Episode 2442

- [Voiceover] Coming up on Volunteer Gardener, we'll get inspired for the upcoming growing season with a visit to the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show. We get a warning about boxwood blight that's now documented in Tennessee, plus, we visit Nashville Hydroponics, where the growing never ends. Join us. First, fantasy gardens spark our creativity. One of the events I look forward to every spring is the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show, and we're here with Todd Breyer who's been involved with the show for

- I don't know how long, 26 years.

- 26 years.

- It's a beautiful show this year. Our theme is Small Spaces, Great Gardens. We were focusing on sort of the trend of smaller properties and things that you could do that are quite innovative with all that. It's a really pretty show this year.

- So how many gardens are here?

- About 25.

- And there are about that many every year, it seems like.

- Pretty much, varies slightly.

- So, one buiilding full of beautiful gardens to look at then several other buildings full of vendors with all kinds of great garden paraphernalia.

- Things to shop, plant societies, lectures.

- So, anything specific that you had in mind when you designed your garden this year?

- We just wanted a little different look. We do the entrance every year, and so, we did Japanese inspired theme for this particular garden and often they do use small spaces and details.

- Sure, and those kind of gardens are all about the details. So, it's nice to have a little different take on something like that for shows. Well, Thanks Todd for visiting with us this morning, and we ought to walk around and take a look. If you need garden inspiration, this is the place to come for creative ideas, and I don't think anybody is more creative than Paula Peace. Let's talk about your new idea this year because, this is really, really cool. Inspired by, what?

- Actually, it went from being inspired by tiny houses and then from tiny house, it went to gnome house or hobbit house, and then just, that's where it started.

- And this is what it turned into? See, you've got some really cool things. I love this big, moss mushroom that's dripping water. What are the mechanics of it? Can you tell us? Give away your secrets?

- Well, actually, the mushrooms are all recycled satellite dishes.

- That is really cool. So underneath here actually is the recycled.

- It's a satellite dish and then it's one of those rattan swings turned upside down with chicken wire and then the moss laid on top. If we were going to do it permanently, it would be done a little bit different, but for the show, it works.

- For the show, that's the way it works.

- Yeah, it works great.

- Well, like I said, no shortage of inspiration or creative ideas, and you have several other creative ideas that I want to look around at also. So, one of the things that I love about coming to this show is that there always seem to be ideas about using, sort of, everyday things and recycling them into really beautiful pieces for the garden, and you've done that with wooden spools from what?

- They're cable spools, and once you're looking for them, you start seeing them everywhere, but you can make furniture out of them. The little picnic table's made out of one. This was to carry on the theme of the garden is called Green Hills, and although they're not painted green, they're planted green. So, it gives you the illusion of hills.

- Of hills in the background?

- In the background.

- So, this really is a small space. What we're standing in now is maybe just 10 by 15 or 12 by 18, not very big at all.

- Right, um huh.

- Maybe even the size of a little courtyard at a condominium or something like that, and you've done several things, several tricks that you've used to change the elevation and the heights.

- Well, by using different elevations, you get more of a sense of depth. So, it makes the space seem wider or bigger than it is, and then, also by getting, you can do that with plants, but then you can also use hard goods, walls, planters.

- Well, we've been talking about unique and creative ideas, and I certainly don't think they get any more unique or creative than the booth that Tennessee Outdoor Innovations has done at the Lawn and Garden Show this year. Believe it or not, this waterfall and these rocks are made out of concrete. They're not real stone. They're actually formed concrete that has then been painted to look real, and speaking of looking real, there is this fantastic fire pit, and again, believe it or not, not a real stump, concrete stump, then scored and painted to look like real bark on the outside, and a real tree stump. This concrete, there's an artform called faux bois, which means fake wood or fake trees. It was very popular in the early 1900s, late 18 and early 1900s. There's a lot of antique faux bois out there on the market, and it's really nice to see this sort of artistic form and endeavor coming back to life in somebody who does it really, really well. This is very, very unique, and last but certainly not least in this booth, this amazing floor, that again, not wood but concrete. Looks exactly like planks but would be completely permanent outdoors with no worries about it rotting or fading away or having to replace it several years down the road. This is a really unique and innovative approach. One of the things that I love about the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show are all the cool plants because first and foremost, I'm a plant person. I am here with Jerry from Nature's Best Nursery down in Nolensville, Tennessee, and the thing that caught my eye is all of the cool stuff that you have forced out for this show. And we do all kinds of things for these shows that may not exist in reality, but that give people a really good idea of what they can do in their own gardens,

- And just allow people to envision this in their backyard. The whole concept here is small spaces and it looks long, but this is actually a relatively small space to put all of this stuff in.

- A few of the things that have caught my eye in particular, the beautiful Loropetalum blooming down there at the edge of the pond. That's something that is in flower this time of year. This is almost it's season. We're probably just a little bit early.

- Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah, Chinese French flower does bloom a little bit early. It's right on the border of being hearty in this area. What I like to tell my customers is It's a beautiful plant. I like to take a little chance with it, and most years, you're gonna come out okay with it, but for what it gives you, it's great.

- Yes, and the wisterias also, really beautiful, this one behind us here, and then you've got one that's almost an umbrella over your hot tub back there in the back, which is really cool. A special variety, Cooke's Purple.

- Cooke's Purple.

- Cooke's Purple is the variety of the really long tresses of bloom and a little deeper color than maybe a normal wisteria, little deeper purple color.

- Yeah, yeah, no, we like that quite a bit.

- Yeah, and then some really cool Japanese Maples.

- Those are katsuras.

- Katsura?

- Uh huh.

- With a golden leaf as it leafs out.

- Yeah, yeah, and it will also have.

- Does it stay gold or does it turn greener in the summer?

- It will turn green when it gets a lot of heat, but it retain the gold really until almost August.

- And I noticed some tropicals. I'm kind of a tropical plant guy.

- Like in the low bowl over here, we've got Justicia, our shrimp plant, which is a really, really old plant. It's been around forever.

- I remember my grandmother growing shrimp plant.

- That's right, that's right, but a lot of people don't use it anymore, and I kind of like those plants. We've also got antique geraniums. One of the pink varieties that we've got here and over there by the pond is pink cactus.

- Some really cool elephant ears that you've got going.

- Yeah, that's black diamond over there, and we've also got a giant ti, yeah.

- Ti ti, yeah.

- That's right.

- And a cool calamondin orange.

- Yeah, yeah, we grow a number of edibles, things that people can put out on their patio, have them for the season there, and then bring them in the house and then bring them back out the next spring. So, we like to showcase those as well.

- Well, I hate to wrap up so quickly, but we really appreciate you sharing with us, and I always think it's fun just to come down and see the cool, new, unusual things that you might not be familiar with and you've got them in spades here.

- Yeah, yep, getting ready for spring.

- Alright.

- Well, not only are there a lot of beautiful gardens to be inspired by at the Nashville Lawn and Garden show, but there are a lot of great vendors here as well. All kinds of things, from plants to just trinkets of all kinds, vendors who can help you with your landscapes. The Nashville Lawn and Garden Show happens the first weekend in March each year, and it's a wonderful place to be.

- Well, it's so much fun and so healthy to grow your own food, but what if you could start really early, do it all winter, and not get your hands dirty? This rockwool that comes in mini-blocks and other sizes is the soilless medium that you use to plant your seeds and then to put your plants into for hydroponics. To get started with our rockwool, we have to soak it in the water first?

- Yes, for about 30 seconds, just enough for it to absorb all the water and be wet, and from there, your rockwool cube already has that little hole in it. You just put your seeds down in there, place it in the tray, put the light over it, and wait for it to sprout up in a few days. In a hydroponic system, the pH needs to stay in a range between 5.5 and 6.5 for the plants to uptake the nutrients properly.

- And you don't need to add any nutrients at that point?

- Not at that point. Once it forms roots and there's roots coming out of the rockwool, you can add some nutrients to the tray if you wanna leave them in there a little longer or go ahead and transplant them into another system where they'll continue to grow and bloom.

- Well, let's talk about this other bigger system because you are gonna have to sort of pot up, I guess, eventually.

- Exactly.

- So this bigger system that I'm seeing over here seems to have a lot of added parts to it. How does it work?

- It's more of an aeroponic system actually. It's a mixture between a hydroponics and aeroponics system. It has a reservoir with a water pump, which sprays the water up into each individual run of those. It splashes the water, aerates the water all in one, and the roots will uptake from the bottom with the nutrient solution and grow towards the light.

- Fantastic, well I really like this and tell me a little bit about the lights that we're using because I imagine that's really important to get that right.

- Very important. Over that particular system, I have a Sun Blaze 48, which has a four-foot fixture with eight T5 HO bulbs, works great for the greens.

- Alright, well my plants are probably not going to stay at this size forever. I certainly hope they get much bigger. So, I'm sort of curious as to what else we might use at home and indeed, I see these beautiful greens right here.

- Yeah, this is a Emily's Garden. It's a great six-site system. It's a good size system to put in your window to get some natural light. You can grow lots of different plants, plants, obviously, plenty of good greens.

- And in here, I see that you have these rocks. Are they clay pellets in there?

- They are. Some of them are expanded clay, which is hydroton and others are expanded shale, which have a natural and actually are mined in Indiana.

- Now, there's this bigger system. It looks like you could really put quite a good size individual plant in here.

- Yes, you can grow a full size tomato plant in that system. That is called the WaterFarm, pumps the air with an air pump from the bottom, and as you can see with the drip ring, it drips the water around the plant constantly. It drains back through and just recirculates.

- Alright, so I really like this system for once you're feeling really confident and ready to go all out with your hydroponics. I think this is called a Flood and Drain system.

- It is. The way this works is you have a reservoir underneath this flood table. The water pump and the reservoir will pump the water up, flood the table, watering all your plants at one time, and set on a timer, the pump will shut off and the water will go back down and drain. As the water comes up, it's pushing out the old oxygen, and as it drains down, it's pulling in new oxygen to the roots, and you can flood and drain three, four times a day as needed to really get the plants to grow quick.

- Now, here we have again the expanded clay pebbles.

- Um huh, commonly known as hydroton. It's a volcanic matter is where it comes from. You can fill the whole tray with that or you can choose to like put a cover over it, drill holes in that, and use these net pots with just the hydroton in those. You can also use a fabric pot, fill in with your favorite soil, soilless media, you can put that in there, have your plant there and the water will go through the cloth pot and water as well. The flood table just leaves you with many options to use there.

- Well, so I imagine with this option then if you were growing something that you later wanted to take outside, then you could just take it on out. Wow, that's really, really flexible. I think this is a fantastic system but I also saw something over there that I really liked because it looks like a nice way to sort of contain my growing system, as well as give it plenty of light. So, let's go look at those.

- Okay.

- Well, Michael, I really like this setup here. What do you call this pot system that I'm seeing?

- This is a Deep Water Culture System, where I have six-gallon pots with a net pot inside. There's an air pump that pumps air into the water and nutrient solution, which bubbles it up and creates a mist and humidity amongst the root zone. So, that is how they uptake their nutrients.

- And I see some beautiful basil and kale in here, but the size of this tent that it's in indicates to me that you could probably put something pretty big in here.

- You can. You can grow fruit trees, you can grow big tomato and pepper plants as well. It's adjustable from 5 foot 11, 6 foot 6 and 8 foot.

- Well, I really like this because it looks like you could not only contain all your light in there but you can zip it up so it's not going to keep me awake all night.

- Right, you won't have the light glaring in your TV while you're watching the news at night.

- I like that. Now, there's this interesting hole on the side. What is that for?

- During the summer, the lights tend to create some heat. So, those are there to put some duct work and an inline fan in to pull the heat out of the tent, keep it the right temperature without melting your plants.

- So, this is then something you could use year round?

- Absolutely.

- Well, we've given you a taste of what it's like to grow indoors, and you can see all kinds of fantastic and fascinating products at Nashville Hydroponics so that you can learn even more.

- Through the years of gardening, we seem to collect lot of different color containers, plastic, whether they're resin or fiberglass and there's a technique that we can use that will unify all of these planters and containers and use them for our combination plantings. It's a very simple thing to do. I read it in a magazine, didn't even pull it out. It's that simple, no steps involved. So, to go from this to this. We can go from this inexpensive, three-dollar plastic to this very classy-looking wood color. The product we're gonna use is Gel Stain. I'm gonna show you how this was put on here 24 hours ago. It does need that amount of time to keep it from. It was still tacky feeling last night, but today it's all dried out, and just take it and as you can see, what has happened to the original finish, this pot is made from, must have a little bit of styrofoam in it, and it is a little porous up here at the top, but it's deciding whether or not you wanna see brush marks, and I think I'll go back and use this one more time on some of these, and then I wanted to leave some of the original color. So, I'll just do sort of a swirl action over this. You see how simple that is? You can take unused items, give them a fresh, new face. Now, it did suggest that if you were using this on wood that you would put a finish on it but we don't need to do that with this and I think I would not want that shiny finish on this type of product. Now that this first little coat is on this, I'm gonna go around, and I also need to finish it on the inside lip, but I wanna go back over here and just see what happens right in here where you can see my brushstrokes from yesterday. See how that one last coat, but it does need that 24 hours to dry, and I think again once you start to use this, you'll decide for yourself maybe you wanna see the striping from the brush strokes. This is suggested for wood, veneer, fiberglass and more. So, and more, to me, meant this resin and fiberglass containers. Now this finished product, I believe looks great. This is an example of what is possible for us to achieve with this product. This comes in wood colors. As you can see, there's a lighter color on here. This comes with oak. They even have a darker black finish, but if we were to take, for instance, the technique and how this looks here we could duplicate that by getting this Gel Stain in a lighter color and applying it to the raised surfaces. When we're shopping at the end of seasons and we see something that we really like the shape of it but perhaps it's just not the right color, see by doing this, we can bring it home and put it in unified colors within the things that we already have on our patios and in our homes.

- Boxwoods are one of our favorite plants in the gardens. They create structure and form throughout the winter and all through the year. One of the main concerns we have with them recently is boxwood blight, and I'm here with David Cook to talk a little bit more about it.

- There is a disease now that is gonna be fairly new to Davidson County, and we're not gonna cause a lot of excitement and people stop buying these beautiful boxwood plants, but this is a example of boxwood from my yard, and actually, there's nothing wrong with these leaves right here. Now if we do start seeing decline and yellowing or black spots occuring on a boxwood, this is just not gonna happen. Boxwoods have issues with diseases, which they've always had in our area. Tennessee, a temperate, humid climate, diseases prevail, but in this photo down here, we can see that we have dark circular but somewhat irregular leaf spots. This is not a common appearance of boxwood leaves in the Tennessee area now. Now, this is a disease called boxwood blight, and if we call a disease a blight, that means it develops rapidly, and boxwood blight from spore to sporulating conditions can occur in one week in Tennessee. So, we can look at temperatures in the mid 40s up to the 70s. So, this is a long period of time in Tennessee when this disease could attack boxwoods. Now, why would we have this disease? It will only be in Tennessee if the plant material that's infected is brought into our area, and so, this disease actually was in United Kingdom in the 90s.

- Okay.

- Plants were brought over here. It was diagnosed in Connecticut and in North Carolina. North Carolina is a big boxwood growing, you know that, state, and so cause conditions are great for growing box this area. So, what happens if that disease gets on a plant and you don't see the symptoms? Well, we're gonna buy these plants. Commercial landscapers install them in. So, what do we need to do? We need to look for symptoms. So, what will happen, a symptom would be very easy to see sometimes. A symptom on this leaf may actually look like a black spot. So, if I start seeing black spots appearing like this, that's not the normal appearance of that leaf, and we do not have a disease in Tennessee of boxwoods that takes on that symptom. See, we're not seeing the disease. We're seeing how the plant responds to that. So, again, if that starts up, and then if we start seeing black streaking, vertical streaking on the stem, this is what we call canker. This would be a localized infection. Now, the problem with the stem infection is that it interferes with the movement of water and nutrients. So, everything above this area may start to decline, and this stem area actually may die cause this is the fungal infection. It's actually feeding on tissue right here causing death of this. It may start spreading to more areas like this. We don't have a disease that takes on this physical symptom right here. So, these black lesions, elongated lesions are common with boxwood blight, but unfortunate the most common symptom is complete defoliation, and if someone has a boxwood in their landscape, or a landscape professional put some boxwoods in, and then after a short period of time, when temperatures are say, 50, 60, 70s, if that boxwood completely defoliates, drops its leaves, that is a good indication of boxwood blight, and so Department of Ag should be notified or the UT Extension agent in that county should be notified to come out and look at that plant. It should be removed out of the landscape and actually destroyed but we want a positive identification, and we wanna remove that plant so we slow down the spread of this disease. Now generally when we have diseases or insects that enter this country and we've known about them for a decade and they get here, eventually some of the problems we can manage well. Some, we cannot manage well. I'm afraid, this is one that's gonna be a little more difficult to manage. When the weather gets very hot, it's amazing that in the 90s, this disease just stops, and very high temperatures actually stop this disease in its tracks.

- Oh wow, okay. I'm sure this would be a common question for a lot of people. What would be an acceptable replacement for a boxwood? If somebody had one die of that, what would you recommend to put in there?

- I would probably recommend maybe a variety of small leaf holly shrub. See, when we look at the leaves on the boxwood, they are small, and it's amazing that some people actually will buy a certain cultivars of hollies, thinking they've bought a boxwood.

- Like inkberry.

- Yeah, yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that. I tell people, I think the boxwood is like the BMW of plants. The holly is another make, I won't mention, car.

- Honda.

- Hondas are good cars. Nothing wrong with Honda, but it's like it's not a BMW, but it is great stand-alone plant.

- Sure.

- So, you can have a plant that resembles another one, but we gotta remember that with hollies, they also have issues too. They are very prone to root rot diseases. So, once we establish plants, we need to back off on watering, really back off on watering. We love our plants to death.

- Well, thank you for all that good information on boxwoods and boxwood blight. So, to recap, what are some things we can do to prevent just diseases in general and spreading?

- Okay, now, gotta remember that we can't control them but we can manage them. So, if we are pruning using spooning tools, it's good to disinfect. What's some disinfectants we could use? We could use a mixture of bleach and water, dip the pruning tools in for 30 seconds to a minute. With bleach, we need to then rinse that off. Bleach could be corrosive. Lysol spray which is a type of alcohol is an excellent disinfectant for fungal diseases and bacterial diseases in plants. Now Lysol generally doesn't have to be wiped off. You can with a little wet rag. I generally carry two pruning tools, and I disinfect one and then grab the other one and prune. So, we don't want it to be the factor of the disease that spread them. Again, we look for disease-resistant plants. Disease resistant, that's the key right there, but we gotta be careful pruning. If disease leaf tissue falls to the ground, we try a cultural practice of trying to remove as much as we can cause while the spores are there.

- Sure, great, well thank you. I appreciate that. Great tips.

- You're very welcome.

- [Voiceover] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org or on YouTube at the Volunteer Gardener Channel and like us on Facebook.