Episode 2601

- [Narrator] On this Volunteer Gardener, we'll have it made in the shade, a beautiful shade garden, that is, with colorful blooms and stately foliage. Then, we'll walk in the sunshine through raised beds brimming with vegetables. And, dried pear bacon bread? I'm in. Join me. First, pretty gardens designed and installed by homeowners with a can do spirit.

- I think all of us as gardeners have shed blood, sweat, and tears in our gardens. I shed some tears yesterday, but then we're given a morning like this, a morning to enjoy the beautiful gardens at the home of John and Charlsie Halliburton in Clarksville, Tennessee. Charlsie, it's great back here this morning, and I know that you like to add color in your gardens in the summertime with the use of some annuals. What are you using?

- Well, I use lots of begonias. I use dragon wing begonias and regular begonias. They're all pink, and I use impatiens and caladiums primarily.

- Yeah, and there's a little bit of all of those here today but in this path along here though, this is where you experience most of the sunshine in your gardens, isn't it?

- Yes, no place in my garden do I get more than two hours, and right here is two hours. The rest is about an hour and a half, and some of it gets very little sun, just dappled sun through the trees.

- Well, and I think that's a good example.

- I'm a shade gardener.

- I sometimes wish I was. But this right here, the Otto Luyken laurel. That seems to be very happy right here.

- [Charlsie] It's very happy, yes.

- [Annette] And you don't really have to do anything to this.

- [Charlsie] I trim it.

- [Annette] A little if need be.

- [Charlsie] It does what it does. It looks beautiful.

- [Annette] Yeah, and I can see that you actually have azaleas in here, and then a lot of planting you've done already by putting in the waxwing begonias down here.

- [Charlsie] Yes, and the SunPatiens right here where I have the sun.

- [Annette] Right, I love that SunPatien.

- [Charlsie] Thank you, I love the color.

- Yeah, I like the color too, but you know, that's a very substantial plant. Last year was my first experience and I had some white ones, and they were in full sun. We got a lot of rain and I actually did nothing with those, so they're my new best friend in the garden.

- They're easy.

- This is a beautiful hanging basket of petunias, and that really gives you color in the bright sun.

- A pop of color, yeah.

- It surely does, and of course Miss Annabelle over here.

- There's my whites.

- Well, and you know, that's such a good plant. Every garden should have an Annabelle.

- [Charlsie] Well, they're so easy.

- [Annette] Yeah, and you know, you get the eastern morning sun and you can see she's happy with that. And I see a bird feeder swinging over here. You're a really good bird feeder, aren't you?

- [Charlsie] Oh, I love birds, and we fed birds for years.

- And you also accommodate them with bird baths, too.

- Bird baths, yes.

- Okay, and of course, who can turn down a blue mophead hydrangea?

- Hydrangeas, yes.

- This is beautiful this morning.

- Thank you.

- And you know, they've had a little bit of a problem and a struggle this year, but you don't have that problem right here.

- [Charlsie] Well, this particular group of hydrangeas has done, performed well.

- [Annette] Everyone needs an oakleaf hydrangea.

- [Charlsie] It's beautiful and fragrant.

- And you know, mine is located out in the midst of everything else. I've really never appreciated the fragrance and as I stand here with you, I can smell that. It's just, I knew that they had all that deposit of pollen and things off of 'em, but then these azaleas, I'm sure are very happy in the spring.

- Beautiful, pink and huge.

- They're beautiful, and then of course, as we walk down these stairs, they just have that curve to them, and they lead our eyes to what you have as your bird bath garden.

- Yes.

- [Annette] No one can deny what a beautiful plant the astilbe is.

- [Charlsie] It's lovely, feathery, and fragrant.

- [Annette] Yes, and that's the main thing, and you know, unlike some perennials, this keeps good foliage all summer.

- [Charlsie] It does.

- [Annette] It doesn't turn brown, or I don't even know if anything will eat on it, and then over here, there's a good example of the Christmas fern, and that's just so beautiful, and you've harvested those from right behind us.

- [Charlsie] From our woods, yes.

- [Annette] Yeah, and you didn't go get 'em somewhere else.

- [Charlsie] We live in the woods and we harvested from our woods.

- [Annette] That's a good thing, and who can deny that beautiful piece of a bird bath right there?

- [Charlsie] We've had that for years.

- I know it, and you know what? You're creating something that your children will want to say, "My mom had this in my garden for all those years," and it stands there to represent the way you love your birds too, doesn't it?

- Right, it does.

- And then again, there's more astilbe, but then you planted a nice, first thing to bloom in the spring.

- Right, it's tulip magnolia.

- Yes, and this one is, what color?

- [Charlsie] Pink.

- [Annette] Pink.

- [Charlsie] Dark pink, beautiful pink.

- [Annette] Yes, you know, I have a yellow one.

- [Charlsie] Yellow?

- [Annette] Yellow. You probably should put an anchor over here and plant you a yellow one. This area is just beautiful, but I believe that you've overcome a large challenge in here.

- Well, our original challenge was in 1994 with the ice storm and it took out trees. This used to be woods. It took out trees, and from that came the beauty of a garden. My husband built terraced walls here so that we could terrace our garden down, and we live on a slope so that worked for us, and we've been working on that since 1994.

- [Annette] To come out and build rock wall is not an easy thing.

- [Charlsie] It's not, it takes time, and he loved it back then, and we've had other helpers with it since then, but it's been beautiful.

- So in this area now that you're almost full shade, you've incorporated what kind of plants?

- Well, hydrangeas primarily, and again astilbe and caladiums, and lots of hostas, hostas love the shade. Ferns, these are Christmas ferns.

- And I'm just lookin' at all of the Christmas fern. That's the beauty of naturalize, a garden that is natural. You know, it's not da da da da da, planted all these things in a row. It has sporadically found happy places in the garden.

- Yes, happy place, that's a good word.

- And it's just amazing what you've accomplished here. I can see what has been, and I can see what is now, and I know what's yet to come in your garden because we can't see it all in one day.

- [Charlsie] Right.

- [Annette] And your caladiums I know are about to pop through in all their glory, but you know, I also know and appreciate how much time and effort that you put in this garden. Yes, it does benefit us, doesn't it?

- [Charlsie] Well, it's a joy.

- Yeah, and the fact that you're willing to share it with other people, that makes it a labor of love too, doesn't it?

- Well, I love that.

- [Annette] Yeah, and just thinkin' that, how you can go into your home and see all of this, and I thank you and I thank Johnny.

- [Charlsie] I love gardening. I'm passionate about gardening, and that's evident I hope, and I love beautiful things and I love pastel colors and hopefully you can see all that with what I've got in the garden.

- [Rene] Hi Phillipe, welcome to my garden.

- [Phillipe] Hey, good to be here, Rene.

- [Rene] I'd love to show you around if you're interested.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, please, let's go in.

- [Rene] Sure, let's take a look.

- [Phillipe] Got some real healthy asparagus plants here going.

- [Rene] They are healthy, even though they're a little bit windblown right now.

- [Phillipe] Yeah.

- [Rene] They don't seem to stay upright, even though I try to tie them together with some tie wraps. That did not work.

- [Phillipe] Right, right, they definitely wanna flop.

- [Rene] But they're happy, they're happy either way.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, but your strawberry plants are right on time, you know.

- [Rene] They are, yeah. For early May, they're producing pretty well this year. I have a few varieties. I've got some everberry and some juneberry.

- [Phillipe] And do you treat them as perennials?

- I do treat them as perennials. These, all of these were actually transplanted from my old garden up in the field over here, and so I've had these guys for a few years now, and of course strawberries make runners. I will divide them each year, but I keep the original ones, and if there are empty spots, I'll fill in with runners or I'll make new strawberry beds and give it away to people.

- Yeah, well they definitely look happy.

- Yeah.

- [Phillipe] So it looks like you've got onions over here.

- [Rene] I do, I have some red onions. My husband is a huge fan of 'em. The first row here are actually from some red onions that I had last year that kind of got forgotten in the bottom of a box.

- [Phillipe] As they do, yeah.

- [Rene] Yeah, and they sprouted roots, and I can't throw anything away with healthy roots.

- [Phillipe] Uh-huh. It looks like someone's been grazing in here. I see you have fence.

- I do have a fence. I have a fence to keep all the big critters out, the dogs most of all, the rabbits, the deer, but you're right, somebody has been grazing on these, and that's my youngest son.

- Oh, really, on the onions?

- He comes in here and he will just pick off big ole fat chunks of onion greens and he will walk through the garden and eat it like it's candy. It's the funniest thing, but it's good for him.

- Right, that's wonderful, yeah.

- So, if that's how he gets his vegetables, then I'm not complaining.

- You know what, that's great, yeah. It looks like your peas are just starting to come into bloom here.

- [Rene] Yeah, the peas are starting to bloom. I'm very excited about that, and these are sugar snap peas.

- [Phillipe] Okay, wonderful.

- I've tried a variety of different peas before and it seems like the family prefers the sugar snap, so I didn't even bother putting anything else in except for those ones.

- [Phillipe] And what do we have, chives?

- [Rene] I have some chives, and these chives are old. They are also from the original garden in the field, and then I've got some carrots, as well.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, so the root crops do pretty well in here?

- Root crops do really well in here. I've had a lot of success with carrots, surprisingly, 'cause I wasn't really sure how that would work with the raised bed only being a certain level, but I've had some monster carrots come out of this, and the kids just love it 'cause they're really big and fat and tall.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So, yeah, it works just fine. I've had beets in here.

- Wonderful, yeah. I do see a huge plot of potatoes. Can we go look at that?

- Sure, absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Let's go.

- [Phillipe] So yeah, it looks like you've got some really full beds of potatoes here.

- [Rene] I do, yes.

- [Phillipe] Then they do well in these raised beds?

- [Rene] They do really well. It might be surprising to some people that you can grow potatoes in a raised bed, but I've done it for a couple of years in a row now and it's been very successful.

- [Phillipe] Yeah.

- [Rene] I have tried growing potatoes in a big 55 gallon plastic drum.

- [Phillipe] Right, kind of the mounding thing?

- [Rene] Mounded up, and the actual potato plant ended up being taller than I was, and when it came time for me to harvest it, I dumped everything out and I was disappointed by the amount of potatoes that were in there, being that I had mounded it up and everything, so I get a lot of potatoes in the raised beds like this, even though I don't mound it because there's not really enough space or room to build it up.

- [Phillipe] Right.

- [Rene] You do get a lot of potatoes out this way.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, what varieties are we growing here?

- [Rene] I have Yukon gold and I have some russet potatoes.

- [Phillipe] Your greenhouse is beautiful. Can we take a look at that?

- [Rene] Thank you. Of course, yeah, let's go.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, let's go in there.

- [Rene] Sure.

- So we're here in your wonderful homemade greenhouse?

- Yes, it's completely custom built by my dad and my husband.

- Awesome.

- I have been bugging him for years for a greenhouse, a glass greenhouse, and all the windows in here are repurposed.

- Great.

- I had gone to window companies that would otherwise just take 'em to the dump and throw 'em out, and I took 'em and here they are.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, and they're, it's perfect, I love it.

- Yeah, and it allows you to start, I see a bunch of melons here.

- [Rene] Yeah, we love watermelon, we love melon. They're gonna go out here in the field whenever they're grown up.

- [Phillipe] Okay, right, 'cause, they're probably, they probably get way too big for your raised beds.

- They do get big. I've had 'em in the raised beds before, and some of them did okay, some of 'em didn't, but they tend to get out of control and grow over everything else, and then they get into the grass part, and I have to lift 'em up or mow around 'em, and it's a lot of work, and if they don't produce, then it's all for nothing, so they're going out into the field this year.

- That's good. That's where they've got space to ramble on and not take over.

- Yeah, they'll be happy there, so.

- [Phillipe] Yeah.

- [Rene] But I'm also growing my sweet potato over here.

- [Phillipe] Oh right, that sweet potato.

- [Rene] Yeah, right here, my sweet potato, and it's making its little babies that I'll pick off and put out in the field when it's ready.

- [Phillipe] I was gonna say, you gonna put that out on the field too?

- [Rene] Yeah.

- Yeah, they definitely get huge and need some space to go.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So.

- Sweet potatoes are a lot of fun.

- Wonderful, yeah.

- [Rene] Yes.

- [Phillipe] So you've got a really nice orchard started out here.

- [Rene] Thank you.

- [Phillipe] What kind of trees do you have?

- [Rene] I have a little bit of everything. I've got three different apple varieties. I've got pears, peaches, plums, cherries.

- [Phillipe] Wonderful.

- Apricots, some grapes, so, you know, I wanted an orchard, I wanted everything, and I bought it all at once.

- Yeah.

- Stuck it in the ground without having clue of what I was doing, but I've definitely learned through the years.

- Right, right. Well, a saying I always hear is, "The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago."

- Yes, I know that saying.

- So, go ahead and do it now.

- Exactly, yeah. They take a while to get established. My apple trees actually bloomed for the first time this year.

- [Phillipe] Oh, wonderful.

- [Rene] And they've got little baby apples on them, so I'm super excited about having apples finally, after waiting for so long.

- [Phillipe] Well, I've had a wonderful time, and you're a very enthusiastic gardener.

- [Rene] Thank you so much. It was wonderful having you here, and you guys are welcome to come back anytime.

- We're in Decatur, Tennessee today visiting River Road Farms, where they have the largest selection of mature espalier trees in the eastern United States. Now, you might think of these trees as just being traditionally fruit trees but I gotta tell ya, Peter here has been working on some other trees.

- Over the years, we've learned that there are any number of trees and plants that can be espalier trained. I'm trimming a foster holly that has been trained into the horizontal cordon form, and I am really pleased with this.

- [Sheri] It's beautiful.

- They're great in the garden and the winter year round, especially in winter, because we're all looking for color in our gardens and the evergreen plants certainly fill that bill, and I just love the small leaf of the foster holly, but we also train Nellie R. Stevens holly, which is another wonderful plant, and they can be trained into horizontal cordons, candelabras, living arbors, fans, so we can go the full gamut with evergreens, hollies, that we can with our fruit trees. These are Shasta viburnums. They have wonderful foliage, defined. They make beautiful flowers, and they seem to be responding very well to being trained as a fan, and these would be I think wonderful in almost anybody's landscape. This particular plant, which has a wonderful almost oak-like leaf to it, is a golden raindrop crabapple, and I just love the leaf. It makes wonderful white flowers, great golden fruits that add interest during the summer. Another plant that we're using, which this one still has some of its winter coat left on it, because this is flushing out a little bit later, but this is a common Leyland cypress that has been trained as a fan, but it can also be trained over an arbor to create an evergreen arbor or tunnel. This makes wonderful texture. It's got a great fragrance whenever you clip it close. Right now we're practicing what we always do by letting the tree flush out so the energy can go back into the plant and then we begin to shear it, but you can get a sense of what it would be like just in its current form.

- I like it 'cause it's very dense. It's a good screen.

- Right, and it's gonna get thicker and thicker. The more you cut these ends, the more foliage it's gonna put out, and it's gonna be just a solid wall of green.

- Great for privacy.

- Yes. This is one of my favorites.

- Beautiful.

- This is an Arizona cypress. It's got this wonderful gray foliage. We're training this as a fan, as you can see, but you can see, you'll see more of the structure in the plant than you will in a Leyland when sheared.

- [Sheri] Well, I kind of think it looks a lot like Spanish moss. Love the blue silver colors.

- [Peter] I think you're right. I never looked at it that way, and I'm from south Louisiana. You know, I oughta know moss, but yeah, I think you're right.

- How do you pick what trees you wanna experiment with?

- I pick out trees that I personally like and would want in my own garden, and I simply apply the espalier technique, training techniques, to those. Now, granted, over the years, we've tried a lot of things. Some plants tell us no, but it's been amazing to me how many of these plants have said, "Yes, we can be trained," and they turn out to be beautiful specimens.

- I can see these being as popular if not more popular for the home garden just because of the winter color. Wow, Peter, this is really thinkin' out of the box. I can see this being applied in many, many, many spots.

- This is an emerald arborvitae, and we're already training plants over structure to make walk through arbors, but I just thought that maybe a two dimensional arbor that could either go up against a wall and to have some ornamentation or a fountain in it.

- Are these harder or easier trees to manage and take care of?

- No, they're really a little simpler because there's not as much of 'em in regards to it being an arbor plant, and we hope to have this available to the public perhaps in a few years.

- [Sheri] And I know for our viewers who want more information and pictures, lots of pictures, they can go to VolunteerGardener.org, and I wanna thank you so much for sharing with us today. It's been so informative and I think everybody should try one of these in their home.

- [Peter] Thank you for coming.

- We're in a great location today in Clarksville, Tennessee at Beachaven Winery. So I have a special guest with me today, Louisa Cook, owner of Beachaven. Louisa, good friend, and we're glad you're with us.

- Thank you for coming. I'm glad you're here.

- Yeah, we've got a party for 25 years to celebrate.

- I know, I know.

- Could you believe that you're this old?

- No, I can't. You know, I was a mere child when we started this. No gray hair at all and look at me now.

- And you've come a long, the winery's come a long way.

- We have had a lot of good luck and we've made a lot of friends and we've made some good wine, and we're just really pleased.

- And you've got great wine that we're gonna cook with today.

- I know, I'm excited.

- So we are going to make a dried pear bacon bread, and we're gonna start, Louisa, with some cheese that we've just grated and put it in this bowl, and that's a cup and a half, and then I'm gonna get you to be my stirrer today, so you go ahead and add the bacon bits that are already fried and crumbled, and that's five slices of bacon, and keeping my husband out of that was nearly impossible. It took all of my womanly charms.

- [Louisa] You should've cooked a little extra just for him.

- I know, I should've, and then we're gonna add some chopped walnut to that, and that's a third of a cup, and I toasted those in the oven at about 350 just until you smell them, and that's kind of nice because the perfect part about that is it adds a little extra flavor to the recipe. We've got one and three fourths cup all purpose flour, and we're going to add to that some baking powder, a tablespoon. That's our leavener. We're gonna add half a teaspoon of salt and a fourth of a teaspoon of black pepper, and I'm just gonna mix all this up together, and then we're gonna add it to that cheese mixture, and Louisa, I want you to stir this well, because what we wanna do is coat all of those cheese strands with flour so that in the recipe when you get ready to bake it, you kind of coated them a little bit and so they're not all clumping together when it bakes. So this is a good trick if you're adding any kind of cheese to any kind of quick bread. If you'll just coat it with the flour, that goes a long way to keep it from clumping. Okay, now the secret ingredient to this, Louisa, are these dried pears. So what I've done is I just dried these pears in my dehydrator and I chopped 'em up, and the easiest way to do that is with your kitchen shears.

- [Louisa] Oh, I see.

- [Tammy] Just cut 'em up just a little bit, and you'll notice that I've got them soaking in this wine. So Louisa, let's talk about what the wine that we're using here because we're using one of your new bottles of wine. We're using your sauvignon blanc, so tell us a little bit about this wine.

- Well, sauvignon blanc is a wonderful wine for a recipe like this. It's light, it's kind of, it kind of smells like a newly mowed lawn. It reminds you of spring and summer, and it's fruity. It's a little bit lemony as well, so I can't wait to taste it in this bread.

- And what we're doing is we are simply rehydrating the pear so all the moisture we too out of it in the dehydrator we're putting it back in, but we're putting it in the form of wine.

- I love it.

- So it's gonna really intensify the flavor of these pears and put 'em, when you rehydrate fruit, put it in a shallow dish like this rather than a tall skinny one so they can soak up all the yummy goodness of the wine, okay? All right, so we're gonna just sit that there for a second and let that soak just a little bit more, then we're gonna add some more to your dish here. I've got three eggs that I'm just gonna lightly beat, and then we're gonna add to this our sage that we've chopped and this is sage from my garden, so this is really, really fresh, so we're just gonna add just a few slivers of that. If you don't like sage, you can add parsley to this.

- [Louisa] But this is what we're lookin' at over there, right?

- [Tammy] That's right.

- [Louisa] You brought the fresh sage with you.

- That's right, I brought it with me and we're just gonna add that to it. Then, we're gonna mix this up and we're gonna add a third of a cup of vegetable oil. Keep whisking, keep whisking. And then we're gonna add half a cup of milk, and it doesn't matter if it's whole milk, 2%, whatever. The reason we're doing this separately is because our leavening starts to be activated as soon as it gets wet, so I'm gonna add this to it and I want you to just stir really well.

- As you're doing it.

- [Tammy] That's right, if you can. I might be in your way.

- [Louisa] Okay.

- [Tammy] And you just stir that up, and baking powder, the reason it's called double action is it starts to work first when it gets wet, and the second time when it gets hot, so when it gets the oven it'll do that as well. So what I'm gonna add to that while you're stirring are our pears, and you'll notice that it's just about soaked up all of the wine. See how it's pulled out all that?

- [Louisa] Right.

- [Tammy] And you can either pull that out and save the extra wine or you can just put the whole thing in there. I'm gonna put the whole thing.

- [Louisa] Good.

- [Tammy] Yeah, that's the best way.

- [Louisa] My sentiments exactly.

- So we're just gonna mix all of that up, and I'll tell you, Louisa, your wine would also be a great thing to serve with this bread as well, because you would kind of pick up on that flavor that we've already put into the pears.

- Right, yes, that's right.

- So this goes into a 350 degree oven for 55 minutes and then you're gonna make sure you test it with a pick to make sure it's completely clean when you pull it out. Then let it cool in the pan 10 minutes before you pull it out and let it cool completely on a wire rack. Then what we're gonna do is serve this with your sauvignon blanc, and I would just serve it with a green salad.

- Right, for brunch, maybe?

- And it would be, it would be perfect for that. And Louisa, it's a great way to celebrate 25 years of Beachaven.

- I can't wait.

- So Louisa, what would your dad think of all of this growth?

- Oh my gosh, I can't imagine except that he would love it. He would love it, you know. He probably wouldn't have agreed with all the steps we've made along the way, but I think he would love the outcome.

- [Tammy] Absolutely, and one of the pioneers of our industry, I might add.

- [Louisa] Yes, yes, absolutely.

- [Tammy] We certainly need to toast him, don't we?

- [Louisa] We do, we really do. You know, one of the things he would love the most I think is the mechanization that we've been able to do, because we used to have to everything by hand 25 years ago and now life is easier because we don't have to do all that and he would really appreciate the fact that we've been able to grow and mechanize and still make wonderful hands on wine.

- [Tammy] And Louisa, tell me about growing the grapes, because that's part of the winery, as well.

- [Louisa] Well, it is. We only have three acres here at the winery but we have other acreage too, and it's just wonderful because a lot of the wine work is hectic and frantic, but when you're out out in the vineyard, it's just, it's peaceful, it's quiet. You can hear yourself think. You can hear the grapes grow. It's just a really great experience, and then when it's harvest time and your fruits of your labor are coming in, it's just a really, it's, you're proud that it's worked out.

- [Tammy] It's a feel good experience.

- [Louisa] Yes.

- [Tammy] And it's evidenced in your wines, by the way.

- [Louisa] Thank you.

- [Tammy] That are wonderful.

- Thank you. We've really changed our product line a lot over the 25 years, but I'll have to say, we have one wine that we have made and kept on making the entire time, and that's our golden rose. It has been a perennial favorite for 25 years.

- So that was one of the first wines and it continues.

- It was, it was, and it's still extremely popular.

- [Tammy] So for this recipe, just go online. It's the dried pear and bacon bread and you're in for treat. Serve it with sauvignon blanc Beachaven wine.

- [Announcer] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our web site at VolunteerGardener.org or on YouTube at the Volunteer Gardener channel, and like us on Facebook.