Episode 2515

- [Voiceover] What a pretty picture of springtime. Come along as we enjoy the fabulous show of more than 100,000 tulips at Cheekwood Botanical Garden. Plus, Julie Verbelia keeps money in her pocket with frugal and fun ways to start seeds at home. This and more, join us.

- [Voiceover] First, outdoor spaces tapped for their growth potential.

- You know, in neighborhoods everywhere, there are vacant lots. Sometimes, those lots sort of all by the way side, become derelict, and that's what this lot was like up here in White's Creek, but an enterprising gardener has changed all of that, and it's beautified this whole little neighborhood hidden back here off of this road, and I can't wait for you to see it. So David Sprouse is the gardener that has created this amazing space out of an old abandoned lot, and tell me how this all came to be.

- Well, this is actually a reserved parcel for the neighborhood that I live in, and I acquired it just from a buddy of mine and it was total woods. I mean, it looked like the woods you see around this plot, and I cleared it with a chainsaw and brush piles. It took me about a year to clear it, and my full intention was to do a garden, and it's actually zoned agriculture. So, there were a lot of challenges just to get this garden up and going.

- So one of the things that you did as you were clearing was you sort of had your creative mind engaged also, and you built some of these structures that you have in the garden and created some unique gates. Tell me about kind of coming up with these ideas and then how you executed them.

- Well, what I did is I selected, I marked various trees on my property. This actually is sassafras wood. It came from my residential property, which is very close by, and I would get dead wood, the things I felt like I could use that didn't cost anything and this is where this arbor, I think there are some cedar here and black locust across the top.

- But you've chosen wood that will stand up to the elements for a number of years. You don't have to worry about this rotting in the near future.

- And this is a bedframe that actually belonged to my grandfather. It's been sitting in our barn for quite some time and I just, I said, well, this would make a good gate, so.

- It's lightweight, so it's easy to open and you have just immediate access to the garden this way.

- Well, I didn't design this garden, I guess, in a way a typical designer would. I didn't plan the entire thing. I just did it in little pieces and bits and chunks, and this rose garden is probably two years old, and the slabs here are red oaks, and once again, there was a dead red oak on the property, and I just thought, wow, these would make great stepping stones.

- So again, just sort of recycling, upcycling from nature.

- Right.

- And even though it's very rustic with the wood, round stepping stones and your limbs along the pathways, it's also got kind of a formal aspect to it.

- Yes.

- A formal layout.

- And it ended up being a triangular shape, obviously, and all the rocks that you see too are basically rocks that I just dug up from the property. As you know, being a Tennessee gardener, it doesn't take long to find a rock.

- Find plenty of rocks.

- So, it may not be as smooth as a typical type rock-path, but you know, once again, you're using resources that are free here.

- One of the things that you've done David that I think is really unique and really beautiful is that you've mixed your plantings up in this garden. The vegetables hang out with the roses, and there's privet mixed in, golden privet, not bad privet, but golden ornamental privet. You've got melons mixed in with other ornamentals. Tell me a little bit about your philosophy behind doing it that way.

- Well, I've planted vegetables in many of these gardens, as we can see, you know corn and beans, and as I planted melons and things through the years, as you know melons spread and to keep the grass from coming up underneath them, I had these mulch beds that I did with leaves and as you know, melons and things like that do real well in the mulch leaves. So it's really an experiment in companion planting and plant diversity and it seemed that this year, all of my melons and things look really well.

- And obviously the squash are happy.

- Yes, the squash, the yellow is zucchini actually, has done quite well and once again, there's some shade that it gets, but the sun comes this way, and it seems to be thriving.

- Yeah, your shade is just basically from just one big tree. So as the sun moves across, you get sun at different times of day, and there's plenty of sun to grow these things successfully. You've also got roses growing on again, a very unique structure, something that you've built a lot out of just salvage pieces.

- Well the story behind this piece is my neighbor gave me this. It's an old wood rack. He said it was about a rick of wood, and he said, "Do you want it" and I said, "Sure," and he also gave me these clothes line pieces and I started thinking, wow I could make a gateway entrance with this and these are cow panels and once again, the only money I spent was on the cow panels.

- Right, which you can pick up fairly inexpensively at a farm supply store, and they're sturdy. I mean nothing, once this is tied up, you can grow anything on this, and it's not gonna take it down. So you've done a variety of raised beds out of different kinds of materials, but I think anybody who's being really resourceful can find any number of ways to make raised beds, but I particularly like these that are done out of logs. Again, recycled material right from the property, and I'm assuming this is some kind of wood that also is gonna be rot-resistant. So, these are cedar logs?

- Yeah, red cedar.

- Cedar trunks?

- Yes.

- And then, on it behind that, you have again reclaimed wood that you have used to create this structure that you're now growing pole beans on. So this, what kind of wood is this made out of?

- I'm not sure about this particular wood. I know they grow really straight when they're young on the back property. I'm not exactly sure, maybe hickory.

- But you've just formed a structure out of that, and then you have smaller twigs that are forming kind of the network that the vine is actually growing on.

- The framework is actually done with cedar, which is gonna be rot-resistant. All the little webbing here are fruit tree. When I prune my fruit trees, you get six to eight feet long prunings, and they're very linear. When I saw them, I was like, I should be able to use these for something.

- They're also very pliable and flexible. So you can weave them in and out if you need to or you can tie them together.

- Exactly and one thing I found is these little ties. They're cheap, these little zip-ties, and they do amazing things and if that came loose, you just put another one. It's not a lot of screws and heavy maintenance here.

- So peach trees are another fruit, obviously that you are growing very well here, but they sometimes are a little persnickety in this area. We're a little north.

- A lot of humidity.

- A lot of humidity, and there are some challenges.

- Yes, I have really three varieties, a Hale Haven, a Red Haven and a Red Baron. Now probably the ones that have haven in the last part of the name have done the best, but as you know, in Tennessee, the peach borer can be quite a problem. They bore into the fruit and the fruit drops to the ground and the insect, or whatever it is comes back up to the ground and I do spray with Organocide. I do try to do all my edibles with organic sprays and it does help. You're not gonna get a full crop, but I can get peaches, if I can keep the deer and the pest off of them, which is another challenge.

- Because you're not fenced here. So there are those challenges also.

- Yes, absolutely.

- Well, it is amazing to me that you've taken this from just sort of an abandoned, wooded lot to what we see today and I wanna thank you for sharing your time and your expertise and your know-how and showing all of us that you can create something beautiful if you just have a little bit of creative vision.

- Well, thank you Troy. Thanks for coming out.

- Thank you.

- I'm here with Patrick Larkin at Cheekwood Botanical Garden in Nashville, Tennessee. We are down in the arches of the Color Garden in this absolutely brilliant display of tulips. How many tulips are in just this area right here?

- In just this area, we have about 20,000 tulips that we were able to fit in here yeah.

- Wow, yeah, it really is stunning and the mixes, I see some fading and some just coming on.

- So at Cheekwood, what we try to do is actually mix early, mid, and late blooming ones. So there's really always something to see when folks come out. So, here, we've got our mids just starting to go out and then our late-season tulips just starting to come on.

- Yeah, and even more than some of the flowers, I see some interesting foliage behind you too that's nice on this little orange tulip.

- Right, well, I mean, that's what a lot of fun with tulips, and actually anything that you plant. You want to look at that multiple seasons of interest. So when the flowers are gone, or even before they appear, you have some great foliage color, and you're not so apt to just want to yank it out as soon as the foliage starts to fade on it.

- Yeah, yeah, and it's also nice to have a few daffodils mixed in here and there so you get that kind of contrast of flower type also.

- Right, we try and have multiple layers of interest with our planting. So you'll also see that we have over-planted the tulips with pansies in this case. We also over-plant with violas and then we also mixed in some of the smaller daffodils this year, the little poetic, types out in here. So we'll get the fragrance off of those and just something that's a little bit different for people to see besides just the tulips.

- Sure and 'cause the majority of the tulips are not fragrant, is that correct?

- Correct, yeah, most tulips are not fragrant and a lot of daffodils aren't. So you need to take a look and seek out those things that are going to add that interest to your garden.

- Well, I'm okay with them not being fragrant. I mean, they're so beautiful. That's kind of okay. They get a pass.

- And for the fragrance, early in the season, we actually had a hyacinths as well. So we really timed our bloom season, and we're trying to extend it as much as possible, so when people come out, they're able to see different things. So we started with the hyacinths. Really, those came on in February, and then we moved into the tulips and a lot of the daffodils, and we still have daffodils coming on here, and then this year, we also added allium, and so, those will be coming up very soon here as well.

- So your bulb season is what, six to eight weeks?

- Oh, we're even longer than that. We're probably up to eight weeks now at this point. We planted 150,000 bulbs this year. So 110,000 tulips alone, 109,000 tulips alone, and again as we've been looking to extend the season more adding those other things like the hyacinths, the daffodils, and then the allium and we hope to add for and those sorts of things too to just always have something adventurous, always have people wanting to come back and see something different.

- So, we're up here in the Trial Garden. Are there any particular varieties that have stood out to you this year?

- It's actually been amazing to see how things come along and, I mean, we have some in here that haven't even started coming up yet. I mean, they're just really starting to come up. So we trial different things and again, ones that were solid performers for us last year up here, some of them are not performing as well. One of my favorite whites is Antarctica right here. We've had this one trialing it out for a couple of years now, and it seems to be just a really great white, staying on for a long period of time. For the really dark one, this palmyra here, I mean it is so dark and when the sun hits it, it's really reflective, but it's also a double also, which adds a little bit more interest to the garden as well.

- It's almost blue in the center.

- I know.

- It's like an eye. That is really stunning, and I like seeing the different forms too. You can really kind of do whatever with the lilies and the short double ones and the parrots, really nice.

- Well, it's a lot of fun for people to be able to pick out their different ones that they like with their families, and again, you'll see the different foliage colors out here also, as well.

- And this little, I mean the generic term for me at least the Rembrandt with that kind of stripe in it, that inconsistent stripe.

- This one's Juliet, and again, it's been a solid performer. We actually moved this one out into the garden last year, and are using it much more. Blooms for a really long period of time. The flowers stand up well over time. So we've been really happy with it.

- Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this kind of stripe, vein one start the whole tulip mania thing back in Holland I guess?

- That was what people were really excited about, was the whole striping and those sorts of things.

- I mean, I'm excited about it right now. So, I get it, yeah, yeah, yeah, and again with these parrot tulips with that crinkle leaf. What is this, apricot parrot?

- This is apricot parrot, yeah.

- Really a stunning one.

- And it looks like crepe paper almost, I mean in terms of how frilly and ruffled the petals are.

- It does, it's really nice.

- So this yellow one over here?

- So lily chic is a lily-flowered tulip, fantastic yellow on it. The little points on the end are always fascinating to people. They don't realize that it is a tulip oftentimes, and it's lasted for about two weeks for us now, which is a fantastic amount of time to get out of a tulip and just that really clear yellow also is fantastic to have in the garden, and then orange dynasty here. This is actually a lot of fun. It's great orange-red, but then the center on it is just a magnificent yellow also. So in the sun, it'll open up and you'll be able to see the yellow centers on them.

- So this brilliant orange one with that dark stem is really nice. How has this one been?

- Hermitage has done very well for us. You can see it's blooming a little bit shorter. I mean, in terms of total height, it's about a mid-range on the height. The color is terrific. So you've got multiple colors in the one tulip, and then that dark stem just adds that additional interest that you're always looking for multiple interest out of your plants, and so, it's not a typical green stem that you would find on your regular tulips.

- Yeah, and even the foliage is kind of a blue-gray compared to the green.

- The straight green.

- That you can see around it, yeah. All parts of it are quite unique. It's nice, and then this one over here that's really standing out with this.

- Yeah, hemisphere is terrific. So at Cheekwood, we'll do our own mixes. We'll do our own color mixes where we'll combine different cultivars together, but oftentimes, you'll have a single cultivar that will actually, on it's own, you'll have multiple colors in there, and this one is just amazing in terms of just all of the, it's almost like each one of the pedals have been painted and again, you've got everything from an almost clear white going through pinks and reds and it's just a fascinating plant.

- So, it's been really fun to look at all these different cultivars of tulips. As far as the homeowner goes, what are some general tips as far as taking care and planting tulips in the fall that you could give?

- Sure, well, tulips should be planted in the fall. You want the soil to actually be cold. They say 60 degrees, but the average homeowner probably doesn't have a soil thermometer to tell. So I normally tell folks to at least wait until after Halloween, before Thanksgiving is a good time, and you can plant them on into December very easily. As long as you can work the soil, you can go ahead and plant the tulips, and then depending on the cultivar, there's different spacings that again depending on what you buy, it'll actually tell you what the spacing is that you wanna use on it, but I always encourage folks to treat their tulips as annuals, for the most part, except for some of the species tulips really because, I mean, that show is really just so impressive that first year and then, in subsequent years, it starts to fade, and again when you buy the bulbs, it actually has everything in there already, I mean the flowerbud is already initiated in there. So for the most part, it should be full-proof for the homeowner to get something beautiful in the spring like this.

- Sure, very cool, yeah. Well those are some great tips. I really appreciate you taking some time out and showing us around Cheekwood and this display. If you get a chance, definitely come out and see the tulips here at Cheekwood.

- I am so happy to be here to learn to how to start seeds. The first thing that always mystifies me is what do I start, when do I start it, and how do I know what to start next.

- Okay, I've been organizing my own seeds with that in mind and to try to get a better handle on what needs to be started when. So I've just started this file, and I've got it by month and I've got then the seed, and when you can plant it, and if it says seed, you can go ahead and plant it in the garden at that time, and occasionally, you'll see one that's gonna say, seed, where you can plant in the garden, or you can start the seed inside at a different date. So there are charts you can get on the UT Extension website that will give you this kind of information for seeds, and then you can organize and you can know, okay this is January, I can start these seeds right now, maybe inside and even again some of these things can be planted outside very, very early. Lettuces can be planted outside starting in February.

- Wow, well I really like that system, and so I have to put that on my organizing to-do list. Now I have seeds, I have to say, I hope I'm not the only one, that I don't know how old they are, but I know I didn't get them this year.

- Yeah, occasionally, you know, often the seed packet will have the date on it, and you can look for packed for and the year of 2007 is really old for spinach seeds. So I don't think these are still good any longer, but there's a way you can test to find that out. They recommend you take about 10 seeds and you use a damp paper towel, and I'm just gonna put about 10 seeds out here, and let's see. I'm really gonna count them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, okay, and what we're gonna do is just roll this damp paper towel up, put it in a plastic baggie, and then we'll start checking it every few days to see if any of these have sprouted. Now, after they've started sprouting, and you give it a few more days, if half of the seeds sprout, then you probably want to plant out about twice as many seeds as you normally would. That means you've got 50% viability of your seeds. If only one out of ten seeds plants, I would probably toss those seeds and go buy some fresh seeds.

- I have to plant it in something.

- You want some kind of sterile potting media. I've got some of the ingredients that are in these potting mixes. You can buy a pre-made potting mix. Sometimes they even have a little fertilizer added in, and they're usually gonna have something like peat or bark, real fine bark and this is gonna be sterile. It's not gonna have diseases and soils in it, but this is going to make your soil really loose, and then you might add some vermiculite, which is a mineral that has been kind of puffed up and exposed like popcorn, and it makes it very light. Vermiculite also will help soak up moisture and nutrients, and so, keep those things readily available to the plant, and then the third ingredient I have here that you might wanna put in a soil mix if you're mixing it yourself is perlite, and this is another one that is volcanic mineral that again is puffed up like popcorn. So it's very lightweight, and it will really aerate your soil mix, 'cause you know, the seeds not only need moisture to sprout, they also need oxygen, and I think it's a great opportunity to use a lot of recycled materials and it makes it fun and you feel good about reusing things instead of throwing them out. So we've got milk jug containers here. We've got different kinds of cups. You can even use paper cups or plastic cups or Solo cups or cups you've brought something home from a to-go thing or your to-go containers. Now, I could use this for starting seedlings. Punch a few holes in here. You want good drainage, and I could just put my soil to about a half an inch or a quarter of an inch from the top and I could go ahead and plant my seeds in this or you could use this to put other seed containers in and this will be my waterproof tray underneath. So you don't want to make a mess. You're usually starting these in the house. So you wanna have some kind of tray underneath anything you might use. This is using toilet tissue tubes, another great use for them. We didn't even put a bottom on them 'cause you can cut it in slits and tape it or staple it, whatever, but you don't really have to if you're not gonna be picking them up. So you just want a waterproof tray underneath. You might tie a string around these to hold them in shape and then go ahead and put your soil mix down in there and plant your seeds and the advantage of something made out of paper is that you can plant it out in the garden, as long as the paper is all underneath the soil level so it won't dry out. Then you could just plant the paper and all out in your garden when you're ready to transplant these, and let's see, over here.

- Well, okay, so you have a really nice paper pot here. Now I've seen all kinds of wooden devices you can buy. They tend to be pretty expensive to make this. What are you using?

- The wooden devices are really pretty, and I've looked at them and thought, oh I could buy that but, I sometimes am frugal. So we're gonna use a soup can and just leave some of the paper. I just did a double thickness here, and I'm just gonna roll it around the soup can until it's all the way down, and then I can just crimp the bottom, just kind of mash it in and flatten it. Now I could staple this, like I've done this one here, just one staple or I could tape it and then when you pull your soup can out, I can staple it right here, and at the bottom, and I've got a nice little paper pot, again, one that can be planted out in the garden.

- One other thing, well I guess really there are two other things that we always need to keep in mind, that it's one thing to get all this stuff started, but to keep it going, we really need to look at the light and make sure that we're keeping things warm enough.

- Yes, soil temperature is a very important thing on how long it takes a seed to plant. Again, there's some great charts online about that, where if you plant a lettuce seed at the correct soil temperature, it can sprout in one day, but if you plant it at soil temperature that's too cool, it can take it a week, and there's some plants where that even goes to extremes where they can take more than a month to sprout when the soil temperature is wrong. So yeah, you wanna know what the soil temperature is for the seed you're trying to sprout, and you may need to put a little heating pad underneath your planters to give a little extra warmth or put it on top of your refrigerator. The top of a refrigerator tends to be a little warm, places like that you can use to kind of get that temperature up a little bit.

- Alright now, what about lights? What kind of lights do we need to get?

- Yes, you can use just a fluorescent light fixture like you have in your shop. These are very inexpensive. Now I would invest in grow light bulbs to put in here because they're gonna give you the right spectrum of light that the plants really need to be healthy, and again position these just a couple of inches before you plant. So I use a system with some chains and S-hooks where you can kind of make this at any height you want to. So you just hook this to the top of the plant, and then you can adjust how high or low your plant is by adjusting where you've got your S-hooks and how you move the chain around, and so, you can keep changing, lifting the light up as the plants are growing taller and I've got a second light fixture over here, which is a little bit heavy dutier, a little bit better light, and this is called a sunblaze light fixture, and you can see those bulbs. This one puts out a lot of light. In fact, during the winter, I turn this light on sometimes just so my kitty kat can curl up underneath it, and it's one of her favorite places to be, but then when I start to plant the seeds, she has to find another spot, but there are great lights like this that you can invest in, and they will last for years and years and you've got good light because light is very important for seedlings. If they're not getting enough light, they're gonna be very and they're gonna lean over and they're not gonna be healthy plants. They're not gonna be stocky plants like you wanna have. So you can use natural light but you have to have a really good source of natural light. Some of these plants, I might take them outdoors when it's a warm day and let them get a little natural light but you gotta start doing that slowly. That's what we were mentioning, that hardening off process, where you can't just take plants that have been grown totally inside and stick them out on a sunny day for a whole day. They get fried. Actually, the leaves just turn beige and the plant dies. So it shocks them and they just can't handle that. So you have to them out a couple of hours the first day, bring them back in, maybe start putting them out on some shady days for a little while, and then gradually work up over a week or so to them being able to withstand the sunlight. So that's a process that once you have those baby plants, if you're gonna put them outside, don't destroy them then. Take a little care to make sure they can adapt to the sun, and another thing is, plants grown indoors, they don't have the wind that actually gives them a little extra heartiness. So you can brush the baby plants with your hands, and that hardens them a little bit to be able to be ready to stand up when the wind hits them outside.

- Oh wow, those are all great tips. Well Becky, best of luck with your seed starting this year, and all of us, let's remember, we can start seeds any time of the year in your house. So let's get growing.

- [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.