana's interview with Sean, she tells us about her master's degree studying grasshopper mice (predatory, solitary, highly aggressive mice that howl) and her PhD in bat ecology, which she completed at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. We learn about echolocation and other bat chatter, fact check Hank Green's...
2025-09-1655 min
Plants Always WinEp. 33 Establishing Apples, Eradicating Horsetail & Fertilizing FlowersOur gardens are winding down for the season, but our audience is putting on a growth spurt! This crop of new listeners has seeded our Q&A inbox with a flush of questions, which we love to see. And while we’d normally answer these at the end of our versus episodes, we currently have a backlog of recorded episodes and we don’t want folks to have to wait for answers. That means it’s time for another Q&A special!We start with questions inspired by Sean’s recent video about an apple tree sold with its graft and root...
2025-09-0958 min
Plants Always WinEp. 32: Home Composting with Delaina ArnoldDo you make compost at home? Do you delight in the experience? If your answer to either of those questions is no, this week’s guest is here to help.Delaina Arnold is the community programs manager with the Georgian Bay Mnidoo Gamii Biosphere, a UNESCO-designated “ecologically significant” landscape where people are striving to live in balance with nature. As part of that striving, the Biosphere launched a pilot project in 2025 to help people learn about home composting, to get started doing it themselves, and to troubleshoot any problems. Now we get to benefit from all that education, as Delaina answer...
2025-09-0241 min
Plants Always WinEp. 31: Joyful Gardening with Chris Paul Rainbows“I am very enthusiastic about [gardening]. I don't know if I'm that great at it. I'm not very knowledgeable. I can't really answer any of your garden questions, but I love getting my hands dirty.”Gardening is for everyone! We’ve interviewed plenty of experts on Plants Always Win who’ve mastered everything from groundcovers to home hydroponics, but every so often we like to bring you a less experienced guest who is already skilled in one crucial area: gardening with joyful abandon.In their day job, Chris Paul Rainbows is a speaker and strategist who helps organizations create spaces where ev...
2025-08-2655 min
Plants Always WinEp. 30: Sassafras vs. Cola NutAre you finding yourself thirsty for a little soda pop this summer? How about for some botanical knowledge about soda pop’s history?In this plant face-off episode, Erin and Sean put some fizz into the competition with the plants behind two iconic flavours: the cola nut that gives cola its kick, and the sassafras that puts the root in root beer. Or, at least, the plants that did serve those roles before the advent of artificial flavouring. Erin takes the first swig with a dramatic overview of the North American Sassafras albidum, an aromatic tree with a long history of...
2025-08-1257 min
Plants Always WinEp. 29 Climate Action with Lauren SavilleThis week we’re celebrating the difference that can be made when a regional government supports its people and businesses in taking climate action. Get inspired by impactful local initiatives in Muskoka, Ontario, like:the Climate Hero Program, which awards individuals and businesses Bronze, Silver, and Gold rankings for the climate-friendly actions they take (including planting a pollinator garden!)the Muskoka EnvironHub website packed with resourcesthe Muskoka GeoHub, an online web mapping portal featuring floodplain mapping, real-time water levels, shoreline videos, and morea Community Energy and Emissions Reduction Planand, importantly, a Corporate Greenhouse Gas Initiative since the onus for change ca...
2025-07-1739 min
Plants Always WinEp. 28 Cultivation Activism with Lorraine JohnsonThis week we talk about the activism embedded in native plant gardening and the creation of pollinator habitat with Lorraine Johnson.Lorraine styles herself as a “cultivation activist”. It’s a term she came up with to describe the common purpose at the intersection of everything she does, from writing books to giving talks to supporting the fight against harmful grass and weed bylaws. This episode is for anyone who:feels guilt or overwhelm when they think about gardening, native plants, and invasive speciesfeels anger or frustration about garden centres promoting invasive plantsneeds tools and resources to fight bylaws that make i...
2025-06-251h 15
Plants Always WinEp. 27 Tomato vs. Pepper Part IIIt’s Part II of the nightshade party!Sean and Erin plunge back in with tomatoes and peppers, covering cultural history, culinary and medical uses, and fun facts about these garden staples of the nightshade family. If you could look back thousands of years to see gardens in the Andes mountains, you would find both of them growing there. Find out how peppers once acted both as a trade good and a discipline tool, where tomatoes have spread most around the world, and the truth about the fantastical-sounding tomato-potato. If you want to know more about growing tomatoes and peppers or...
2025-06-1749 minPlants Always WinEp. 26 Tomato vs. Pepper Part IIn this shady plant face-off, Sean and Erin explore two of the gardening world’s favourite nightshades: tomatoes and peppers. Both are members of the family Solanaceae, and have plenty of traits in common, so rather than splitting the episode in half our two hosts try a livelier approach this week, passing the stage back and forth to talk about their chosen plant’s botany, etymology, growing habits, and pest and disease management. Prepare for a wealth of interesting information (did you know the Spanish word for tomato references an old belief in their aphrodisiac qualities?) alongside practical gardening tips (make...
2025-06-121h 01
Plants Always WinEp. 25 Smart Hydroponics with Jennifer HolstonSmart hydroponics pioneer Jennifer Holston grows a living pantry in her home through all seasons. And so can you. When most of us hear the word “hydroponics,” we picture sprawling operations in a warehouse or basement, possibly constructed from home-drilled PVC pipes and buckets. We might also have a very specific idea of the kind of plants that are grown hydroponically. But over the last decade, attractive, compact, and easy-to-use home-scale hydroponic systems have become available. This week’s guest, Jennifer Holston, was an early adopter and she uses her bookshelf-sized indoor garden to grow everything from the expected herbs and let...
2025-06-0456 minPlants Always WinEp. 24 Serviceberry vs. HaskapWe’re berry excited for this extra delicious plant face-off. In this week’s shrub showdown, our hosts go head to head with serviceberries and haskaps. Sean represents the former, a member of the Amelanchier genus also known as saskatoons, juneberries, and shadbushes, among other names. With cocky confidence of a guaranteed win, he extols their hardiness (down to zone 1!), their robust hybridization, and their independence when it comes to fertilization. Who needs a pollenizer? Not serviceberry! Sometimes they don’t even need pollinators. With tangents into breeding seedless fruits and food-as-medicine research, we savour serviceberry’s taste, versatility, abundance, ecosystem...
2025-05-271h 03
Plants Always WinEp. 23 Life, Death, & Master Gardeners with Cole ImperiCole Imperi is known for her trailblazing work in thanatology, the study of death, dying and grief. But she’s also a master gardener: someone who helps others learn how to make life flourish. In this interview, she shows us how grief and gardening have much in common, from the importance of community engagement and cultural sensitivity to the roles of healing, resistance, and emotional well-being. After all, gardening can’t be separated from cultural practices and traditions. Everything in gardening connects back to broader societal themes. On a more pragmatic level, Cole and Sean compare notes on how the Maste...
2025-05-201h 01
Plants Always WinEp. 22 No Mow May…Debunked?Every spring, the gardening and sustainability side of the internet explodes with posts: Practice No Mow May! Let your lawn bloom! Support pollinators! But does a lawn and garden initiative begun in the UK have the same environmental impact in North America? That’s the subject under scrutiny in this episode as we examine whether well-meaning horticulture advice can be exported around the world. This week, Sean comes armed with research while Erin is equipped with curiosity. Is practicing No Mow May in Ontario helpful, harmful, or neutral? Does a lawn full of imported dandelions somehow hinder our pollinators? What nat...
2025-05-1445 min
Plants Always WinEp. 21 Permaculture and Biodynamics with Debby WardHave you ever wanted to go a step beyond organic gardening and buzzword-y sustainable practices? To grow food, flowers, community, and even society in relationship with the land? This week’s guest, Debby Ward of Prior Unity Garden, helps her clients and students do just that in their own yards. This week she joins Erin to talk about two systems she draws on in her work: permaculture and biodynamics.Debby shares her own journey in organic gardening and her mission to help clients understand their gardens, not just to maintain them. She and Erin compare notes on the principles of pe...
2025-05-0635 min
Plants Always WinEp. 20 Ask Erin Anything about Monarch ButterfliesHow much expertise does a children’s author need to write about monarch butterflies? In this episode, we find out.It’s a special show for a special day. Our co-host Erin Alladin is launching her second picture book, Wait Like a Seed, and we’re testing just how much research she did….and how much she retained. Wait Like a Seed uses the relationship between monarch butterflies and milkweed to teach kids the life cycle of a seed, and at the back of the book are nine extra pages of information about both monarchs and milkweed. We know from Episode...
2025-04-2952 min
Down The Garden Path PodcastPlants Always Win Podcast with Sean Patchett and Erin AlladinThis week on Down the Garden Path, Joanne speaks with Erin Alladin and Sean Patchett about their podcast, Plants Always Win. Plants Always Win Podcast Plants Always Win is a podcast where two Ontario gardeners dive down plant-fact rabbit holes, answer audience questions, interview intriguing guests, and compete to bring you the most interesting stories and information. Erin Alladin, a.k.a. Earth Undaunted, is a professional communicator with a love for gardens, especially garden ecosystems. She's known online for her writing and videos about gardening with chronic illness and disability, as well...
2025-04-281h 10
Plants Always WinEp. 19 Moths and Butterflies with Stoned AffectionSusie of Stoned Affection is a practicing entomologist who has been raising moths and butterflies—and raising awareness of them—since 2014. She also creates beautiful art from lepidoptera taxidermy. This week Susie joins Sean to talk about what it’s like to work with moths and butterflies, especially the ethical considerations that go into sourcing and raising both native and tropical species. If you’ve ever wondered about butterfly farming, butterfly houses, and sending live specimens through the mail, this is the episode to satisfy your curiosity. You’ll also find out what Susie thinks of lepidoptera in media, whether butterflie...
2025-04-221h 05
Plants Always WinEp. 18 Seed Starting vs. Direct SowingAs a changeable April wears on, spring-hungry northern gardeners are anxious to get seeds planted. But should they start those seeds indoors with grow lights or on a widow sill? Or can they put them directly in the ground outside (if the snow ever melts!)? That’s the subject of this versus episode.Normally, Erin and Sean compete to see who can make their versus topic more interesting. This week, it’s more of a collaboration. Erin gives us the rundown on materials needed for direct sowing (not much but a rake and a gentle watering head are your friends) and...
2025-04-1554 min
Plants Always WinEp. 17 Plants Need BugsPlants always win…and to manage it, they need insects, arachnids, and other creepy-crawlies on their side. Of course, those creatures need plants too. In this episode, Sean and Erin are joined by Kelly and Amanda of Bugs Need Heroes. And what happens when you cross-pollinate a gardening podcast with one where an entomologist and an illustrator create bug-based superheroes? There’s a lot of laughter, a heaping scoop of science, and the birth of a new squad of garden defenders.Insects and their compatriots come armed with some pretty impressive real-world superpowers that savvy gardeners can use to their adva...
2025-04-081h 03
Plants Always WinEp. 16 Q&A Special: Cedars, Compost, and Cardboard MulchWe’re cultivating a safe space to ask gardening questions!We have been plotting for some thyme to add some dedicated Q&A episodes to the recording schedule. While we love seeding quick questions into the end of a show, and while many of our most popular episodes have sprouted from a particularly juicy inquiry, there are plenty of other questions that merit ten minutes of discussion rather than sixty or two. In this inaugural Q&A special, we tackle a bushel of cedar and shrub questions and spend some time in the vegetable garden as well:Do you need to...
2025-04-011h 00
Plants Always WinEp. 15 Lost Ladies of Garden Writing with Carol MichelCarol Michel is a garden author and co-host of The Gardenangelists podcast. She boasts of having the world’s largest hoe collection…which is overshadowed only by her library-worthy collection of gardening books. Among the hundreds of volumes on her shelves are hard-to-find copies of books by a number of American women who were horticultural experts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but who have been all but forgotten by history. To honour them, Carol started a Substack called the Lost Ladies of Garden Writing. On this week’s episode of Plants Always Win, she invites us into some of their...
2025-03-2541 min
Plants Always WinEp. 14 Living Soil with Michelle BruhnSoil is the foundation of a healthy garden…or homestead…or farm. For sustainable gardening that gives us nutritious food without depleting the land, we need to know how to feed and maintain living soil. After all, it’s the community of living things in the soil that feeds the plants we eat ourselves. That’s where Michelle Bruhn comes in. Michelle is a suburban homesteading author, speaker, and educator who manages the online information hub Forks in the Dirt. This week, she joins Erin (who’s always excited about home-scale regenerative agriculture) to talk about how she has turned a sandy su...
2025-03-181h 04
Plants Always WinEp. 13 Beneficial Non-Natives? Borage vs. CosmosIt’s a concern being voiced by conscientious gardeners everywhere: is it okay to plant a non-native flower that feeds pollinators but also self-sows freely? One suspect that is being discussed in many online gardening groups in borage. It shows up in pollinator-garden seed mixes that the purchasers expected to be 100% native. It features at seed swaps and in seed libraries because its seeds are easy to collect, and established gardeners know it always brings the bees in. But it also sows itself aggressively, and it didn’t evolve alongside North American pollinators. The people want to know: is it prob...
2025-03-041h 00
Plants Always WinEp. 12 Groundcovers with Kathy JentzThis week we cover a lot of ground on the subject of groundcovers with Kathy Jentz. Kathy is the editor and publisher of Washington Gardener, the host of the Garden DC podcast, and the author of Groundcover Revolution, a book written to give inspiration and examples for turf grass substitutes that gardeners everywhere can use to find the best plants for their region. They can also use its attractive and accessible photographs to get their spouses and their HOA on board.We start our conversation by establishing some ground rules: what is a groundcover? Kathy says it’s any plant th...
2025-02-181h 07Plants Always WinEp.11 Valentine’s Day Special, Part 2, Carnation NationThis is the second instalment of our two-part Roses vs. Carnations Valentine’s Day special. After Sean eloquently shared his love for roses earlier this week, Erin barges in with the claim that roses are elitist and carnations are the flower of the people. Her focus is Dianthus caryophyllus, a cut-flower relative of some familiar garden flowers like pinks. She takes us back to the Carnation Revolution and other people’s uprisings in which carnations became important symbols, tells us what the name “pink” has to do with dianthus’ ruffled petals, and explores carnations’ aromatic uses. When Erin puts Sean on the spot...
2025-02-1543 minPlants Always WinEp.10 Valentine’s Day Special Part 1: RosesThis is a special two-part Plant Face-Off! We had so much to say about roses and carnations that we had to split the recording into two episodes. In this instalment, we start with some housekeeping, answering the listener question “What is Patreon?”, explaining why we’re phasing off the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram, and reminding YOU to reach out if you’d like to join the conversation at our Plants Always Win Discord server.After that Sean takes us through history and around the world with the ever-sweet subject of roses. Learn about the surprising members of the rose family f...
2025-02-1149 minPlants Always WinEp.9 Garden Classrooms with Lauren MacLeanHave you learned to read your garden? This week we sit down with Lauren MacLean, a teacher, author, and podcaster from Richmond, British Columbia. She’s a big advocate for how outdoor classrooms help kids learn better, but a few years ago she had a learning experience of her own when her school built a new garden classroom. In this interview she shares with us her background as an outdoor educator and explains the magic of “sit spots” for creating a relationship with our environment—something we should all do in our own gardens. Lauren explains how even though she was new...
2025-02-0444 minPlants Always WinEp.8 Peace Lily VS Phalaenopsis OrchidThis versus episode kicks off with a discussion about creating a safe space on social media for respectful, loving communication about everything plants and gardens, then digresses into a discussion of Latin pronunciations in botanical, liturgical, and classical settings. When we make it to the Plant Face-Off, Erin leads with peace lily, or Spathiphyllum spp. She explains why some plants in the Spathiphyllum genus have Big Spadix Energy, then explores the fascinating physical mechanism that makes biting a peace lily a bad idea. She explains how to approximate the conditions of its home in the understory of tropical rainforests and...
2025-01-2858 minPlants Always WinEp.7 Winter Sowing Native Plants with Amanda JewellYou might think a gardening podcast would focus on guests who have a lifetime of gardening expertise and plenty of credentials. But we want to emphasize that anyone can garden, and amateurs everywhere find niches to flourish in. That’s why we invited Amanda Jewell to share her adventures in learning to grow native plants from seed.Amanda is a vision therapist by trade. In her free time, she uses her postage-stamp urban yard in Northern Ontario to grow hundreds of native wildflowers every year. She describes for us the joy she felt the first time she discovered that her ga...
2025-01-2152 minPlants Always WinEp.6 Milkweed VS BeardtongueThis versus episode is a battle of the native wildflowers. Sean leads with penstemon, also known as hairy beardtongue, a charmingly fairytale-looking native perennial genus with species that grow across North America. Points in this plant’s favour: it has few pests and diseases, pollinators love it, and Sean lets us in on the secret to increased blossoms. Also: tube-shaped flowers = hummingbirds and adorably wiggling bee butts. Not to be outdone, Erin pushes back with common milkweed Asclepias syriaca, another native perennial that’s important for pollinators and a range of specialist insects, including monarch butterflies. Its sweet-smelling ball-shaped flower clust...
2025-01-1450 minPlants Always WinEp.5 Pokemon Ecology with Alex MeindersWe’re always pretty nerdy on Plants Always Win, but in this interview episode Alex Meinders helps us take it to a whole new level. He’s a wildlife biologist and videogame enthusiast whose passion project is the YouTube and TikTok channel Geek Ecology. He uses his real-world science know-how to analyze the biology and ecology of Pokémon—yes, those quirky monsters from the cartoon, card game, and video games. This week Alex speculates with us about the plant-inspired class of grass-type Pokémon. We consider their place in the food web (are they animals or vegetables?), their evolutionary history...
2025-01-0744 minPlants Always WinEp.4 Bay Leaves VS Mustard SeedIn this Versus episode, it’s the battle of herbs and spices. Get your fill of these fascinating aromatic plants that have flavoured our food and changed our history since paleolithic times. Learn why they bother smelling so good—and what you can do to make the most of their flavour—then get ready to cast your vote in the Plant Face-Off. Sean is representing the herbs with bay laurel, a plant not to be confused with the many other bays and laurels in the world—especially not the toxic ones. Learn how it grows, how to preserve the leaves, and why...
2024-12-3147 minPlants Always WinEp.3 Garden Education with Paul ZammitIn this interview episode, Sean chats with Paul Zammit about the life of a garden communicator. Paul has had a long career in horticulture and is presently a professor of Horticulture and Environmental Studies at Niagara College as well as CBC’s Ontario Today gardening expert—although “expert” is a term he would like to contest. After all, we never stop learning, and that’s especially true in the garden. Paul and Sean talk about selfish gardening (taking space from nature for ourselves) compared to building a biodiverse space that wildlife can enjoy alongside us—even if that means broadening our definiti...
2024-12-2457 minPlants Always WinEp.2 Poinsettia VS AmaryllisIn this “versus” episode, Erin and Sean face off with two big holiday plants: Poinsettias and Amaryllis. Erin comes in swinging with the fraught history of settler (Poinsettia) and Indigenous (cuetlaxochitl) names for her plant, but Sean pushes back with the romantic (or is it?) mythology behind amaryllis. Both contenders shatter misconceptions (Poinsettias are not toxic! Some amaryllis are imposters!) and share care tips for keeping these festive flora in good shape during the holidays and year round. A few tangents slip in about specialist insects that thrive on toxic plants and the way plants interpret light and darkness. And of c...
2024-12-1848 minPlants Always WinEp.1 Erin VS SeanIn this pilot episode of Plants Always Win, Erin and Sean give the Plant Face-Off a trial run…with a twist. Instead of competing for viewers’ votes with the most interesting information about a plant or gardening concept, they go head to head with competing interviews of each other. Find out what theft has to do with Erin’s early forays into gardening, why she makes content about gardening with chronic illness and disability, and how talking about plants every week complements her literary life. Then learn how Sean’s mom got him into a horticulture career, explore the pros and cons...
2024-12-1643 min
The Garden Question185 - Gentle Gardening: Gardening With Uncooperative Bodies - Erin AlladinWelcome to The Garden Question Podcast! I’m your host, Craig McManus.Today we’ve got a fantastic episode lined up. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert seasoned pro, this conversation will inspire you to think deeper about gardening.Our guest is Erin Alladin, creator of the concept gentle gardening—a unique approach designed for those working with chronic illness and disability.Erin’s journey is all about making gardening accessible and enjoyable for every kind of gardener, no matter their challenges.Throughout this episode, Erin shares practical strategies she’s deve...
2024-10-2440 min