Episode 2548

- [Voiceover] Tennessee farmers are leading the way in implementing sustainable farming practices, and reducing commercial inputs. Phillipe Chadwick learns the many ways this field of cover crops is building soil health. Marty DeHart shares a tip for strong tomato plants, and Sheri Gramer tours a garden where the children get growing, too. Stay tuned. First, microbe-friendly and soil enriching.

- I'm here in Coffee County at a large-scale commercial farm, where farming practices are constantly evolving, and it's leading to healthier soils. I'm here with Adam Daugherty, who's from the USCA Natural Resources Conservation Services. So what would you say are the principles of no-till farming?

- Okay, well, no-till farming is not really a system. It's just a tool that we use to be able to plant a crop with limited disturbage, which is one of the four principles of soil health, is eliminate disturbance, keep something growing all the time, a lot of diversity, and keep the soil covered or armored. And the no-till planner is just one of the tools that allows us to be able to do that. The magic in what we're doing out here lies between our ears when we've finally got an understanding of how nature's designed to work, how our soils are designed to function. And then it's our job as humans to start to learn how to manage this. Which it is, it has been a transformation for us. Planting in what you see right here is a totally different game than planting in standalone no-till ground that's pretty clean, and a big difference in planting in conventional ground. So it takes a high-level management, a high-level understanding. Phillipe, what we've got here is we've got a field of diverse cover crop species mix that we've yet to terminate, this field's not been planted. This field was planted back this past fall with several different species. This is one of our Austrian winter peas that we pulled up in here. This is a legume, nitrogen-fixing legume. Real early to put on nodulation, so we get a lot of nitrogen production out of this. And we'll plant these in a mix like this in a rate of around four pounds per acre in the mix. And we really like it, winter survives, does a good job, easy to plant into.

- [Phillipe] And this purple, flowery one right here?

- [Adam] This is another one of our legumes that we're planting a lot of, this is hairy vetch, big-time nitrogen producer. You can look at a lot of different diversity in plant structure and composition, which this one leads to when we're rolling and terminating these covers, this vetch almost acts like velcro.

- [Phillipe] It looks like the main one out here is this. Is it oats?

- This here is cereal rye. This is Abruzzi cereal rye, it gets pretty tall. One thing that's a lot different, this is one of our cereal grains. We put these in here because these legumes that I've just showed you, once we've terminated this and got our cash crop planted, they'll be recycled real quick. They're a lower carbon-nitrogen ratio residue that we have, whereas our cereal grains, the cereal rye will be a lot higher. So once we get this down, it won't be cycled through the soil as quick. Our goal is to rejuvenate modern agriculture as we know it. We're not organic yet, but we're not tilling. I don't know when we will get there. We're seeing a tremendous reduction in inputs. The only inputs that are used on the farm is not nutrients, with nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. We've had a lot of sprays, any time that we have to fire up and provide labor to this field, that's an input that costs producers money. And there's going to be some happy medium someday. I don't really think we'll get totally organic. I think we'll still be using some commercial inputs on these large-scale operations but when we start looking at pesticide reductions, herbicide reductions, less passes, and then get these soils where they're more resilient, then it's just going to be a win-win when we're going to have a happy balance. Healthier soils lead to healthier foods.

- [Phillipe] I have to say, also, as an onlooker, this is a lot more nice to look at than an empty dirt field.

- It does. Not only will it have a lot of aesthetic values for folks that are passing bye, but when they go put their kayaks in the streams, they're going to be in clear water. When they go catch fish, it's going to be in clean water. When they turn on the faucet at the house, all in turn, it is going to cost the taxpayer less money to treat that water than if we're sending turbid water into our municipal water supply. So it starts up here at the head of the watersheds, and it goes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The hypoxia, the dead layer, if we had the landscape covered in this as it was designed to function, we wouldn't have a hypoxia. But one county, one state's not going to change the nation. We've got to shift agriculture to this, both from monetary reasons, you know for producers to be more productive, and also from an environmental standpoint. When we're doing this on our fields, this addresses all resource concerns. What we're doing here is we're just mimicking nature. If you look at these fence rows, these wood lots, the plateau in the background, it's always got something growing on it, it's got a lot of diversity, it's always capturing sunlight, and there's no disturbance. We're not running plows, we're not spraying chemicals up there in these natural ecosystems. So that's all we're doing once we've started implementing the cover crops is we're just to mimic nature in the way we're growing our cash crops. Now we understand that we're always going to be trying to go against nature because these fields were never designed to have a monoculture grown on them four or five or six months out of the year, but we're working with nature as opposed to how we used to work against her with the heavy tillage, with a lot of chemicals. Now we're starting to work in tune with her a little bit more and she's really paying off for us.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, yeah, that's good.

- [Adam] But what we're really concentrating on is the below-ground, the living critters that are underneath our feet right now. In a teaspoon full of healthy soil, we have over a billion microbes, which they're all microscopic, we can't see them, but that's really what's doing the work for us. The bacteria, the nematodes, protozoa, the fungi relationships that we're getting, that's what we're trying to promote and the main thing is, when we're capturing sunlight, all they want's living sugar, the carbon. So we're pumping a lot to it right now so therefore we're getting a big flux in our microbial populations.

- [Phillipe] And keeping a plant life on top of that and not tilling, you're protecting them, correct?

- [Adam] We are, I mean, several things. We're not destroying the house through tillage, but we're also feeding them. So we've got new carbon coming in, we've got old carbon in our organic matter, so think of it as like if you go to a buffet. If all you got at the buffet is just lettuce, you're going to survive but you're not going to be real happy. We've got lettuce, mashed taters, peach pie, we've got it all going on here so not only do we have a lot of eaters, we're keeping them all happy.

- [Phillipe] Right, that's a really good example of that.

- [Adam] But you'll see the ease at which that shovel goes in the ground, don't have any compaction. And then as we look at this ground here, we already see some big biology with the earthworms. But you see the aggregation in there, see how that soil was crumbly right there?

- Oh yeah.

- Okay. We like for our soil to start looking like black cottage cheese. When we start getting to look like back cottage cheese, then we've got a lot of aggregation, a lot of pore space, you'll see all the root channels coming down, you'll even see some micorrhizal fungi interactions going on. See all the little soil aggregates forming around the roots? That's why it's so important to keep a living plant growing. These soil aggregates, they're not formed one time and last forever. They're like our skin, they're constantly reproducing so about every 22-27 days is the life of a soil aggregate. They can only form around living roots. One of the first things that we'll start seeing when we start integrating these systems is returning the water cycle to our soils. And when you get a soil with this type of structure, this porosity, this soil here will infiltrate water in excess of 20 inches per hour. So when we get a rain, it's going into the ground instead of running off.

- [Phillipe] What's a typical farm see?

- [Adam] Our long-term no-till fields that we've seen in the county will average somewhere in the two inches to a little bit less than two inches per hour infiltration rate. After two years of cover, most of our fields are in excess of seven or eight, and then as we keep doing this it keeps getting better and better. Our natural wood lots, where these fields started from, infiltrate in excess of 60 inches per hour.

- Wow, that's huge.

- So that's where we're working, but we're trending in the right direction.

- And what's the summer crop that we're growing here?

- This summer we'll come in with soybeans, this year. Had corn on it last year, we'll come back into soy beans, and this field here has predominantly had a corn-soy bean rotation since it was brought back into crop production probably seven, eight years ago. It had been just in a pasture setting, and when we brought it back into crop land from the start, went from no-till straight into no-till and cover crops and it's been doing that for six, seven years now. And what we've seen in this field in 2014, which was a real good growing season that we had here, this field here won the state dry-land no-till corn growing competition. They have a competition across the state, and then it placed in like sixth, seventh place nationally with a very high yield. This thing had over 315 bushel-per-acre dry-land corn. Even more impressive than that was last year, this area here was in a D4 drought, and this thing had over 250 bushel dry-land corn growing on it in a D4 drought situation. And what that just shows is, the healthier we get this soil, the more microbial action we get, it just leads to natural resilience. We've spent years and years degrading this resource, and it's going to take us a while to be able to rejuvenate it, but we're on the right track and we've finally learned how to manage in nature's image and ultimately rejuvenate our resource.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, that's awesome. You're doing some really good work here.

- [Adam] Thank you.

- Behind every great tomato is a good tomato cage, and unfortunately a lot of times, the tomato cages you buy commercially are made of thin wire, they're not tall enough, they're just not up to the job of really supporting a really good, healthy tomato plant that's going to bear all summer. So what I do, and what a lot of other people do, is make their own, and the ones that you make at home, like I'm going to show you, will last for years, give your tomatoes great support, they're economical. You can't beat 'em. Here's what you need. This is called concrete reinforcing wire. And you can use hogwire, you can use various kinds of fencing, but what's good about this, whatever you use, make sure it's a good heavy gauge wire, so it's not going to flop over once the tomato plant gets remotely big, and you need a big enough hole. This is a six-inch opening. I can reach in and harvest my tomatoes. I'm not going to jam a tomato inside a little bitty hole and not be able to get it out. It's important to think ahead like that. These rolls are relatively cheap, you can get them anywhere, like a big box store or a hardware store. This is a 150-foot roll, I grow a lot of tomatoes. And it cost less than $50 and I'll get a ton of tomato cages out of it. This is a five foot high roll. It's on a slope and I'm short. But the reason I get five-foot as opposed to four-foot or three-foot, is I grow what are called indeterminate variety tomatoes, those are the types that bear all summer long, they don't bear a whole crop all at once, like the old-fashioned canning tomatoes, or you can still get them that way. Many varieties are called determinate, that means they bear all at once and stop. Indeterminate keeps growing an bearing all summer. So I grow those because we are tomato fans at my house, and they get big. And if you've ever grown cherry tomatoes, they'll just shoot out the top of this thing, but they won't be flopping all over my garden. That's what I like. Because it's a six-inch hole, it's easy to count off feet in this, and two of these is one foot. The way you want to make a cage is between 24 and 30 inches in diameter to go around over the tomato, and it takes about three straight feet of this wire to make one foot of diameter, so if I want to make a 24-inch, a two-foot diameter cage, I'll use six feet of this. And it's easy just to count off and cut what I need. Now, let me tell you what kind of tools you're going to need to do this. These are heavy duty lineman's pliers slash wire cutters, and lightweight isn't going to cut it, literally, because the wire is so heavy that the hardest job is actually cutting the wire. But what I do, instead of just trying to, because I don't have the hand strength, I score it. I go back and forth in a ratcheting motion. It'll make a gouge in there and then it just snaps off. So you can do that, instead of having to use brute strength, you can use the sharp edge of the wire cutter here, and then just the pliers and it'll just snap off for you. And what you do, I've got one cut here. This is a little over six feet long, it's going to be a little over two feet wide. And you're going to form it into a cylinder, obviously. Now the way that you cut it, let me un-bend this and show you, is I cut just before one of the verticals, so I have these long arms hanging out and I use those to close it. To start the process of closing it, I grab it in the middle, and bend one back like this. The wire's not hard to bend, it's just relatively hard to cut. And that holds it, and then I can go all the way up and down the length of it and bend each one and I don't have to be trying to hold it closed. So that's a tip, start in the middle. Do one in the middle and then you can work from anywhere on it. Another thing to do is the bottom of this cylinder, you want to cut off the last horizontal row that ends this, there was another row that I've cut off down here. You can see where the weld was. Sometimes you can pop it off. These are just spot-welded and the weld will pop. Other times the weld holds and you have to cut it with those wire cutters like I showed you. The reason for this is, you drive this into the ground to help hold the tomato stake up. So you will put it together like this. I will do that all the way down. And you'll see there's going to be an overlap area here, where I have two legs together, basically. I don't want this to go like this as I drive it into the ground, so I will use a little bit of wire to wrap around that, and it's a really small, easy wire, if I can get it out here. It's basically, I think, bailing wire. You can get it at, once again, any hardware store. This is 400 feet for $3, it's very cheap, easy to cut with wire cutters. This is another side, and I just cut myself a little length of this like so, and then I just wrap it around, spiral it around so that these feet will hold together. And anywhere else you think it might come apart, just wrap like so. This is very flexible wire but very strong. Now that'll stay together and I can drive it into the ground without worrying about it. One thing, when you bend these things together, make sure that you haven't got a sharp end where it's going to stick you. I often bend them back over and then wrap them around again, just so when you reach in there, it's easy to see when it's empty but believe me, this will be full of tomato plant at some point, and you won't see that wire end. So just bend it around to where it's not going to stab you. And once you've got that altogether, you're ready to plant and put it in! Okay we've got our cage all ready, and we're in the garden. And you can see that I've planted this little Bradley right here, and he's getting his cage. It's smart to build your cages and install them while your tomatoes are very small. The sooner the better, I like to do it as I plant them so that no roots, nothing gets damaged. There's no way that working around this tomato right now is going to hurt it. All I do is press it into the ground, and we had rain overnight before we're doing this so that makes it a lot easier. But you can see that even just pressing it by hand, this is pretty sturdy. I do take a rubber mallet, though, and just sort of help it in a little bit more, just to make sure, like so. And that's pretty good. But as you know, anybody who lives in this part of the world, we can have some significant storms and some serious wind. So what I do to make sure that this cage doesn't take off in a gale, is I take a metal fence post, drive it in, this is in about a foot, and I wire it to the cage. This keeps it in tact, nothing moves this. This also reinforces it in case we get some kind of godzilla of tomato plant, it won't tip over. This is in really deep and keeps it. I want to talk a little bit about the tomato plant varieties that I like to grow. There are tons of them and there are a lot of good ones. But I like Bradley, which is a great favorite in Tennessee, it's a pink tomato, great flavor, doesn't mind our heat and humidity which is important. A lot of varieties just don't take. They quit bearing and flowering, even, over 90 degrees. So I like to grow varieties that do. I also grow Better Boy, which is a modern hybrid, it's a bright orange-red, classic-looking tomato. It performs great for me, and bears all summer, great canning tomato if you like to can, which I do. I also great two heirlooms, which are Belgium, oh, the best, huge tomatoes. Sometimes I have trouble getting them out through these holes, they're so big! But the flavor is to die for, that's an old heirloom variety called Belgium or Giant Belgium. And another one is called Mortgage Lifter, also known as Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter. The story is that in the '30's, a guy was about to lose his radiator shop because of the depression, and he couldn't make the payments. He'd been breeding tomatoes and he combined four into one through breeding, and came out with this tomato that he sold for $1 a plant, and paid off the mortgage on his radiator shop. Hence the name, and it is a great tomato. By the way, Belgium is one of the parents of Mortgage Lifter. You may wonder once again, why are these so tall? Most of the tomatoes will be taller than this by August. Better Boy about this tall, all the others will come out the top. And you don't have to prune using this system, that's another great thing, you get a lot of leaf cover, and it protects it from bird damage and from sun scald and cracking and splitting. It's a great system, I recommend it to anybody.

- [Sheri] We're in Historic Downtown Franklin at the home of Tina and Roger Jones. You'd think this courtyard and surrounding gardens had been here as long as the house has been here, and it was built around 1915. We're here with Pete. Pete, let's talk a little bit about this garden.

- It was about four years ago when we put this together. She came to it with her ideas and I told her I'd come and look at it and we started talking and we put together a plan and I sketched it out, and then we drew it out on the ground with marker paint. And we both liked what it was looking like.

- So this was all grass, part of this.

- It was grass all the way from here to the other end.

- Was the grade the same, kind of going downhill?

- Pretty much the same grade. And we dug out what we needed to. Tina and Roger picked out the stone. It was a stone that goes well with the old look.

- The age of the house.

- Right, and it fits real well into the garden and looks like it belonged here and looked like it had been here for years.

- Yes it does, I think you've achieved that.

- Tina and Roger have two little girls. One's nine, I think the other's seven now, but four years ago, of course, they were younger. But they built the garden with them in mind, for them to get out and be able to dabble in the soil and play and get close to nature and that kind of thing. And they do, they take a big part in the garden. They've got all the goldfish named, and they've got little areas of their own and all that. And Tina lets them dig up anything and move it if they want to, and it's also very pleasing to adults, too, it's a good comfortable, laid-back feeling out here.

- [Sheri] Well, Pete, I want to check out this fairy garden that the girls have going on.

- [Pete] Yeah it's a unique area of this for the girls to do their thing in. And all little girls like fairies and princesses and all that.

- And Tina told me they actually do a lot of the plantings here themselves.

- [Pete] I think they do, and they really enjoy this area.

- [Sheri] And then, right over in the other corner.

- [Pete] That's the cistern that was uncovered years ago, I think Tina and them discovered it. It was covered up with a big concrete slab. They found out that it's a cistern that dates back before the Civil War. It's about 25 feet deep and it's lined with stone. So they had a heavy metal grate put over the top of it for protection and then went ahead and finished out the top of it.

- [Sheri] And they call this what, their wishing well now, the girls do?

- [Pete] The wishing well, that's what it is.

- Alright, Pete, let's take a walk down here. I want you to tell me about some of these plantings. I notice right in front of us, looks like vegetables and herbs going on.

- Yes, this is the area that they keep most of their vegetable and herb plants. She don't plant a lot of vegetables, but she plants a little bit of everything. She's got some kale and a tomato plant or two, a pepper plant, some tomato plants, and of course she's got some herbs in here.

- [Sheri] What else do we have? We have some ornamental sage, maybe?

- [Pete] Yes, and balloon flower. And of course the Endless Summer hydrangeas. I think that's a Lady in Red hydrangea back there. This is a crabapple tree that's right over us. And then we get down to the pond area.

- [Sheri] And you did this hardscape as well here, the pond and the fountain?

- Yes, ma'am, we did. The water is about eight foot wide diameter, and it's got about a three-foot walkway around it with the same flagstone as we used on the patio.

- [Sheri] And the fountain's kind of Tina's pride and joy, isn't it?

- It is, it is. She found that at an antique shop, sitting on the side of the building and weeds growing around it. She dug it out and brought it home and got it working and it looks neat.

- [Sheri] It does and then behind us I noticed, I'm not familiar with this plant, tell me about this.

- [Pete] They call that the Jewel of Opar, and it is a beautiful plant. It's kind of unique, it's got the little berries on it and the little tiny bloom.

- [Sheri] The chartreuse color's gorgeous.

- [Pete] Right, it is, the color is great. It's kind of a wispy look when it's in bloom heavy. The only thing about it, you have to watch it. It will spread on you, it spreads with seed and it can be invasive but it's a great plant for contrasting colors and things like that.

- [Sheri] I notice she's got some basil planted and then we have some catmint here.

- [Pete] She's got a stevia plant over here.

- [Sheri] What also is nice, I think, is that she's got lots of space for the girls. But I notice there's also a nice little intimate space for the adults in the family as well as guests and friends and family.

- [Pete] Right, it's a combination, and it just fits the whole family.

- [Sheri] Well thank you so much, Pete, for showing us the garden today. It's been a real pleasure. And I think it's very important for everyone to keep in mind that this was all grass. You don't have to buy a house with a garden. You can make your own paradise.

- [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.