Elizabeth Lawrence, Louise Beebe Wilder, Sharon Lovejoy, Nancy Hutchens, Tasha Tudor, Gertrude Jekyll and Ruth Stout.

All are great women gardeners. All have written a book or two. I track them down and read them with bated breath, from cover to cover.

All, if not most, have great gardening reputations reaching far and wide.

Cultivating great audiences through their thoughts on gardening.

Touching each of their readers with their genuine dialogues on their beloved subject of gardening.

Each author/gardener credited their readers whose contact broadened their knowledge and inspirations.

All base their books, drawn from their own experiences in their own gardens, through their hard-won victories or on their utter exasperating darkest setbacks.

So for those who garden with their pens and their spades, I thoroughly enjoy their cultivated wit, charm, imagination, wisdom, sense of humor, scrappy sarcasm, liveliness of thought.

They one and all possess both great spirit and genius. I find them all so juicily enlightening.

• Got milk? Wagner Bettiol discovered that a mixture of milk and water cured mildew-infected plants more effectively than toxic fungicides. Mix one cup milk, nine cups of water, shake well and pour into a spray bottle. Apply to infected plants twice weekly. Refrigerate between use.

• To rid a pond of algae, without resorting to harsh chemicals, float small “bales” of barley straw in the water. The barley straw will decompose and release tiny particles of hydrogen peroxide, which stops/kills the growth of algae. A barley in liquid form can be found, too.

• Did you know that aphids are irresistibly dawn to the color yellow?

• Some gardeners have reported luck with deterring Japanese beetles by planting chives around their roses.

• Romance is on the wing. Sunday, while sitting looking out my dining room window, I spied two cardinals, a male and a female, perched on my feeder.

Sitting shoulder to shoulder, the male tenderly fed his female “seedy” morsels that he expertly picked just for her.

There ain’t nothing better in life than true love or a homegrown tomato.

Nancy Wiersma of Dowagiac writes a weekly column.