Episode 2545

- [Announcer] Spring is good anywhere, but it's best in a well-tended garden. Annette Shrader strolls through a grand perennial border as it awakens for the growing season. Turnip and mustard crops are closely related. Jeff Poppen shares his insights on growing these two crops. Plus, we'll visit an urban garden that grows flowers, food, and relationships. Join us.

- Brilliant colors of bulbs, blossoms, and buds. It must be spring.

- They say there's springtime in the Rocky's, but I prefer springtime in Paris, Paris Tennessee, with our good friend, Jimmy Williams. Jimmy, this magnificent pink behind you?

- Well, I'll tell you, Annette, that pink up there is beauty bush. Commonly called beauty bush, it's kolkwitzia. It's a german plant, named after a German, Kolkwitz. And it is just a wonderful old-timey shrub. It's about 15-feet tall there, and it'll get that big. I've got several around in the woods, and it blooms quite a bit in the shade, too.

- There's no denying, along in this border, what the chartreuse of spring does. And how it accentuates what you have in this border, here. What is this magnificent?

- It's a Chardonnay Pearls Deutzia, one of my favorite small shrubs. This is about maximum size and it's been here for several years now. The bloom is great, but Chardonnay Pearls, the buds look like little pearls. They're round and white and then they open out into the open blooms. But the chartreuse, of course, is for the foliage and I love chartreuse in a border, especially in spring. It's an eye-catching color, it's a very eye-catching color.

- And it stays that color all year. It's not like some of the other things that loses--

- That's right, it doesn't turn green. It stays that way to fall.

- And just look at the blue--

- The Spanish bluebells. I think its colors go great together. Spanish bluebells, I've got a lot of `em in it. A lot of bulbs in this border that've already bloomed and others that'll still come. But that particular combination I like.

- It's one of my favorite blooms around here.

- It's all over middle Tennessee in the wilds. The local spring phlox divaricata. The woodland phlox divaricata, with again the chartreuse and a little creeping Jenny.

- [Annette] Look at how fresh and new that one is.

- Yeah, this one's about over. That's right, they're toward the end of their life.

- Now this is a beautiful pansy.

- I wanna point out these pansies here, Annette, because they are hard to find, at least in our area. Down at the Jackson Experiment Station with Jason Reeves, you've been there, he has these at these at their fall sales. These have been here since last fall. I put `em in in the fall, think there's one flat in here. I love, this is Morpho, m-o-r-p-h-o, and it has a little monkey face and so on like the old-timey violas and may be a viola, I'm not sure.

- [Annette] Well all I can say is, is this sometimes called a Johnny-Jump-Up?

- [Jimmy] Yeah, the smaller forms are called Johnny-Jump-Up.

- [Annette] But this is not?

- This is not, this is actually, this one won't seed and come back. I used to have Johnn-Jump-Ups all over the place. As a matter of fact, they got to be almost a pest. And the columbine, the purple columbine, goes well with these colors. And these colors in here, that are in here now, pastels, virtually all pastels. And this is one of my favorites. This is a geranium. Most of the potted geraniums you come on are actually pelargoniums. This is geranium striatum. Y'see, I don't know if you can pick it up on the camera, but little striations of red and the pink there. Geranium sanguineum striatum. And it's a very wonderful, it blooms on til June. It'll bloom here for two months.

- [Annette] So I'll tell you something I see that I like about this variety. I have the other one, the blue, and it's so wild and big and it falls over. This is very controllable, isn't it?

- It's growin' outta the rock walls, here. Growin' nice, I poked it in there when it's young. I've got quite a few of those around and they divide easily and you can move `em nearly any time.

- Wow, and this little dianthus right here.

- That's a scarlet that's all rooted in there, in the wall.

- [Annette] The ending point of this border, pink plants over here, the top one there, this is a hardy gladioli?

- It's a hardy gladiola, and it's plenty winter-hardy and, matter-o`-fact, it can be a little bit in recess by seeding. But I don't know the species on it. But they're, you can buy `em by mail order from bulb houses. This one, this is one of the hand-me-down verbenas. Now you know homestead purple is the one everybody, and I've never had much luck with most of the cultivated varieties returning for me past winter. But this is, I've had it hear for years and years, and it's verbena canadensis, I'm pretty sure. Which is a species.

- [Annette] Marvelous. There's excitement here, it's spring, and exciting. I wanna go into some other areas.

- [Jimmy] Okay, let's go.

- [Annette] Towering over us is a good example of springtime in Paris, Jimmy. This is azalea back here.

- Yeah most people, many people, wouldn't recognize that as an azalea. The pink behind us is about over, you can see the bloom is going out. But it is from Henry County here, cuz there's a huge plantation of `em here in Henry County. Pink and white, we'll look at the white in a minute. But yes, and they started from little sprouts that I got.

- [Annette] How did you acquire your first plant?

- The pinks are more, not as plentiful as the white ones, I will say. But there were some pink ones there and some white, too in this area. And they clear cut that area a few years ago and absolutely demolished acres of `em. And it just made me sick, so I went out there rescued two or three sprouts. One of `em was this pink and the other one is this white one, right here.

- Oh, and this is what we smell?

- That's what you're smelling, it's so fragrant in it's white form. Azalea canescens, I guess they are. And they are, as I say, in middle Tennessee, the woods're just full of `em in places.

- That's over fifteen-foot high.

- Oh yeah, it's, they get much bigger than most people would realize. You don't often see them that big.

- [Annette] Well, and because it's native, you don't really every have to do anything.

- [Jimmy] I don't do anything to it `cept thin out some dead growth.

- [Annette] That's right and you know what, it's the right plant in the right place, therefore, no worry. That's exactly right. I love the brightness of this color on this azalea, Jimmy.

- Well, this orange or red almost azalea, and I don't know, it's not native to this county. In fact, I'm not sure, it's a hybrid of some of the native types of azaleas, but I don't know exactly what it's name of it is. But I love this plant here. There's three of `em in there.

- [Annette] Now some of the deciduous azaleas, they bloom with absolutely no foliage. Have these lingered on and got interrupted in their bloom?

- [Jimmy] No, this is normal for this variety. Some of `em absolutely do bloom before the leaves come out. This one is an exception in that regard, in that it does bloom after the leaves. Which, I don't know, it may be more, I don't know which way'd be more spectacular.

- [Annette] Either way, I'll take it. Now Jimmy, you were sharing something interesting with me as we were walking over. This azalea is called?

- Nathan B. Forrest. There's a series of these azaleas, deciduous azaleas, not evergreen, that are named for Confederate generals. I like to have this one because I'm related on my grandmother's side to Nathan Bedford Forrest, distantly. But anyway, the buds, when they come out, if you can pick that up, they're beautiful, a dark red. And then mid-bloom is about here and then they open on out. This one is just openin' up.

- [Annette] I call that burnt orange.

- It is, it's a burnt orange, yeah.

- [Annette] It's distinct, beautiful. Jimmy, you are always so gracious to allow us to come and visit in your garden.

- [Jimmy] My pleasure.

- We're sitting here on a bench that actually means a lot to you. We were discussing lichens and some people'd wanna get rid of those, wouldn't they?

- Absolutely.

- They actually are protecting this, an outer carpet.

- 20 to 25 years to get it that way.

- I guess and your gardens are always in rare form, regardless. It's always such an honor, even to end it right here on this bench.

- Well Annette, let me just expand on that, just to explain. I know as well as you do that just not too long from now, we're not talking `bout 40 years from now, won't be long til I won't be here to tend to this. And the next person coming is gonna bulldoze most of this stuff down to the ground and plant grass back in. They not gonna fool with it. And anybody, it's gotta be somebody that's just really crazy, like me.

- [Annette] Well we like crazies.

- [Jimmy] I've been here 43 years at this place and it's taken nearly all of it 43 years. There are a few things that I can get by and modify a little bit, to stretch it on out. One thing is I'm doin', and I told Troy a couple a years ago, one thing I've done is put more shrubs in these borders. Less work than perennials. But there's quite a bit less satisfaction overall.

- Well, this is amazing. This visit in the spring is very wonderful and it just revives us to see and no matter what last year had, it's all here and I've enjoyed my spring tour.

- [Jimmy] Well thank you for being here. I enjoy having ya.

- In rural Tennessee, greens means turnip greens and mustard. Turnips were an important crop for the Romans and mustard has been grown in Asia for 5,000 years. Typically in Tennessee, these greens are sown around the middle to the end of August, when the summer garden bites the dust. This field was in winter squash. There's one little squash plant left that's barely here, but when I sowed the field, it was real dry and the mustard didn't come up. But the squash that was left over had reseeded and came up and caught enough dew to sprout the mustard. So we ended up getting a pretty good stand of mustard here. Now the way I would do it in a home garden is, I would just take a digging fork and I would just turn over the ground a little bit like that. And then I would take a garden rake and I would smooth the ground out a little bit. Get some of the bigger clods out. Then I would be ready to sow the seed. What I do on the farm, on these big fields, is I take my favorite garden tool, the bush hog, it can really clean up a garden fast, and I mow the crop down, run a chisel plow through it with a harrow, and then I'm ready to sow. One thing I like about these crops, is I don't have to make rows and sow them in little furrows. I can actually, simply broadcast the seed over the field. What is difficult, though, is getting a little ounce of seed spread thinly over a thousand-square-foot of garden space. But I have a trick. I take the turnip seed, about an ounce of it, and I mix it with a gallon or so of lime now I could use sand or something like that. It would be hard to get this much seed spread out thinly, because it's just so small. But what I do is I mix it in here, mix up really good with the lime. Then I spread the whole lime-turnip-seed mixture over my little garden spot, about a thousand-square-feet or so; that's 10 by 100. Off we go! I also added an ounce of crimson clover. This is a legume, which is small right now, but it won't be killed by the winter. And in April, this whole field will be covered in red blooms of the crimson clover, which is a nitrogen fixer and very beneficial to the soil. I've tried growing other varieties of mustards, such as the red ones and one from Florida, but I like Southern Giant. This is a beautiful plant and it does really well here. The leaves are best when they're this bright, shiny, lime green. And they're easy to harvest. You just snap them off. Another mustard variety we grow is called Mizuna. You'll often find this in a salad mescaline mix. It adds a little bit of spice to the salad. We simply cut it about six or eight inches off of the ground and it resprouts again. It's what we call a cut-and-come-again crop. The standard variety for turnips in Tennessee is purple top white globe. And these are beautiful turnips. They have really good edible greens and then they have these pretty turnips down here. Look at that color. The turnip roots go into the soil and break up the ground and they give this nice mycelium stuff grows on the roots. It is beneficial for the sulfur of the soil. So these are plants that work with the element sulfur. Turnips can be roasted or boiled or mashed. I even like them raw with a little salt. Some of the other varieties we grow, besides the purple white top, are Scarlet Queen. It's a red variety, very pretty. Another one we like is a white turnip called hakurei. This white turnip comes from Japan. Back in the day, most Tennessee farms had a garden, which they never wanted to grow out in weeds. Turnips and mustard and other greens are a great way to keep your garden growing something that's healthy for the ground and healthy for you too. Take your mom's advice and eat your greens.

- So you wanna grow some vegetables and maybe even some tomatoes in some containers. Well, this is easy and it's fun because it's everything you probably have on hand. I'm using a tomato plant just because I want to put it on my back porch this summer. We're gonna use some type of trellis and I like bamboo just because it's bamboo. This is the star method and we're going to use five posts, just like if it was a star. When you're placing these bamboos in there, you want to shove them all the way to the bottom, and keep in mind and kind of in your head, when you draw a star, what it actually looks like on paper. So we've got this and these will be the last. Now what I did ahead of time is I pre-measured one star so I knew how long my string should be. I'm gonna start right here and you're gonna wanna do these probably at about, y'know, six-inch intervals. You can do it all at once or you can wait til your tomato plant, or whatever you're putting in here, kind of grows up and then you can add more. I'm gonna circle around to the front of the pot here. You're gonna take your string, and I'm just gonna wad it up in my hand so it's easier to do, and I'm gonna wrap it around here. We're gonna go down at the bottom just like we're drawing our star. Do it again and cross over here and you can keep pulling it tight as you go and adjust the height. You can use nylon twine, too. You can use lashing cord, whatever's handy. I just happened to have this. And we're gonna go straight across here. You can see what I mean by pre-measuring the string. It makes it easier than working with a big ball of whatever you decide to use. Alright, got it good and tight. We're gonna make our last part of our star right here. As it grows, you're gonna add another string with another star, another star, another star, another star. You've got a great support system. It doesn't look like it'd be that sturdy, but once you have that many stars going up, as the height of your plant gets big, it is really quite sturdy. This is fun, this is easy. I can see you painting the stakes or even some wood stakes kind of a funky color in a wild pot. Give it a try. For those who live in apartments or just have balcony garden space, this works fabulous.

- What a joy it is to just walk out of the neighborhood and into the Wedgewood Urban Garden here in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm with Christina Bentrup, the Garden Coordinator. Hi, Christina.

- Hi, how are you?

- I'm doing great! So it's just an open garden here for the neighborhood?

- It is; we have a perennial herb and flower garden that takes up the size of a pretty standard city lot. Anyone from the neighborhood is welcome to come and hang out and pick flowers or herbs, pull a few weeds if they wanted to, but not required, and just enjoy this space that's created for the neighbors.

- It's just beautiful. I'm seeing mint, and coneflowers. What else do we have here?

- We're passing by our summer corn planting, which will also be available to the neighbors. We just walked by some rosemary and lemongrass down below. Oregano, thyme, horseradish, chives, catmint, a few cherry tomatoes, eggplant and peppers down here, just for fun, pineapple sage, regular sage, lavender, yarrow, you name it. We've got a nice mix of plants here. I work for an organization called The Nashville Food Project and we manage this garden and another space where we bring people together to grow, cook, and share food, with the goal of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city. We do that by bringing volunteers into every facet of our program. So volunteers help to grow this garden, they help to grow our other garden, they help to process all the food coming out of our gardens, they help to cook it, send it out on our meal trucks, they help deliver meals in the neighborhoods around Nashville where people need access to good, healthy food. And all along the way, we're trying to bring as many people from as many walks of life together to do that. The property goes much further back. We have about an acre-and-a-half up the hillside here in production. We are very production focused and we also house two community gardens in the upper space.

- [Julie] I saw some people headed up there. Let's go see what they're doing.

- [Christina] Great.

- Pollination is important in any garden and looks like you have a lot of pollination plants here.

- We do, we think a lot about the bees in this garden. We wanna have good pollination. We're worried about the bee crisis all over the world right now. I try to always have something flowering for the bees. For example, we have a couple of different kinds of dill and several flowers, intentionally planted in the center of the garden, so that the pollinaters come in as well as the other beneficial insects that help us with our organic pest control. If we bring in beneficial predator insects, we don't have to worry so much about the bad insects eating our crops.

- [Julie] That's fantastic and speaking of crops, it looks like you really started here with your production gardens.

- [Christina] Yes, here we have 200 bell peppers. Those start coming in to fruiting full production in July. We'll harvest those for our meals program. We also have over here are garlic crop, our okra. We've harvested a lot of kale and getting ready to plant in the next round of summer crops.

- [Julie] What a great mixture.

- Yes our spring crops came in really well this year. They loved the weather. The chartreuse should produce good for another month or so and then we'll harvest it fully and do another crop following a careful rotation scheme that we have.

- Beyond that you have potatoes that you're growing.

- [Christina] Irish potatoes, 76 tomato plants. We have winter squash, butternut squash. We have lima beans and the climbing french green beans.

- [Julie] Wow, what a great amount of variety that you have here. Now I see some people working today.

- [Christina] Yeah, also in this space, as well as producing crops for our kitchens, we house two community gardens. One community garden has a refugee focus and we were able to get a grant from the Federal Government to facilitate that for the next three years. We'll have groups of refugees from different countries, who were most likely farmers in their home country, and have been resettled in Nashville but don't have access to land. So we're able to share a good chunk of our land with them, so that they can grow food for themselves, for their families, and become better integrated into our community.

- [Julie] I imagine there's gonna be some amount of garden learning your going to have when you move from one climate to another.

- [Christina] Yeah it's actually an incredible sharing, learning experience, because I am able to teach them about what's done well for me here in Tennessee, but they've also brought crops with them that I've never heard about. They have their own way of doing things that often are just so different I didn't even think about it. We've been learning a lot from each other.

- Now I know that you have these other community plots for local people as well.

- We do, we have nine plots this year just behind us, for neighborhood residents who don't have access to some of the other community gardens in town. We really recruited for that community garden at the local elementary school, Fall-Hamilton, where we also do veggie tastings with the kids and do some educational programming as well.

- This is a huge garden. You've got a lot of people working and a lot of variety. The question that really comes up is, how are you watering it?

- That is a great question. Over the years, y'know, we have a really different, some years are incredibly wet, some years are very dry. So we've decided to even out the surplus of water when it comes in bulk in the spring and dries up in the summer, by harvesting a lot of those early spring rains in rain barrels to irrigate our crops in the summer when it's really hot. We have 4,000 gallons of rainwater storage around this garden, which was calculated to be enough to water most of crops through an averagely dry summer.

- [Julie] Of all the methods that you teach people here, I see a real mixture of plants and, well, what are you doing?

- [Christina] We try to use the best practices of organic and sustainable agriculture. We think a lot about soil health, ecosystem health, habitat for the neighboring insects, birds, bees. We are completely organic. We try to grow all our own fertilizers on the property. We make our own compost. We partner with some local restaurants that bring their compostables to us. We use compost teas. We make teas out of stinging nettle and comfrey. We do a lot of companion planting and we try to keep happy plants. The healthier the plants are, just like us, the less likely they are to be attacked by insects or by disease or anything that might not be so good for them.

- Certainly I see that you have a chicken coop, you have your beehives.

- Yeah we have a real diversity of things happening here. It's an incredible space. We have, obviously, all of our annual vegetables all over the property. We also have a lot of perennial fruit trees. We have black raspberries and blackberries and strawberries and blueberries and cranberries. Just think of a berry, we have it. It's really great to have both the perennial and the annual agriculture here together.

- What a fantastic project. What are you looking at next? Are you expanding?

- That's a great question. We don't have secure land tenure at any of the spots we grow on and the community gardens have been such a success that we really hope to find a secure piece of land that we can grow on, both for production for our kitchens to get that out to Nashvillians who need good food, but also space for people who want to grow their own food to be able to do that, whether it's refugees or community gardeners or one of the many other groups that we work with.

- [Julie] This is just a fantastic experience. Thank you so much for sharing it with us and of course for sharing it with all of our neighbors from around the world, right here in the middle of neighborhood Nashville.

- [Announcer] 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.