Episode 2514

- [Voiceover] On this Volunteer Gardener, we'll stroll border beds full of fragrant and flavorful herbs, learn how to optimize yields of kale and collards while growing organically, and ramble around the peaceful and picturesque grounds of Historic Cragfont in Castalian Springs. Join us. First, basil for pesto and peppers for roasting.

- I love herbs, and today we have the pleasure of visiting Carol and Rob Stein in their herb garden. Carol, let's start right here.

- Well, these are garlic chives, which I use in cooking. They're self-propagate, and you need to control them.

- Yes, if they flower, you're in trouble.

- But they're pretty flowers.

- Yes, they are, and then I love that purple, ruffly thing back there you said was an ornamental.

- It's a ornamental basil-related plant. I believe it's used in Japanese cooking. I just use it for decor.

- Even gorgeous in bouquets also though.

- Yes, absolutely. You have to contain it 'cause it's invasive.

- Okay, good to know and then behind there, we have a type of mint.

- Yeah, Kentucky Colonel mint, which is great in mint julep.

- Okay.

- Need it for mint julep.

- Yes, yes, and then I noticed that you've got the Tennessee Wildflower there, the passion flower in a pot.

- That was a gift from our daughter for one anniversary.

- Nice, and you also have a pot of lemon verbena. Now, where do you winter that over at?

- In the rec room, we have some grow lights. It tends to get very, very scraggly, but it is one of the most loved plants in the garden because aside from using it in tea, as a lemon flavor, I make lemon sorbet, lemon verbena sorbet, which is truly like perfume.

- And I see some dill.

- Well, everybody has to have dill in their garden. I use the flowering sections in salads, but also let some go to seed because it will self seed, and in terms of, I make a lot of herb butters. I make a lot of things with herbs, but with the dill, I just take off the fronts here, strip them, put them into a Quisinart with softened butter.

- Salted or unsalted?

- Unsalted, always unsalted, turn it on, it comes out as a lump like this, put it on a piece of wax paper, and roll it so the pieces can be cut for fish.

- You put it in the refrigerator of the freezer?

- Freezer.

- Okay.

- Freezer.

- And so essentially, you could do that with any herb, the same technique.

- Yeah.

- And it's kind of like playing around with what your personal taste.

- Absolutely, that's what it's all about.

- Yeah, and then behind here, we have some pineapple sage, and we have another basil. You have lots of varieties of basil, love it.

- Well the thing is, I have grandkids in town who were addicted to pesto. So no matter how much I make, industrial strength, we use all the basil.

- So grandma kills the pesto queen, huh?

- I guess, I guess.

- And then what's in the pot right here?

- That's Mexican oregano, and it has a very wonderful taste. It's a little soft. This is what you will find dried in bodegas, but it's hard to find the plants. It took a period of time after the last one died.

- Is that tender or do you?

- Yes, here, it's tender.

- And the pineapple sage, are you making anything good with that?

- Bouquets.

- Bouquets? It's always good in lemonade and things like that too. Alright, we're gonna go up here and check out your next little border.

- Okay.

- Carol, I see we have some flat-leaf parsley and then sorrel. Tell me about your soup you make with the sorrel.

- Well, I make a French sorrel soup. I serve it either at room temperature or cold. It requires a lot of sorrel, which I used to be able to get in New York at the grocery store, but no longer and certainly not down here. My sorrel soup calls for a pound of leaves, which is an awful lot.

- That's a lot, that's a lot, and it's important to mention that to grow your herbs and to continue to have them flourish, we keep the flowers cut off, correct?

- Correct, and this is a perennial.

- And then we have a basil in front here.

- Lettuce-leaf basil, this is the classic basil with large-format leaves.

- One of my favorite things and it's not grown very much is the salad brunette.

- Which tastes like cucumber.

- Yes, very good in salads. That's probably where it got its name from, and then we have some French tarragon in front.

- Um hmm, which is not so easy to grow.

- No, it's not in this area. It's too hot, and as you said and we agreed that it needs lots of shade, and then we have some oregano.

- Yes, we have, this is the Greek oregano. I use two types and we grow both of them in cooking, Greek and Italian. Greek, I like the best because a little, little softer, doesn't have as much of a bite.

- I see you have some nasturtiums back here. Do you use the leaves as well as the?

- I don't, I don't. I use just the flowers, but I probably should.

- Do you use the capers then afterwards as well?

- I have not.

- Okay, those are good in salad as well, just like the flowers are edible. So if you're making real pretty, pretty lunch, they look awesome in a salad, and this is Rob. This is Carol's equal half.

- Lesser half.

- And we're gonna talk about things that you enjoy more.

- Absolutely.

- The peppers.

- I love the peppers and this is our forest of purple peppers and we call them purple peppers because the foliage when it matures, will be pure purple, but as the peppers themselves come in, they turn all sorts of colors, white, purple, orange, and then red.

- And they are edible?

- And I have a garland here that is basically last year's crop that we hang in the kitchen, and then when the new crop comes in, we will take these, throw them into a food mill. That becomes our red pepper flakes for the following year.

- So is it a hot pepper?

- This is twice as hot as any commercial red pepper that you'll buy.

- Oh, wow, okay.

- So when we see a recipe that calls for red pepper flakes, we have it if we're using this.

- Great, and then I also see several types of basil coming up here but we have the purple ruffle.

- The purple ruffle is, not only is it pretty to look at, but we make our own vinegar. So we'll use the purple ruffle to not only impart flavor to the vinegar, but also a lovely pinkish-purple color. So, it's just a lovely product, which we give away as a gift to friends.

- And so there's more peppers. Are those a different kind we should talk about?

- These are Shishito peppers, and one of our fellow Herb Society members turned us on to this. This is a pepper that's absolutely wonderful either green as you see it or at the bottom, the red, and basically just cut it off the vine, put some olive oil on it, maybe some salt and pepper to taste, and then just grill it. Throw it on the grill and char it, and once it's charred, it goes straight from the grill into your mouth. It needs no embellishment. It's a wonderful appetizer.

- And tell me about the arugula.

- The arugula is a very unusual type in that this arugula actually winters over here in Nashville, which is very unusual, and it was given to us as a gift by actually a faculty member at a course that I used to chair. He said it was special and he was right. As you can see, it's growing everywhere that we let it, but it also self seeds. So our main issue with the arugula is keeping it in bounds.

- And of course I feel not one herb garden is complete without bay.

- Bay, well, this is probably one of the greatest values for an herb garden. Anyone who's purchased herbs, who's purchased bay from the grocery, when you get over the shock of the price of the bay leaves, then you'll realize that paying $2.50 for a plant that will give you more than a lifetime's supply of bay makes the most sense, and the only downside is that yes, you have to take it in during the winter.

- And we have another basil.

- This is a relatively rare cultivar called New Guinea Basil and we love it because, first of all, it's very pretty with the purple and green foliage, but it also has wonderful flavor. It's gonna get chest high. My wife, when she makes pesto, actually combines the lettuce-leaf with the columnar with the New Guinea so that it's a more complexed flavor in the pesto.

- And one of my favorites is lovage back there.

- Yes, well, I think lovage is one of the most under-appreciated herbs in the garden.

- I totally agree.

- Of course, it's great for soup, stews, but it's great just to the leaves and put them into a salad. One of my favorite things to do is to harvest the stalks which are hollow and there's no better way to drink a Bloody Mary than through a lovage straw.

- And lovage has the flavor of celery, we need to mention.

- It has the flavor of celery with a little pepper added onto it.

- And it isn't tough. If you cook the stalk, it's tough. So it's good in stews and soups, something that's gonna cook for a long time.

- Exactly, and it's a perennial. So it comes back year after year, and then right next door is also a newcomer this year for us. It's padron pepper, which matches up with the Shishito peppers that are relatively mild. The padron peppers carry about as much heat as I wanna use for a pepper that I'm tasting. So we've decided that we're gonna be filling that pepper with goat cheese or something to cut the heat.

- Bob, I wanna talk about that tall plant right there.

- That's one of our favorites, actually. It's a Mexican tarragon. So long after the French tarragon sort of poops out in the heat, this Mexican tarragon is just going strong. It also is gonna come up with a yellow flower late in October. So it's just about the last thing in the garden to flower and also has this vertical, upright growth pattern so that it looks pretty just as a landscaping plant. Not only is it functional as a culinary plant, but it also has visual benefit as well, and you can see how it looks nice up against the sage Berggarten here as a foil. So, they play off each other.

- Well, Rob and Carol, I wanna tell you, thank you very much for sharing your pleasure with herbs. It's been wonderful, and I hope this kind of gets the itch in other people to use them culinary as well as in the landscape. Thank you again for letting us share your gardens.

- Thank you.

- Great ground guarantees growing gourmet garden greens galore. This field was in beans and cucumbers and squash and corn, all spring and summer long and then by mid-August, that was history. We bush-hogged it, chisel-plowed it, and herald it, and then we got it ready for planting the kale and the collards. These are the greens that really make the fall a garden. Kale and collards collect calcium that are very good for you because of that calcium, but we have to put it on the ground first in the form of lime or wood ashes. For lime, we spread about a ton to the acre every other year, which amounts to five pounds per hundred square feet or a 50-pound bag for a spot 10-feet wide by 100 feet long, which is 1,000 square feet. This 1,000-square foot space of garden needs about a yard and a half of high-quality compost along with the lime, but I will only put about 10 pounds of wood ashes on it. Kale is the queen of the greens. It has three times the amount of vitamin C as an orange, and it has the protein content of 4.5%, packed with fiber and it's super nutritious. Add to this kale's winter heartiness, and you can see why kale is gaining popularity. We harvest it from September all through the winter, up until April, when it sends up a little shoot, and that shoot makes a flowerbud, oh, about the size of a half a dollar that looks just like a broccoli. They're delicious. We call them brocckalies. After they've flowered, they go to seed, and then the little seed pods are dried, and we thresh out the little black seeds that we plant again the next fall. Kale and collards were grown back in the Roman times, and the Latin word for them was coal. These plants are the ancestors of cauliflower and broccoli and all of the other plants that we grow in that cabbage family, but these remain the most nutritious because they're most like the way they were back then. These collards are very similar but they're a little bit more heat-tolerant. So they can grow in a little hotter weather, but they're maybe not as winter-tolerant as the kale. This variety is Tuscano, a Lacinato type of kale from Italy. It's an Italian heirloom also known as dinosaur kale. It has these wavy sort of rough leaves. There are other varieties of kale that have very curly leaves, like vates and Syberian kale and Scotch Curled. We actually like the flat-leaf kales better. They seem to be a little heartier and maybe I like them because they're easier to wash in case there's a bug or something on them. This flat-leaf kale, we've been saving the seed for 35 years. You make a shallow furrow in the garden some time around the middle of August and then, I just sprinkle the kale seed right in that row, step on it a little bit to firm it into the ground, and kick a little bit of soil on top. It will sprout up in about a week, and it comes up thickly. Now, you can thin them out to six or eight inches apart, but we just let it grow up thickly, and then we cut them, oh about eight inches off the ground and the leaves come back and it's a cut-and-come-again crop. I found that frost seems to improve the flavor of the fall kale, but other things that help kale to have a sweet flavor are having that calcium in the ground and also having no nitrates. So as a plant grows, it needs nitrogen, and if it gets nitrogen in the form of a nitrate, then it has to use some of its energy to turn it back into nitrogen so that it can use it, and this energy in a plant comes in the form of sugar. So if we have amino acid nitrogen from old compost that's been worked into the ground since last spring, then the plants taste sweeter because they haven't had to use up that sugar. Another advantage to having sugar in the plants is that sugar is not digestable to leaf-eating insects. So, the leaves don't have bug holes. We had put about 40 tons of compost over this acre in the spring when we grew the cucumbers, squash and beans, but I didn't add anymore before I planted the fall garden. By cultivating the beans, squash, and cucumbers, I kind of turned that microbial balance from a fungal bacterial ratio that was even more on the bacterial side, which is what the fall greens really like. For the small investment in a little bit of seed and a small amount of work, kale and collards are a great addition to the fall garden, which your garden will just grow up in leaves anyway. They're highly nutritious, easy to grow. You can eat them all winter long. It's great garden soil that makes it all possible.

- I am in Castalian Springs. I want you to imagine with me as we travel back in time to 1798. I'm standing in Historic Cragfont. This was the home of General James Winchester, and at this home, remarkably, is still standing today because it was constructed of a rough Tennessee limestone. They do have a historic home that you can visit, but out in the back, they have taken an infrared photograph and the gardens that existed then, people have worked hard to bring back the resemblance of the gardens, and you know me. I'm going to go to the garden. This is a garden of year-round interest. We happen to be here in late summer. We still have the sound of the insects, but I'm visiting with Challis, and Challis, this is a beautiful location here. Tell us why Cragfont is on this site. Well, General Winchester choose this site 'cause it was up on a bluff and also, you can see it's a beautiful vista. It's also on a creek, Bledsoe Creek, and he had access for the tobacco farm. He was friends with Andrew Jackson. So he set this all up and he wanted a beautiful garden. General Winchester came from Maryland, and he wanted to set up his garden like the gardens they had, more of the formal structure that came out of Maryland, Carnton Plantation. So, he was looking at something like that.

- That was big scale. Can't you just imagine, what would they do out here in these gardens?

- Well, they had parties and their parties would go from three to five days and General Winchester, Sam Houston, they would come and their wives, and they were out here and they would have their tea. They would also have their bourbon, and they would enjoy a beautiful evening, and then during the day, they could come out under the trees. These pathways are the original pathways. Some of the bricks had to be replaced and restored. After the Civil War, the family, the original family, they no longer lived here, and there were multiple owners that came. Back in 1959, Ms. Wemous was a benefactor, decided to help with the restoration. Her, one of the heirs, Mary Winchester-White, donated a lot of money in the 70's, and they brought in infrared cameras to set up to find out where the original beds were, and that's when the restoration of the garden really took place.

- Isn't that exciting to know that they could site it right where it was. The house is there and we could reconstruct somewhat, well, and we've just almost reached a point here, something that I love in a garden is a sundial. Can you read the time on it? Let's see, let me get you out of the sun. I see it, what time it is. Do you see it?

- That looks like it's about 10 o'clock there.

- Yeah, see this is 12 and six, and three and yep.

- And this was set up in the 70's.

- Okay, well right here is one of my favorites, the perennial begonia. One of the beautiful things about this for a gardener that's not familiar with it is the color underneath the leaves and how it's beautiful this time of year.

- Well, we have a lot of weddings and events here. So we try to maintain color all year round. We have the hydrangeas, the dogwoods. We have tube roses. The Sumner County Master Gardeners maintain this with the support of the Board of Directors of Cragfont.

- Isn't it wonderful when you can walk down through an like this and you all have used.

- We have 14 crepe myrtles, and it sets up a beautiful canopy. After brides have had their wedding, they come back here, and a lot of the guests can enjoy an evening stroll through it.

- And you know, as we look at these, the bark has already started to exfoliate off of these crepe myrtle, and it's revealing a red, and the blooms are white, and that's why I think it , which is a great one, and these have also been pruned the correct way. I see no , and they're pruned up so you can see through them and don't have to see over them. I just love the garlic chives blossoms this time of the year when there's really not many other things, perhaps, blooming and you can walk by and get the fragrance too. Now I hear a relaxing sound of water here. Tell me about this special fountain.

- Well, this special fountain, it is in honor of Eugenia Kimber, who is a Master Gardener, and she was out here in charge of the garden for about 11 years, and so, we decided that we wanted to honor her with this, especially in this really pretty section of the garden. You have the rose of Sharon, you have a balloon flower. In the beginning of the summer, yep, we have daisies. We have the herb garden here, mandevilla are over there. So we try to have it just really pretty.

- Challis, I do like this, the walkways in here, and what is the shape overall of this bed?

- Well, this is an oval bed that was set up. It's divided into four quadrants. This is our fragrant garden. We have roses and the most exciting thing are the tube roses.

- I have to say, they are exciting, and I don't know that I've ever seen as many. Of course now, this zone we're in is sometimes kind of on a divided line. What do you do to preserve all of these tube roses?

- Well, I would say we dig up about half of them and we take them home, and then we leave the other ones. So that way if we have a really bad winter, we can bring them out. Since I've been doing this, about five years, we have, it just seems they just keep growing and growing, but we dig them up and keep planting them, and they keep growing, and so it's really exciting to have this, especially in August and September.

- I see from this viewpoint we still have that beautiful overlook of the valleys down below and you see that rockwall. It's calming, isn't it?

- Oh, it is. It's very peaceful out here in the fall. When the leaves start turning, it's just really pretty and of course, really, this garden is pretty practically all-year-round. We do have magnolias. We have boxwood. So even in the winter, you have color.

- Yeah, and another fragrance plant, I know you have in here are peonies, which are cut down, but they put out that same delightful fragrance, don't they?

- They're beautiful in May. They are just huge and you can make bouquets, and it's really pretty.

- I hope I've introduced you to a new place in Tennessee today. Castalian Springs has the Cragfont mansion. This will be a new place for me. They're open April 1st through November and even have a Christmas Open House. Enjoy Tennessee and its beauties. [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.