Midday's Back to the Garden w/Carrie and Denzel

Today, Midday goes Back to the Garden, with two of our favorite green thumbs joining Tom in Studio A again to talk about what to grow and how to grow it, and to answer your questions about gardening.Carrie Engel is the Greenhouse Manager and a plant specialist for most of the past 50 years at Valley View Farms in Cockeysville, Maryland, where today she’s responsible for the well-being of the family-owned company’s large inventory of herbaceous plants, including annuals, tropicals and vegetables...Denzel Mitchell is an urban farming pioneer in Baltimore. The former owner of Five Seeds Farm, Mitchell signed on this past Spring as farm manager at Strength to Love 2 Farm, a 1-\u189\u acre workforce training farm in Sandtown-Winchester for returning ex-offenders, and a Baltimore food resource with produce outlets around the city. The farm is run by the faith-inspired non-profit development group called Intersection for Change…and it’s a member of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore, a network of producers that’s working to increase the viability of urban farming and improve access to city-grown foods. Just a couple weeks ago -- when we were in the middle of an oppressive heat wave -- we thought we’d talk today about ways to help your vegetable gardens and flower beds survive the withering drought.Today the question is, can your gardens survive a week of torrential rains? The Maryland region has been breaking more-than-century-old rainfall records this month, and flood watches are still in effect across the Maryland region. National Weather Service meteorologist Christopher Strong joins Tom on the line to put this soggy weather trend into context, and to tell us how much more rain we can expect in the week ahead.But as every gardener knows, this too shall pass...and as we care for what's already growing, it’s also time to be thinking about what to plant now for the coming fall harvest…To help us with that, and to address all of your green-thumb questions, Carrie and Denzel share their years of experience producing beautiful, bountiful gardens.This conversation was streamed live on WYPR's Facebook page, and that video can be seen here.Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.