Episode 2642

- [Narrator] Areas that have become overgrown with invasive plants choke out all the native plants that support wildlife. Well, this landscape management team can help fix this problem. The Nashville Chew Crew is an ecologically friendly, people pleasing way to clear out overgrown spaces to bring back diversity. Stay tuned. First, targeted grazing.

- [Julie] Well, this is sort of the things of my nightmare. I swear part of my backyard has looked like this from time to time and I know other people have had the experience of having to pull out all kinds of weedy invasives and ugh, Johnson grass. Oh, but now we have Zach. And all his little gardening friends.

- And my hundred plus four-legged lawn mowers.

- [Julie] We're out here at the metro center levee on the riverside and it's really steep and I wouldn't want to have to be out here with a lawnmower. So, you got your chew crew here.

- [Zach] We do, we do. They're working hard. We got three miles from bridge to bridge here along the Cumberland River Greenway and we are working hard to clear all the invasive species and hopefully work toward a native warm season grasses meadow effect along the levee.

- Well, this is really neat. So all this stuff we see up in here, I know it's a problem for the levee because it starts to sort of chew up the levee and make it not so protective anymore so we gotta get rid of it but what kind of invasives have you found?

- [Zach] Man, this place has the grand slam of invasives. If it's in Tennessee it's probably on this site. Just behind you there's privet, everybody knows privet. There's honeysuckle, both bush honeysuckle and Japanese honeysuckle. There's mimosas, there's invasive pears, we could just walk around and look, it wouldn't take too long to find some new ones. This place is overwhelmed. It's a tough site to manage so you can see it's easy to let it go and if you let it go to its own devices you kind of end up with this. You get a lot of woody, invasive shrubs and trees.

- Well, it's certainly not good for the levee. It's not good for the wildlife.

- You're right, you're right. So not only is the core of engineers and metro water concerned about the integrity of the levee, but also they're really interested in the plant composition and how that might help the native wildlife. So, you know, if you go up and look on the other side of the levee where it's mowed Bermuda and you go on this side especially elsewhere where we've done a lot of work and it's a field of native warm season grasses, there's so much life. There's turtles and rabbits and hawks and songbirds and it's great, it's beautiful. But you can also just enjoy it and appreciate it because you can see it and access it and be a part of it. Whereas right now it's kind of overwhelmed.

- Well, this whole process, okay, first of all, we have eating machines.

- We do, we do.

- [Julie] It seems to me they eat, they chew their cud and they sleep, and then they eat again.

- [Zach] Like clockwork, yes.

- [Julie] I can see here some of the branches they've already been eating on and really have seriously defoliated which is great. There's a lot of crushing of grasses going on here as they eat them up. We've got some more eating down there.

- [Zach] You're right.

- [Julie] So what other things do sheep bring to this whole environment?

- [Zach] Oh man, I could talk all day about why I think sheep are a good landscape management tool. Real quick, in terms of cost, this kind of site because it's so steep and overgrown, would be pretty expensive so that's one of the reasons Nashville looked to the Chew Crew as a solution because we can manage these sites for a much more affordable rate. More than that though, environmentally, they're so much more sensitive to the soil. They're light footed versus heavy machinery which might turn and make a lot of tracks and kick a bunch of mud and cause erosion. These guys are very easy on the land. They fertilize as they go. But everything that needs to be cleared from about ground to about head height they'll defoliate and get rid of. So that opens up the opportunity to come in and clear it by hand or whatever the next method may be. And beyond all that, beyond economics, and the environmental part of it, what makes me so excited about this job is it engages the public with the process. It'd be hard to get people as excited about herbicides and noisy lawnmowers but with sheep, people can see it happening, they can hear it, they can smell it, they can just engage with it. It's more entertaining and it's kind of a catalyst for getting people out to the site. Which to me is important.

- [Julie] Well, the sheep clearly have been here recently.

- They have, they have. They just moved off this site. You can tell everything around us has been defoliated to over head high. The grasses are not clearly gone. They've just been kind of pressed and all the dead foliage is on the ground so it's like a natural mulch. But the problem plants, the ones we want to manage are now totally accessible and visible. So the next step is to come through and cut all of these invasive tress and shrubs. Honeysuckle, Bradford pear, Callery pear. All these plants and they'll be cut about ankle height and from that point, everything that grows is gonna be tender and totally edible for the sheep so with the sheep coming back twice a year, these trees will never get a chance to get to this point again. And hopefully by putting the herd on them twice a year with sheep, eventually will exhaust them, never have to use herbicides or heavy machinery to remove them. Perhaps more importantly, the roots are all still intact maintaining the integrity of the levee itself.

- [Julie] Well this is really quite the dream come true now isn't it? Look at all these grasses.

- I am very proud of this section. This has been grazed twice and vegetation has been removed once and this is what we're left with. I think the sheep are pretty effective landscape managers.

- Oh my gosh, and let's see. What kind of grasses do we have coming up here?

- Quite a few. A lot of native warm season grasses. All these kind of bunches that you can see providing great cover and food for the wildlife. So we've got songbirds and rabbits and turtles. It's a lot of wildlife in this section which is really cool. But specifically, I've seen a lot of Panic, or switch grass. Indian grass, some Andropogon, some Solidago, and then a host of other forbs and grasses that are native and beneficial and also good sheep food. So, hopefully we're getting on a good plan here for years to come.

- [Julie] If you happen to be out on the levee one day and you see a lot of sheep, just give them a little round of applause because trust me, they are weeding things that none of us want to get into. So, thank you so much Zach and thanks to all your little sheep.

- [Zach] Well, thank you very much and I'll tell the crew.

- [Annette] There are many wonderful things about spring. Everything greens but one of the most beautiful things is how quickly wildflowers come up and start to bloom and give us such beautiful color in our gardens. I'm visiting with Andy Sessions at Sunlight Nurseries in Andersonville, Tennessee. She has a mail order operation here also and a wonderful location. Andy, the selections of plants that we got here, I know that there's certain rules if I'm a novice and I want to start a wildflower garden. According to what we've assembled, what would I do first to ensure success?

- Well, first you have to understand what your site is like. Is it shady, is it sunny, does the soil hold good moisture, is it lousy dry soil, is it sandy? Those are all things that are very important. But gardening with wildflowers is just like gardening with any other perennial. You have to prepare your site and choose the right plants for that site.

- What is the opportune time to plant these wildflowers?

- Well, the best time really to plant wildflowers along with most other perennials is in the fall, early fall. However, it is fine to plant all these now. It just means that you're going to have to pay more attention to watering and the care that you would normally give your flowers during the summer if it gets dry. In the fall however, you give them more time to get established before they have the stresses of drought the following year.

- Yes, well and so you're saying that a plant likes to wake up where it went to sleep.

- That's a very good way to put it. That's easy to remember.

- Okay, well, with those things in mind, I think we should tell people if you want to plant now you may, but if you'd like to prepare that site and get ready to get some plants in the fall then maybe they need to get a pencil and paper. And as we go through the selection that we've pulled through your vast selection out there they might want to jot down some names, right?

- Right.

- Okay, well why don't we start up here at this corner.

- Okay, this is the blue woodland Phlox and it is common in our moist woods in the area. It's easy in the shade where you've got pretty good soil. If it's really dry probably not your best bet. But the nice thing is is that it spreads by seed when it's happy. So you start with one and you're probably gonna have many in years to come. It also attracts the early butterflies. So it's a good early butterfly flower.

- Okay now, is this in the same family?

- Yes, this one is a creeping type of woodland Phlox that happens to be a purple blue color. This is another creeping woodland Phlox. All three of these like the shade. This one is more a clump former. These two tend to spread by runners. So they make good ground covers in shade and good soil.

- Let me ask you a question about this shade. You know, when we look at our barren trees now and some of these wildflowers are popping up underneath them they're actually in full sun now. So after they've bloomed and the leaves start to get on the trees then you don't have to worry that they're getting sun now.

- That's correct and that's a good observation. Most of these things are flowering out here when it's sunny. Now, because the leaves on the trees aren't out. They can handle that. They spend their time after they're flowering in the shade growing bigger.

- Some of these also there's no foliage once they've bloomed and the seed pod has formed. I know that this phlox will keep foliage but let's move on to this right here.

- Well this is the wild columbine and it is native to rocky woodland sort of drier places in our area. You'll see it on cliff faces. Pretty much slopes in the shade. It is evergreen though. It does keep its leaves year round. This is one that attracts early hummingbirds so that's an early butterfly plant, this is an early hummingbird plant. It also spreads by seed so you're gonna have this many more of these if you start with one or two.

- I have that prolifically in my garden. Okay, now this right here.

- This is the old fashioned bleeding heart. It is not a native plant but it is a great plant for the wildflower garden. Blooms this time of the year on into June. After blooming, this one's going to go dormant and disappear. It disappears completely to the ground when it starts to get drier. People see this and they always say, oh my grandmother had this plant. That's why it's called the old fashioned bleeding heart. It's been around for a long time. Here's a white form of it. Usually you see it in pink but sometimes you get a white and that is a pure pure white flower, it's beautiful.

- Is this a little bit more delicate? Is it a little more difficult to establish?

- This one's a little slower to grow. A little more difficult to establish, yes. Oftentimes white forms of other colored flowers are harder to grow, to get started.

- [Annette] Okay, I'm gonna go to the front over here. Now I know that's not a native or a wildflower. What is that?

- This is a Japanese version of our Jack-in-the-pulpit. And this one is really a collector's item. This is Arisaema Sikokianum. It's called Japanese cobra lily. Great plant for the shade and moist soil. It comes up at this time of the year, it does its thing. It's probably going to get 12 to 18 inches tall with leaves that may be 18 inches wide. And again, by midsummer, this one's probably going to disappear and go dormant.

- How important is it to remove debris from your wildflower gardens? If you don't take off twigs and leaves that fall in the autumn and winter, is that a problem?

- Well, it all depends on your trees and the amount of leaves. Of course, if you're blowing your leaves off your yard into your garden, that's a problem. But you look at the woods and the woods have sometimes several inches of leaves and duff and in the long run that is very good for your soil. However, in our wildflower gardens we tend to expect them to do maybe better than they're doing out in the wild so you can for instance fertilize in a wildflower garden. You don't have to, but you can to encourage growth but we recommend that you leave as much leaves or natural covering as you can so long as it doesn't get in the way of new plants coming up the next year. And you just have to judge that individually.

- [Annette] And the aesthetics of keeping it natural looking enhances the fact that these are wildflowers.

- That may be the look you want. It may be that you want wildflowers in your shady border in front of your house where mulch is something you might want. But before we get to that, here's the Virginia bluebells which is another spring bloomer that comes up and does its thing now and by June it's gonna disappear. And this one will naturalize in your woods with good moist soil and it can form acres, well, in the wild, maybe not in your garden, but acres of beautiful blue flowers.

- I have this in my garden and it's very special because a friend, an elderly friend, gave it to me. Only one plant, she said, I don't give this to everybody, I'm gonna give you one. She has now passed away and like you say, my hillside is covered in my bluebells from Eunice. Now how about the Baptisia?

- This is Baptisia or blue wild indigo and it blooms in late spring. It may get several feet tall. The flowers are just now starting to come up. They look like sweet pea flowers. And it's typically blue but it may tend towards purple or yellow. They've been hybridizing them so there's lots of colors.

- [Annette] I've seen a white one. Isn't the white one native?

- [Andy] Yes, there's one called the white wild indigo. But this a long lived big perennial. It can get three-four feet tall and three and four feet wide. It'll be there forever in sunny dry-ish places, gorgeous.

- I won't tell it but I have a nice story about one of these too. Okay, now let's move to this pretty dianthus.

- Dianthus or pinks, great ground cover for sunny, dry places. It's very fragrant. I wish you could smell it through the camera. It smells great. It'll form a mat and this will repeat blooming if you shear off the old flowers.

- [Annette] And the blue textured foliage, just look how this fuchsia color pops. The yellows and the blues and the pinks, it's just, this is a unifying color, isn't it?

- It's very easy to work with that color.

- Okay, right here this is a familiar looking face.

- This is the celandine poppy. And it's another spring bloomer. It's probably one of the easiest wildflowers to start with. We recommend this for beginners that have shade and average to good soil. It will form a clump 18 inches tall and 18 wide so it gets bigger than it is right now.

- [Annette] And I see that seed pod right there.

- [Andy] It spreads by seed. The seed pod gets bigger and hairy and it'll burst open in June and fling its seeds everywhere and the next year you should have seedlings.

- [Annette] Another reminder about reemergence in our gardens that we want and a lot of things we don't want but we do want are all these things that naturalize from seeds.

- [Andy] Right.

- [Annette] Okay, this is a cutie.

- [Andy] This is the dwarf eared Coreopsis. And it's an easy ground cover for light shade. It doesn't get much taller than that. It is evergreen so it keeps these green leaves year round.

- The Coreopsis is a native plant but this is a hybrid?

- No, this is a native. There are many different species of native Coreopsis. This is one that's low growing and blooms early. Most people think of Coreopsis as summer blooming, sun loving perennials.

- Yeah.

- But this is a spring blooming, more shade liking perennial.

- I can see this in a little hybrid tuber pot.

- It's easy, there's many uses for that. With the flowers at maturity, it may be a feet tall so quite short.

- Okay, we're down to the front row.

- [Andy] Spider wart. Late spring bloomer, gets a foot or so tall, spreads. You give it some room because it will spread but that's a beautiful color.

- [Annette] This also, doesn't this fade away, the foliage after it's bloomed?

- [Andy] They can get tired and if any of these look tired and you think they're not supposed to be going dormant. You need to know which ones like this should go dormant. If they look tired, just whack them off.

- I've done it.

- Get a little haircut and let it rejuvenate.

- I have to say, I've done it hoping it doesn't come back. This right here, I have these and I love this.

- That's a hearty orchid. Not a native plant, it's from China but it's beautiful in the wildflower garden. It's going to get a foot or so taller, spreads slowly, it can grow as a rock garden type plant or in average soil. It's not too particular. Slowly spreading clump.

- [Annette] Okay, now.

- And foam flower.

- Isn't that pretty?

- Every spring woodland wildflower garden should have foam flowers. There are clumping types, which this one is. And there are creeping types. Most of them have white flowers. This one's got a pink tint to it and this one is a variety called pink brushes. Some have all green leaves, some have got splotches of color in the leaves. There are subtle variations in the foam flowers but very easy for shade and average soil.

- You know, is this one have an evergreen clump?

- Yes, it is evergreen. That one is evergreen.

- Okay, I used to get these mixed up.

- Easy to mix them up.

- Well Andy, there are many things out there in those greenhouses that you've now unveiled, let's put it that way. Because you've been waiting for a day like today. And now we can find your gardens listed on the website?

- Right.

- Okay, well, I appreciate your end of the day with a cool breeze and it's obvious that if someone wants to know about wildflowers, how to do it, and what you've done wrong, I think they should look up Andy Sessions.

- Well, thank you.

- [Sheri] We're in Warren County McMinnville and we're visiting Jaime Wynn today. And Jaime's relatively new to middle Tennessee and she is like most of us, gardening and learning at the same time. I want to mention all your beautiful signs here Jamie. I love the handmade look to this.

- [Jaime] That's what I do in my winter months when I don't have anything to do.

- [Sheri] When you don't have anything to do. I notice a lot of home gardeners would be envious of your fencing here. Obviously to keep the deer out.

- [Jaime] Yes.

- [Sheri] Do they still jump over and eat things?

- [Jaime] No, I haven't had really any problems so far with any animals other than birds and maybe a few rabbits every now and then.

- [Sheri] Your squash is looking very good this year. Any secrets? Have you learned anything?

- [Jaime] No, not really. Just about moving your crops around. Last year they were on the other side of the garden and this year I guess they're pretty happy where I put them.

- I hear chickens in the background. What kind of fertilization do use?

- I use all the chicken waste in the garden. I have a pile over there and during the winter months I throw it all in the garden and then it's all tilled in.

- [Sheri] How many hours are you out here? I see it's freshly tilled.

- [Jaime] I'm out here several hours a day picking weeds. Weeds are probably my biggest challenge.

- [Sheri] Well, your garden is very neat and tidy, that's for sure. I'm impressed by that. So you've had some challenges with the corn as well?

- [Jaime] Yes, I do think maybe that was my fault on the first rows. I don't know if I let my seeds sit out too long before I planted them. That's part of my learning experience.

- [Sheri] Well, gardening, if you stop learning, you stop growing and if you stop growing, you stop gardening. I think that's the only way, trial and error. I notice behind me you have some kind of beans growing up that beautiful fence behind us.

- [Jaime] Yes, those are my green beans and crowder peas.

- [Sheri] I understand you love to grow potatoes. Can you tell me why?

- [Jaime] I love digging them up because it's like a box of chocolates. You just don't know how many you're gonna get.

- [Sheri] You are very proud of this broccoli and I can see why. It's just starting to come to head. Tell me about your broccoli.

- [Jaime] Well last year I planted it. It did terrible. The bugs ate it up before I could even take a hold of it and that's a whole nother thing I'm learning is about the bugs. But this year, for the most part, they're popping up. I think they come up overnight. But they're doing pretty good so I'm very happy about that.

- Do you have a mentor anywhere that's helping you learn about your vegetables and how to combat the insects? And fungus and all that good stuff.

- Well, I took a master gardener's class and I did get a lot of information. It was a little overwhelming. But I did learn a lot from that.

- [Sheri] I noticed you have marigolds planted at the end of each row. Does that serve a purpose?

- [Jaime] The marigolds supposedly deter some of the pests. And I did try to plant them in between some of the plants as well and I had heard radishes as well. I did plant a few radishes in between.

- Did you do that in years past as well or is that something new?

- No.

- And do you think you've noticed a difference?

- I do think I've noticed a difference with the marigolds, definitely.

- That's good for other people to learn.

- [Jaime] These are my cucumbers.

- [Sheri] And these are the tomatoes you were talking about. They're kind of short and squatty this year?

- [Jaime] Yes, they're just not producing and possibly my soil could be too dry right now but even when I put them in we had an abundance of rain but I'm not sure.

- [Sheri] Well, that's how we learn. You mentioned that you can and freeze. Are you self-taught with that as well?

- Yes I am. I do a lot of internet research and a lot of experimenting.

- [Sheri] It's very inspirational for people that have never tried it to hear somebody admit that they're learning as they go so perhaps they'll be encouraged to try it as well.

- [Jaime] Yes, I mean, it's really fun in the winter time when you go in the pantry and you pull out some stuff that you had grown and canned. It's really fun. I can a lot of tomatoes. I make pasta sauce.

- [Sheri] Great, what do you freeze then?

- [Jaime] I mainly freeze my beans. The crowder peas are a big thing. I froze my eggplants, squash, zucchini, for soups and stuff. I dice it up and then put it away.

- [Sheri] Great. And I notice you have one of my favorite things here. A little plot of herbs and this is new for you this year as well?

- Yes, a friend of mine gave me a whole bunch of different herbs and I've been experimenting with them. Still learning. But I do use them. I actually cut them up a lot of times and put them in my chicken coop and of course I cook with them too.

- [Sheri] And I see a volunteer sunflower I just passed, he's gonna be a big one. And some zinnias and some other stuff, fun stuff. I just want to tell you thank you very much for inviting us out here to your little piece of Eden, it's gorgeous.

- Thank you. Thank you for coming.

- [Sheri] And I want you to know that other people and other viewers will really appreciate the fact that they're not the only ones struggling with things and that it is really a learning process. Thank you for inviting us today.

- [Jamie] Thank you.

- [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.