Episode 2611

- [Narrator] With over 150 species, viburnum is a spring-flowering woody plant that won't disappoint. Annette Shrader touts the many attributes of some popular varieties. Plus, Julie Berbiglia learns tree grafting from a master. And log-crafted cocktail recipes for your next get-together. Stay tuned. First, the opportunity to grow several types of fruit on just one tree.

- One of the fun things about gardening is learning all kinds of new skills. Now you may have heard of grafting trees, but have you ever tried it? Well, it's a little scary but what you come out with is really really neat, and David, I wanna talk to you about all this great grafting stuff. So first of all, I know that if I have a really favorite tree from my grandma's house, I could graft it, right, and get my own tree?

- You can do that, you can do that.

- Okay, and I've seen fruit trees that are grafted.

- Yes.

- To grow different types of fruits, maybe on one tree. Now this is something you would do in the winter, early spring?

- You do this preferably before growth initiates in the spring, it's the middle of April right now so we're running a little late and our sign wood's beginning to grow just a little bit in the cooler. That's one of the things that you do need, you need to collect your sign wood, your sticks that you want to graft with, in the wintertime while they're fully dormant. So you wanna do that in January or February, preferably on a day that they're not frozen. You can graft that, you wrap it up in a Ziploc bag with a damp, not a wet paper towel but a damp paper towel and put it in the refrigerator in the crisper section and it'll keep for up to six months.

- Okay, so just go out, cut off a small twig and bring it in and put it in the fridge, okay. So now what about the root stock?

- The root stock we're using today is called Malus sprout free and it is selected because it's a crabapple root stock that does not send up suckers from the ground. A lot of the traditional rootstock seedlings are bad to suckers so you put this in your yard and then four or five years from now, you've got a big cluster of little crabapple trees coming up from around it and this resists that, it may have one or two but for the most part, it's just a tree and you don't get that suckering at the base.

- Alright, and so today, we have that great root stock, and what kind of side wood do we have?

- We have a variety called Adirondack and Adirondack is an upright crabapple that was selected for its growth pattern, it grows straight up and down, very upright. I've selected this one to grow so that it will make a tree that will fit in a small yard. It won't spread out so much so it's not quite a columnar tree but it's a very upright-growing tree that will fit in a medium to small yard. I'm gonna take a grafting knife, a grafting knife is a particular kind of knife, it's only sharpened on one side, so it's sharpened on this side and beveled on this side but it's perfectly flat on the other side. And that allows you to make a straight, flat cut. If this was beveled on both sides, it would have a tendency to grab in the grain and pull to one side and make a curved cut rather than a flat cut, so let me just cut a little piece off of this and let me show you what's inside here. Okay, the green right underneath the bark right here along the edges, that is the only part of this tree that's going to grow and live, this is the cambium of the tree, right underneath the gray part. This part in here does not grow and heal anything, this is just wood and it just sits there, it's structural. But the green right under the bark is the part that grows and we have to line this green part up on this sign wood onto the green part of this root stock in order to make the two grow together. So what will happen here as this begins to grow, you'll see what they call a callous, which is a little bit like a scab when you have a wound on your body and that callous material is where this material has grown and knitted itself to this right here and that will be the new union between the two. Everything that grows on the root stock below the graft union needs to be taken off because it'll have the characteristics of the root stock. But everything from the graft union up will be the desired variety that you put on there.

- Okay, so how much of the root stock are you going to keep, in most cases, and what determines how much?

- It's personal preference, it's whatever makes you happy. I like to grow them fairly close to the ground so I want my trees to be, oftentimes I just grab them and hold 'em where the outside of the palm of my hand is at the roots and I'll have my cut here at the upper section right here. Alright, I'm gonna make a different cut on this piece of sign wood here and let me pick a root stock, you want your root stock and your sign wood to be pretty close in size together so you want them to be about the same size.

- And then you have a better chance of the cambium matching?

- It's best if the cambium lines up all the way on both sides. At the very least, it's gotta line up on one side. I'm gonna, I hold my thumb underneath, I hold the knife in my other hand. This takes a decisive cut. If you whittle, you're just wasting your time. So I'm gonna make a straight cut. Trim that back a little bit, so I've got that opened up. And this is what's called a whip in tongue and this is the tongue. I'm gonna cut that end there and lift that up just a little bit. I'm gonna take my root stock, hold it the same way, put my thumb underneath it again. And that's not a long enough cut to suit me so I'm gonna do it a second time. I'm gonna make sure that that's a flat cut. As flat as possible. I'm gonna split that one like the other one, lift it up a little bit. I'm gonna cut this off, I generally like to put two buds on there, cut that off. And I'm going to push these together, I generally push down on the bottom of the sign wood and that allows those to slide together and lock together. And you want that to be when you tighten it up, I'm gonna put a rubber band on there, when you tighten it up, you don't wanna be able to see any light in between and you want the cambium right under the bark on both sides as best as possible. Now that doesn't quite touch on both sides but it's a pretty good match. And we're gonna take, these are grafting rubbers is what these are called but they're just a little strip of rubber band, you put your finger, I hold it with my thumb and you wrap it tightly. It has to be tight, you're trying to put pressure so that those two surfaces will knit together.

- At this point, besides planting it in a pot, is there anything else special you need to do to it?

- We're done.

- We're all done.

- This is now an Adirondack crabapple tree.

- Well I guess we should also label it, right?

- We should, always put a label on one, I print labels but get a way to mark it permanently because you will, if you get the bug to do this, you will graft all kinds of things and you will forget what you put on what and where you put what you put where you put it.

- At what point can we start to take all of this stuff off and is there any possibility we're going to damage it?

- There's always a chance of damaging these things. Once this, in two to three weeks, this is gonna start growing. I've got one here that I did three weeks ago. And this is a Grime's golden apple tree. We just used masking tape on this. And you can see, the buds have already broken and it has blooms on it. Now, right after we grafted one, we don't want the blooms to mature because this little twig can't support fruit. But we will pinch those flowers off and then there'll be a secondary bud there that will come out and make a sprout that will grow up to be a new tree. But this is a Grime's golden apple tree on a G41 super grower fruit stock.

- Well that is just really fast results.

- Yeah, yeah, apples make you look like a genius.

- Ah, they're the easy ones, right?

- Yes, they're the easy ones. This is called bench grafting, is what this is called and the graft is called a whip in tongue and it's pretty easy to get good results doing this. Nut trees are hard. Pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts, those sorts of things are much more difficult. And stone fruits, peaches and plums and nectarines, apricots, those sorts of things, cherries, those are generally budded in the summertime which is an entirely different technique. They need to heal longer before you force growth because they grow so vigorously, they'll tend to blow out if you get any wind right after you graft them and they start to grow at a young age.

- Okay, so you really need to know about what you're grafting, you can't just, one size fits all.

- Now one more thing about this, apples go on apples and peaches and plums can go on the same root stock, cherries go on cherries, you cannot put a peach tree on an apple, it just doesn't work. Apples sometimes will work on pears and maybe pears will work on plums, pears will work on apples, not on plums, but they tend to fail over time. There are incompatibility issues, some things don't knit together properly, they may live a little while, they may show some growth, but over the course of a year or two years or five years, they'll eventually die.

- Okay, that's good to know. Now, what if you graft several different times of apples onto one stock?

- That's perfectly okay.

- Okay.

- That's okay, you can take an apple tree that's got five nice branches on it and you can have five different kinds of apples on that tree, the same with pears or peaches or plums or whatever, as long as you use the right root stock for that. Especially in gardening, don't be afraid to fail because failure is how you learn.

- Well that is definitely worth remembering. Now, how often would these fail?

- Oh, even when you're really good, you can have as much as a 50% failure rate. With apples and things like that, generally 70 to 80% of them will grow if everything lines up. With something like pecans or walnuts or something that's more difficult, if you're anywhere above 50%, you're doing real good. You can even graft tomatoes like this, usually they do that with a knife, but you can graft tomatoes, you're gonna have a disease-resistant root stock that you grow and you grow your little tomato starts and you can graft them together and then you've got a disease-resistant tomato plant.

- Well this is just a fantastic concept and I had not really thought about that with the tomato plants, so thank you so much for showing us how to do this.

- We are in the beginning stages of a glorious spring. And you know, we think about flowering shrubs in our garden and we always turn to the hydrangea, there is another plant family called viburnum and viburnums are a wonderful factor in our gardens. In fact, Michael Doe has quoted in his words that a garden without a viburnum is like life without music and I concur with that. Today I'm gonna talk with Adam at Bates Nursery and we're gonna go over the attributes of a number of viburnums. So Adam, thank you for spending this beautiful morning with us.

- Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.

- Okay and let's just go ahead and start out with number one.

- Alright. So this is Chinese snowball. This is similar to the eastern snowball, which is what most people are familiar with, only it has a much bigger bloom.

- Bigger than a softball.

- Yes, yes.

- [Annette] And the foliage is more lustrous too.

- [Adam] It is, it's darker green.

- [Annette] It's easy to distinguish it, I think, without bloom because of that foliage.

- Right, right.

- Right, alright, this one right here looks interesting.

- Yes, that is Chicago luster.

- I see that luster.

- Yes, it is a arrowwood viburnum, gets quite large, probably 10 foot as well and it will bloom later in the spring, you can see where the bloom has started to set.

- Yeah I see that.

- And then they'll have blue berries in the summer.

- Do the birds like those?

- Oh yes, oh yes.

- [Annette] And they're not toxic to the birds either.

- Not to the birds, no.

- No, they're not. Well I do like that luster. Now is this going to be deciduous?

- It is.

- Totally deciduous.

- As is this one, this is deciduous as well, yes.

- Okay, let's try this one.

- Yeah, so this is Allegheny viburnum which is a type, actually this is a hybrid of the traditional leather-leaf viburnum and so it is actually more cold-hearted than the other leaf but if it does get to zero and it is what I would call semi-evergreen, so if it gets to zero or below, you can have some leaf loss of this one but for the most part, it is evergreen.

- [Annette] One of the things in the viburnum family, the fragrance goes from sweetness to really stinky and I think this is in the latter portion.

- [Adam] Yes it is. You don't plant this one for the fragrance, no.

- No you don't, and I do have the other one, I've had those shrubs for at least 30 years, they've been cut down, they've sprouted.

- They're tough, they're really tough.

- They are, and I don't really have to worry about them in the right place, that's always key, isn't it? You know the viburnum family is like 120 strong and some cultivars so let's go and talk about one that most of you are probably really familiar with, Adam.

- Yep, this is the European snowball bush. This is what most people think of when they of viburnum, they think of this shrub right here, blooms profusely in the spring with ball-shaped blooms there and some beautiful red fall color in the fall.

- Yeah and you know, another thing that I like about these, they start off green, nice, round, big.

- Yeah, very similar to like a limelight hydrangea in that respect.

- And they're very useful for people that like to do floral arrangements. That's one of my favorite things about that, eastern.

- [Adam] Yeah, it's an eastern viburnum.

- Okay, then let's step into another one.

- Alright. Now this is a variety called pragense viburnum, it is an evergreen variety but you can see, with the leather leaf or Allegheny, the leaf was much bigger, this is a smaller, more narrow leaf so it's a little bit finer texture, very tough plant just like the leather leaf, grows very fast and gets very big so 10, 12 feet tall and wide.

- [Annette] But now is it happy to be pruned?

- [Adam] Oh yes, yes. You can shear 'em or handprint 'em, it's not gonna phase 'em at all.

- [Annette] And what time of the year would you do that?

- I would probably do it either really early spring before it flushes out or early summer.

- And one of the things I do like about this in our winter landscape, that luster really does add something to the landscape for you and then does this one berry?

- This one, it does bloom, although.

- Insignificant.

- Yeah, the bloom is not really why you would, this is really more for screening or for evergreen habitat for birds in the winter, that kind of thing.

- [Annette] And so it'll probably go below zero, won't it?

- [Adam] Oh yeah, this will stay evergreen even below zero.

- That's great. Lately, we've been needing that. Okay, one more.

- Alright, so this is birkwood eye or birkwood viburnum. So this is one of the ones that's sought after for its fragrance, very sweet fragrance in the spring. The blooms will come out with pink buds and then when they open, they'll turn white.

- What size are those?

- The ball on there? Probably about the size of a tennis ball, maybe.

- This is the number one viburnum for me.

- Yes, this is carlesii or Koreanspice viburnum, the most fragrant viburnum.

- Well I can tell you, this is no exaggeration. I don't even know how to put it in feet and yards but I can be on my back porch, the wind can be coming the right direction and it has to be length of a football field that I can pick that fragrance up. It's just wonderful, now, this is deciduous.

- [Adam] It's deciduous and it actually is fairly slow-growing in comparison to the other viburnums we've looked at and gets about six to eight foot at the biggest. So kinda different than the other ones.

- [Annette] I have one that's maxed out, it's been there at least 20 years and it's that reliable.

- Oh yeah.

- And then you say there's a new one?

- There's a new one called baby spice and it's a dwarf version, it's good for if you have a small garden, if you're in a town home or a really small yard and you can still have that nice fragrance.

- [Annette] And you should again adapt it to a container.

- [Adam] Oh that, certainly you could do with that one, yes.

- Now this is another little individual right here, isn't it?

- Right, right. This is a blue muffin viburnum, this is a viburnum dentatum, which is arrowwood viburnum, which is in the same species as the Chicago luster that we looked at earlier. Now, this has brilliant blue berries in the summer. Now you'll need to have, it's probably good to have a Chicago luster in your garden somewhere to pollinate this, to get the best berry set.

- [Annette] When you say somewhere, is there a distance?

- [Adam] No, just as long as it's in your yard.

- Or even your neighbor's?

- Well, could be, could be.

- Could be? Well I thank you for this glorious conversation.

- Alright, thank you.

- With Adam at Bates Nursery.

- We're back at beautiful Allenbrook Farms in Springhill, Tennessee, where we're learning more about wild crafted or garden crafted cocktails. We're here with Zachary Helton and we're gonna make two different beverages today. We're gonna make strawberry Aperol and jalapeno margaritas?

- Yes ma'am.

- Yum, okay. Let's get started here.

- So the first one, the strawberry Aperol spritz, what we're doing, the Aperol spritz is a classic Italian cocktail with Aperol and some sort of bubbly. You can use soda, you can use champagne, you can use prosecco, so we're actually using California sparkling wine. So Aperol is a bitter aperitif, it looks like fruit punch but it doesn't taste like it. It's made from dried orange peels, so it's nice and bitter, so what I've done is taken some of this blue ribbon strawberry jam from out here in Allenbrook Farms.

- [Sheri] That's Stephanie's blue ribbon and you really mean blue ribbon, she's won blue ribbons with it.

- So we've taken this one, this jam, and I've poured about half of this jar into a larger mason jar with half the bottle. I put that into my refrigerator for 48 hours.

- So you're just steeping it, do you stir it periodically?

- No, let it do its course, let it sit in there for two days, pull it out of the refrigerator, I strain it, so our finished product is slightly darker than what we started with.

- And it's pretty.

- It's pretty and it's also gonna have a little bit of sweetness compared with the bitterness. So it should smell a whole lot like strawberries. So this one's really really simple.

- I have a question. If somebody wasn't into strawberries, you can do this as well with other fruits? Like blueberries and raspberries?

- The blueberries would be tough but I think raspberries would be a really really good one. More oranges, you could even cut down, I wanna say lemons would be really good in that if you want to, so you'll get that flavor, so what we're doing out of this is two ounces of your strawberry Aperol, top the rest off with prosecco and we're gonna cut a fresh orange slice.

- Alright.

- So just to make it easier with the bubbly, I prefer to put the orange slice in first on this one. Most cocktails you'll see where you'll kinda garnish it last so we've got the ice, we've got the oranges, we're gonna measure two ounces. And you could use a wine glass, I prefer the nice country feel with a mason jar, that's why we're using that. This one is quite simple.

- I guess.

- We're gonna top and just to make sure it's all mixed, spoon, knife, whatever you might have.

- Finger.

- Finger, all works, and we'll stir this one up 'til we got it nice and mixed and then just finish topping off. And we'll place a straw, that's your strawberry Aperol spritz.

- Thank you. That's yummy, that is really yummy. Alright, Zachary, we're gonna do one more today, it's jalapeno margarita.

- Yes ma'am. So everybody's favorite classic margarita, can't beat that.

- No, margaritas and I haven't been friends since 1984.

- Well maybe you should just have me as your bartender, maybe that'll work out a little bit better for you. So we're doing fresh-squeezed lime juice, we're doing our simple syrup that we've made earlier, we've got a little Grand Marnier and then the 901 tequila, which you can't get local tequila being in Tennessee but it's a local boy, Justin Timberlake's tequila done by Sauza, it's a really beautiful silver tequila and then we're taking fresh jalapenos that we picked earlier today as soon as we got here to the farm from Allenbrook. So we're gonna take that, cut it up, muddle it with everything, shake, and we've got a beautiful margarita.

- Alright.

- Show you what we've got.

- Let's go.

- So when it comes to jalapenos, a lot of people like spicy drinks, like myself. Some people don't, so what you really wanna do is maybe find a nice medium ground in between, so when it comes to jalapenos in cocktails, you're gonna get all the heat from these seeds on the inside so what you're gonna do, do your best, is remove the seeds, 'cause the seeds are in there, we're not washing that or anything, we still want a little bit of the heat to be on there.

- I can smell it from here.

- We're gonna toss this right in to the margarita. So we're gonna build that little paste like we've done with our other muddled cocktails so classic margarita, we're gonna do an ounce and a half of tequila, half ounce of Grand Marnier, then we're using a full ounce of lime juice with a half ounce of simple syrup. So we'll get our fresh juice in there, full ounce. Next we're gonna get our simple syrup, half ounce. So while we've got that in there, that's when we're gonna muddle. You really wanna break down this jalapeno into the sugar so give it a good muddle, so really kinda put some elbow grease in this one.

- Would it hurt to dice it up a little bit more?

- You could, I think that you express a lot more and it's easier to muddle when it's bigger strips so as long as it still fits in whatever tin you're using, I think you should be good there. So after we've done the citrus and the sugar, we're ready to put the more expensive booze in last like always. So Grand Marnier or any sort of triple sec, which is just gonna be made from three kinds of oranges, thus the name, triple sec. And then silver tequila. And then a nice hard shake. When you're shaking cocktails, the main reason that you're shaking it is to add air, to lighten the cocktail, so why we're shaking it is to get that citrus mixed in with the jalapenos and all the spirits 'cause if you didn't, you would just have a lot of pulp at the bottom of your glass 'cause the alcohol and the citrus are a different weight, so when you're really shaking it, you're introducing air, so you really wanna get a good shake. Don't wanna waste any.

- I can smell the jalapenos.

- And then grab your hawthorn strainer.

- Do you double strain everything?

- Anytime you're muddling anything, I'm a big fan of clean. Some people like to see all that stuff in their glass, I'm not a big fan. Classic garnish on a margarita is always gonna be a lime slice, so we're gonna do a little wedge of lime, make sure I get off these seeds of jalapeno and I'm a big fan of doing a little orange zest just to get more kinda citrus oils into there so you'll take just your average potato peeler that you can get anywhere as one of the tools and we're just gonna zest from the top down, you can actually see the oils kinda go right over the glass. Take it when you're done and you don't want a lot of the pith 'cause that's gonna be bitter, yes ma'am, so then nice little squeeze and then tuck that in so it's out of your way.

- It's the best part of this, I get to try all these.

- Perks of the job.

- I was a little afraid that the jalapeno would be a little bit too hot, it's perfect, perfect.

- As long as you take out the seeds, you're gonna have a lot more kind of a refreshing margarita where you won't have over too much heat.

- Well gosh, Zachary, it's been wonderful, you sharing your knowledge with the different crafted cocktails and I think people that are gardening should give this a try, I mean, there are so many options out there and so many other vegetables that you probably could use and there's books out there now about all this good stuff too. So I wanna tell you thank you and I wanna also say thank you to Allenbrook Farms for letting us come out here today and shoot.