Episode 2640

- [Narrator] On this Volunteer Gardener, we'll see how using native plants in the right growing spots makes for light maintenance in this beautiful woodland garden. And, Tammy Algood visits Grinder's Switch Winery just before the spring growing season begins to see how essential this pruning is to the process. Stay tuned. First, following Mother Nature's example for a garden.

- Landscapes are often thought of as being viewed, but gardens really are thought of as being lived in. And that certainly is the case with this garden. We are about 45 minutes west of Nashville in a two acre garden that is built on a beautifully wooded hillside. The ultimate goal is for the homeowners to have complete enjoyment with as minimal maintenance as possible. And even in a two acre setting, when the garden is complete, it should be able to be maintained in just four to six hours per week. I think one of the things they've managed so beautifully in this garden is the way the garden itself is arranged. You can see that there are large areas that have been dedicated to low ground-covering shrubs and other mass plantings, and then the garden itself really has been designed to be in these small vignettes that are easy to maintain. So you have large areas of ground cover or massed shrubs that help keep the weed population under control and take up a lot of physical space. And the gardening can be done more intensively in smaller areas. Even the hellebores have begun reseeding themselves around, there are beautiful stands of May apple, and the perennials themselves have been planted in groups of five and seven and nine, so you get large, massive displays that are easily viewed from the house and it just gives a really nice overall effect in the larger landscape. Well, the current homeowners do have a little bit of help in their garden right now, and that help is Mitch Hampton and his crew of people. You might remember Mitch's garden a couple of years ago on the show, a beautiful woodland garden out in the Dixon area. Mitch, thanks for joining us and tell us just a little bit about how you've sort of reconstructed and helped this garden along a little bit in the last couple of years.

- Okay, great, kinda what we're doing, Troy, this was a real nice, formal garden at one time, and it just got a little outta control, certain plants moved a little faster than what everybody was expecting, things just, it really just got outta control, so I stripped it back down to just the shrubbery and then we've actually collected material off of the site, you know, the stones aren't actually off the site but it's a Tennessee field stone. You know, found a lot of really beautiful art in the woods, this is actually a part of an 80-acre farm. And there was just a lot of beautiful material and, you know, even stuff like this reclining Saint John's cross, it's a beautiful plant that blooms in the summertime, it's really tough, and I found it just kinda growin' out at the edge of the fence. And we've tried to pull stuff like that in. We're trying to get the property to the point to the homeowner can actually take care of it. It took me about a year to go through it and actually get it back to the bare bones again. This'll actually be the beginning of the third year.

- Sure. So did you come in and prune trees--

- Yeah, actually we did.

- Lighten the canopy?

- We raised the canopies, I've deadwooded stuff, I've still got stuff left, but I wanted to feature this area because it's kinda the center of the garden and I just kinda opened it up a little bit, didn't really hurt anything but just pulled the canopy way up so that all this other stuff can fill in. So eventually that same kind of look.

- And this is a combination of native and non-native species.

- Yes.

- Mostly non-invasive, as far as the things that are not native here.

- Right.

- Things that will sort of stay put and behave well in this garden.

- Sure.

- But that will thrive in kind of a dappled shade, dry sort of hillside setting. Is there irrigation here?

- I do have drip-line running it right now while we kind of just establish the garden, but the overall goal is to kinda get the natural cycle going again, get the soil rebuilt and pretty much all of it should, if we have normal weather conditions and stuff--

- Yeah, and as all of us who are gardeners know, there are going to be times where we do have to supplement, whether it's supplemental food with a little fertilizer or supplemental watering during a drought or whatever it might be, but there certainly will always be times when we have to supplement a bit. But more or less, your goal here is that the homeowners--

- Will be able to maintain this, yes sir.

- On their own.

- Yeah, and it's about two acres so it's a lot to--

- A sizeable garden.

- Yessir, and it can be done, you just gotta kinda know what you're doing. Just one interesting thing as we walk by, a friend of mine had some property and it was cut over, and these azaleas were all out in the woods so I went and did like a plant rescue. And this is actually a local provenance of material.

- And it's--

- It's 25 miles from here.

- We talk a lot about, you know, kind of discouraging people from digging things out of the woods, but in a rescue situation, you've kept these from being destroyed.

- Exactly, you've saved the gene pool.

- [Troy] So I see a lot of stone used around the garden for bed edges, for paths, and tell me about your choice of stone and how much stone you've moved because there's a lot of it.

- Well, I try to use what's called a field stone, which most of the time comes within about a hundred miles of this area. I like it 'cause it's very dense. It doesn't break easy, I have a real high canopy here-- A sandstone, you know, if it's hit from 70-80 feet up with a large branch, it takes a chance of cracking it. Another thing, it's just a local product. It's very hard to deal with, it's very heavy. There's about probably 400 foot of walkways total and it's probably about 80,000 lbs of stone. And I laid every piece of it myself.

- Wow.

- So, but it really was something that's big, you need something really bold, and I just didn't-- I wanted a definite line through it.

- It does a great job of leading people through the garden.

- Right.

- Mitch, you mentioned about lightening the canopy and kinda limbing these trees up, and you can really see a great example of that on some of these tulip poplars. And I would assume that that has also made it so that in the areas of the garden where you have a little bit more sun, you can do things like this path where you've got all these beautiful sedums and things growing.

- Yeah, I wanted to use sedums here because this is really, I wanna make it kinda harsh for the weeds and I've used a paver base mix to put, actually there's probably about three inches underneath the stones, and then we pack it in between 'cause the sedum will grow a little bit in between the stones but it really won't run down the edges like this, because on the edges I've used PermaTill which looks pretty close but really it's a different product. The paver base is real alkaline. The PermaTill doesn't really affect the pH one way or another. And it's a great product not only for putting sedum or, you know, Phlox subulata, or something like that. But it also works great for if you're planting trilliums or something in an area where you have voles, it's really good to pack underneath that.

- [Troy] It's kind of a sharp little-- It's actually, I think, and expanded shale product that's kinda been baked almost like perlite or the little white stuff you see in potting soil. But this has kind of sharp edges so if you have vole problems, you can actually use it, and they don't like to dig through it.

- [Mitch] Exactly, exactly.

- [Troy] Well, you've obviously been very successful in these sunnier areas with a lot of different kinds of sedum, both native and non-native?

- [Mitch] Yessir, most of the sedums I use in the sunlight are non-native sedums. Most of the ones I use in the shade are the native sedums, so I, you know, it's kind of a combination of-- I like using the hen and chicks and the Phlox subulata, I use another one called Phlox bifida, there's just a lot of neat stuff. It just has to be real drought tolerant. You could probably use something like thyme, maybe, if you water just a little bit extra. It's not quite as tough as the sedums. Yeah, it's just anything that's kind of an exerscaping-type plant will work for the edges.

- [Troy] So if the upper part of the garden is the little bit more manicured portion with the, you know, stone paths and sort of directing people where you want them to go, you've got these little vignettes set up that you sort of reach a destination. Then this is maybe the little bit wilder and more native part of the garden down here in the front.

- Yeah, usually I'm so busy with the top of it anyway I don't really have time to get down here on it. It's got some weeds and stuff. You know, this is pretty much what it does. I'm slowly gettin' all the weeds under control and eventually I won't have to really do anything at all.

- [Troy] So you've got columbine that reseeds itself, you've got celandine poppy, and these plants really are just allowed to--

- [Mitch] Do their thing.

- [Troy] Travel and do their thing.

- [Mitch] Yeah, I'm just, I'm trying to keep the, you know, put a little bit nicer trail thing in. I'm gonna use some of the material actually when we cut that tree down, I'm gonna do a really nice wood embankment thing around it and plant actually in the log itself.

- [Troy] So you have kind of a big dead tree that needs to come down and you'll utilize that trunk and everything as part of the garden art.

- Sure, and it actually recycles everything the tree's absorbed while it was in the garden.

- Right, well we can't look at this part of the garden and not mention this enormous clump of trillium that's down here.

- [Mitch] This is probably my favorite plant in the entire garden, believe it or not. I'm really a big hiker and stuff, and you just don't see big trilliums like this much anymore. You know, it's just a special plant. It's probably, you know, that's probably 50 years old, really. It might be a little quicker than that 'cause I know how to grow 'em, and I mean, you can actually, you can keep these plants up like any other perennial. They cannot ever get dry. 'Cause if they get dry one time, it instantly kicks in a dormant.

- [Troy] It's time for me to go dormant. It's summer drought, and it's time for me to go dormant. Which is the way with a lot of spring ephemerals.

- [Mitch] Sure.

- [Troy] And that's the way they're designed.

- [Mitch] Exactly. And why these are so big, I can push like three or four seasons every year into a trillium. They come out of the ground quick when you do it like that.

- [Troy] Right. Creating a garden on this scale and of this magnitude obviously requires choosing the right plant for the right place, and I think that can be seen very easily in the hellebores, the plum yews, Christmas fern, plants that are deer-resistant like epimediums and even our native plants like the columbine and other things that we've seen today. I think it's so important to choose that right plant for the right place to cut down on the maintenance that's required by those individual plants. And eventually, as everything fills in, as the leaf mulch gets a little bit deeper, and as the plants truly cover the ground, this really will be a low-maintenance garden.

- We're here at Grinder's Switch Winery in Centerville, and I'll tell you, it's not the typical day in a vineyard. But a lot of people don't realize that there's a whole lot of work to be done in the vineyard before it starts looking beautiful in the spring and summer. Mick Chessor, you have the wonderful responsibility of the vineyard here at Grinder's Switch Winery. And while it looks to somebody just looking at the vineyard that nothing's going on, there's a lot that needs to go on, right?

- There is. Right now, we get out here while the vines are still dormant and we do what we call double pruning. All these canes and stuff and shoots that you see here, this is all new growth from this past year. So we'll come in here and select cut a lot of these out of here, and what that does is that delays bud-break about two weeks so we can get past that late frost.

- [Tammy] Okay, so tell me, show me exactly where you would start pruning this.

- Okay, well, a lot of times you'll want to start right in the middle. I've just done enough, I start on one end and go right down the row. We want pretty good spacing, so we've got this end shoot here, we're gonna leave this because the buds on the end will bloom out first. They'll shoot out with growth first, and that'll allow these to make it past the frost. So we'll just kinda move down here. Start cuttin' off these older, weaker lookin' ones. This one's dead, this one's a little bit stronger, so we'll probably leave that one, leave that one. That one's growth away from the main vine there. That one's just a big bull cane, we'll get it gone. Try to thin this out.

- And this is a painstaking process. You've gotta do this through the entire vineyard.

- Yup.

- And how long-- You've got, what, seven acres of grapes here, or more?

- I do, and I've gotta do every one of 'em by hand. This'll take me about four weeks. We've got over 3,000 vines, probably, and putting in another 1,600 this spring.

- Wow, wow. And so, basically, what do you do? Do you leave this here and it will-

- I'll leave these, we'll cut these trimmings off here. And you can see right here, this bud right here is already swelled up. 'Course it's gonna be trimmed off. If it didn't the freeze tonight would probably kill it.

- [Tammy] So obviously you've got these trained so that--

- [Mick] These are all trained,

- These are supported--

- with the VSP.

- [Tammy] really, really nice. So if the homeowner is thinking about doing some grapevines, they really need to consider their trellis system because it gets heavy, right?

- [Mick] Yeah, their trellis system, what style of trellis they're gonna put up, depending on what kind of vine it is. A lot of different things come into play there.

- [Tammy] So this one's triple wired, I guess you'd call it.

- It's VSP, we're on main cordons down here, on the bottom wire, and like I said, this is double pruned so while these are still here, after frost has come and gone or chance of it, I'll come in and leave three buds, a basal bud, a primary and a secondary bud. So let's just say, frost has gone, there's no chance of cold weather, these'll come and I'll count up three buds and trim 'em all the way through. Basal, primary, secondary. We'll cut this off since we've got plenty right here.

- [Tammy] So even if you initially prune, you're not through pruning.

- Oh, no. I'll prune these even through the year. So after... After we've got some greenery out here, now this is what it'll look like after chances of frost. These buds'll be swelled up and probably even green. There's gonna also be other little buds that'll pop up along the vine, so while those shoots are three inches long and still green, we'll come through and shoot thin then. We'll knock those off. They'll be comin' off the bottom, and we'll wanna knock those off while they're still green, 'cause you can just flick 'em and they'll come right off.

- [Tammy] And so, the purpose of this is, it opens up your canopy so you got sunlight that can get in.

- Airflow.

- Here.

- [Mick] Stays dry.

- [Tammy] And so that reduces your disease pressure by keeping it dry.

- [Mitch] Yes.

- So really, to not do this is to do a disservice to--

- Absolutely.

- To your grapes.

- It's a necessity. You've really gotta do this. You don't want your canopy so thick there's no light coming through it, there's no sunlight gettin' to the grapes, and there's no airflow 'cause, like I said, you gotta have that airflow through there to keep the berries dried off, 'cause moisture is the enemy.

- Got it.

- Asparagus is a perennial plant that stays in a permanent spot in the garden for many, many years. We take an old plant and divide it up, and we get these little hands. Or you can buy these two-year-old asparagus roots. They usually come in a bundle of 25 or so. This variety is Mary Washington, it's the standard variety that's been around for a long time. So we put a lot of compost on the field, and also lime it real well, because asparagus needs to be in a soil with a pH of around seven. So after we get our beds prepared, we make the hole. And then, into the hole, I put a mixture of compost and soil. I mound it up and then I set the hand over the mound of soil as if it was grasping a ball. Spreading the roots out. Then I put more of the soil-compost mixture on it and firm it down. I don't fill the hole in all the way at first. Young asparagus is rather tender, and so we only cover the crown about two inches deep. I fill the other three or four inches of the hole in later on in the year after the shoots come up. Don't make the mistake I did of following directions to plant asparagus in a trench a foot deep. In Tennessee, if you go down a foot, you're gonna run into a heavy clay subsoil, and the asparagus I planted that way didn't do very well. The first year, the asparagus is kept well-weeded and then in the fall, we mulch the bed with some hay and then pull the hay back up in the spring and kept the field weeded for the second year. We have to resist the temptation of eating the young asparagus stalks those first two years and let the plant get well-established and get its roots way into the ground. On the third year, though, the asparagus comes up nice big fat stalks and we keep it harvested every day. Otherwise it gets too big. Once asparagus starts coming up thinner, then we quit harvesting it and just let it grow for the rest of the summer and it makes a nice big ferny-leafed ornamental plant. Asparagus does require some patience. But don't give up. A little bit of time and effort at the beginning pays off in years of bundles of asparagus.

- So here I am in one of my favorite places here in Nashville and one of my playgrounds is the Gardens of Babylon at the Nashville Farmer's Market. We're surrounded by some beautiful, lush house plants. The key ingredient here is keeping them alive, happy and healthy. So what we're gonna talk about are some key elements you gotta remember when it comes to your success with these plants. Biggest thing I want everybody to always remember is right plant, right place. It works for the outside, it even works for the inside. Don't just be attracted to the pretty, colorful foliage and think anything's gonna go anywhere you want it to. You have to match the plant to their preferred light levels. It's the biggest reason why most people aren't successful when it comes to house plants. Ask your nurseryman. Don't be afraid to ask these questions. Take pictures of your space. Note the sun exposure in these rooms throughout the day. These are very critical points in making sure that you choose the right plant for the right space. Now, once you have chosen the right plant for the right space, the next big step is soil media or planting it up in the container. How's it gonna be? Different ways of approaching the container world, there's some where it is the, you know, you can take the nursery container that it comes in, pop it in, a container that usually doesn't have any holes in the bottom of it, cover it with some decorative moss, Spanish moss, reindeer moss, mulch. So another type of potting configuration that you might find yourself with is containers that maybe don't have holes in the bottom of them but you still wanna plant them up in some fresh soil. Key thing here is remembering to use some sort of mechanism for drainage. Rocks, sand, broken containers of terra cotta that you have laying around. Get creative with it, it's cheap. If you're even lookin' for something as a reuse material, packing peanuts. They are very lightweight, they don't take up-- They can take up as much space as you want in a container. For really large containers, you don't have to fill it all up with soil. Use some non-biodegradable packing peanuts. The ones that don't break down in water. Now if you have a glass container that doesn't have any drainage, get creative with it. There's colored stones, colored glass, river pebbles, colored sand. And the last configuration with containers and house plants is ones that have saucers either attached or they're separate and they have holes in the bottom of the containers. The drainage and the rocks and pebbles really aren't as important, but the key thing is just allowing that water to soak away from the roots. And then it gets on to the question of, "How do I pot this house plant up?" What is the best type of soil to use? This is a key ingredient when it comes to the overall success of your house plant. I have one of my favorite types of media. It's a soilless media. It's usually gonna be peat moss based. Your most ideal elements found within house plant potting soil are peat moss, maybe a little bit of good aged organic compost, sand, perlite, vermiculite. There are mixes out there like this one behind me. It's called Cactus Mix, and don't let the name fool ya. You can actually use this, in our professional opinion, on a wide variety of house plants. Why? Because even foliage plants love good drainage. Another big key ingredient I see people failing with is they just keep their house plants too wet. Too moist. Big thing to always let your house plants dry out in between waterings. Use a moisture meter, use your finger, so the key take-away here is to resist the temptation to over-nurture house plants. Letting them dry out in-between waterings is a very key element to success. Another key element to success is feeding them the right way. House plants really aren't heavy feeders in the macro-nutrient world, they're heavy feeders more in the micro-nutrient world. This is where organic fertilizers excel over synthetic. Make it easy on yourself. If you have a situation where you're potting up a house plant into its new soil in that container, use a slow-release granular fertilizer. Mix in a cup, half a cup, depending on the pot size. Mix that in the potting soil. Boom. You're done. You can forget about feeding that plant for the next year, year and a half. Now if you have a situation where you are taking the house plant in its original nursery container and dropping it in a container that doesn't have any drainage or holes and covering it with moss or a decorative cover, you wanna use maybe a little bit of a water-mixed fertilizer. These come in all different shapes and sizes, everything from fish emulsion and seaweed to a less stinkier option which is, some of our favorites is Monte's Plant Food, which is, little bit goes a long way with this type of fertilizer. Maybe one to two teaspoons per half gallon, water that in maybe once every one to two months, especially for flowering house plants. Orchids, begonias, cyclamen. These are big, key plants that need fertilizer right around the early spring, late winter time when plants are naturally gonna be blooming inside. So just like outdoor plants, indoor plants can sometimes have the possibility of getting bad insects on them. Don't worry, don't fret, there are key ingredients that you want to have under your sink at the ready. Now, when it comes to indoor plants, we like to think on a preventative measure. Things like neem oil, spray it on your plant once a month, just as in outside plants, inside plants it works great, dilute it down in water, spray it on your house plants even if you don't see any signs of bugs, more as a preventative. Now with your typical house plant pests, if you do see some mealy bugs, aphids, scales, a lot of it can be wiped off with rags and soapy water. You don't necessarily have to buy a chemical for it. Just take a clean rag and wipe some of the surfaces of the leaves, pull 'em off by hand. If it's a larger job, there's some insecticidal soap recipes that you can find on the website out there as well as off the shelf insecticidal soaps that may have a little bit of a pyrethrin base in them. These are a little bit stronger than your neem oil. If you see the existence of pests on your plants already, use insect soap or even a spinosad, which is also for organic gardening. Mix it in with water and you want to spray the whole entire plant, even the undersides of the leaves. Most people kinda forget that. A lot of those bugs are living underneath that leaf and they only spray the top. But concentrate on the newer growth as well as under the leaves. Take your plant outside on a back patio or balcony if you have to. Spray it off with a hose afterward, and your bugs will be a thing of the past. Nowadays, scientific research has even proven the benefits of indoor foliage, whether it be cleaning indoor air pollutants, lowering stress, making a work environment more productive. Hey, the science is out there, and it's time to start really thinking about incorporating some of these house plants in and around your office or your home environment. And with these key ingredients about soil and fertilizer and pest control, you're gonna be very successful in doing that.

- [Narrator] 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.