Episode 2645

- [Narrator] Farming, landscape design, ornamental garden beds. Yes indeed. We've got all kinds of growing situations on this Volunteer Gardener. Jeff Poppen likes growing okra because it thrives in our heat and humidity. Troy Marden tours a fresh landscape for a grand old house. And we'll prune hydrangeas to show off those blooms. Join us. First, beautifully colored blossoms that produce a highly nutritious fruit.

- All garden plants have a history. The various trails they took to find their way into our fields. The huge mysterious continent of Africa, especially around Ethiopia is where many of our cultivated plants had their origin. This is where okra came from. History is obscure and uncertain but we can follow okra up to Egypt where its been commonly grown for hundreds of years. Okra also found its way across the red sea into Arabia and from there it spread completely around the Mediterranean and eastward to India. In our little country it probably landed with the French colonists in Louisiana. Thomas Jefferson mentions it being grown in Virginia. And by the 1800s, there were several distinct varieties. Both the words okra and gumbo are of African origin. The flowers of okra tell us that it's in the hibiscus family. The same beautiful swirling flowers that you see in a hollyhock. Okra is very easy to grow. You just take the seeds and plant them oh, about six to a foot in warm soil. If the soil temperature is only 60 degrees it'll take a full month for the okra to sprout. But when the soil temperature is 75 degrees it'll sprout in two weeks. But I found that if I wait til about June 1st, when I'm planting sweet potatoes, the okra when the soil is 90 degrees jumps out of the ground in one week. It's always better to plant when our seeds come up quickly because then we can get in there with our hoes quicker to get rid of those pesky weeds. If you get real impatient and want to get your okra out soon, you can always do a few of these little tricks. One of them is to soak the seeds overnight in warm water. Another trick is to freeze the seeds overnight. And the third way is to rub them a little bit with sandpaper and nick the hard outer coat so that they'll sprout a little quicker. Because it comes from Africa, a country with alternate rainy spells and drought conditions, okra is very adaptable to the weather. It can take too much rain or it can withstand a drought. We plant okra late and it graces the fall garden with its beauty. It's just such a pretty plant. This variety is called Burgundy. Obviously it has these beautiful dark red pods and stems and all. It's a real pretty plant. The other variety that we grow is called Clemson Spineless. It's a standard green variety. Both of these varieties are natural hybrid from the wild plants that grew around Ethiopia. Consequently, they show a certain hybrid vigor. But you can save the seeds on them. They'll come true from seed. We simply just let the pods get real big and then just leave them over winter and in the spring take out the seeds and plant them. There are hybrid varieties of okra that do well in a shorter season cooler climate that has adequate summer moisture. Hybrids like Cajun Delight. Okra's a pretty easy plant to grow. There doesn't seem to be any insects or diseases that bother it. Although it's bothersome for some people to harvest it because of the little spines and such on the leaves and stems. So many people will wear gloves and long sleeves when they harvest their okra. I usually use pruning shears when I harvest it and I pick them when they're about three to four inches long. You don't want to let them get too big. Whenever a plant makes a big fruit with mature seed, the plant then loses vigor because its already made seed. We like to keep our plants like okra in a vegetated state so we continually harvest, every two to three days we have to get in here and get all these little baby okras out. We don't want them to get big unless for the end of the season we might if we're gonna save seeds. Sometimes I use a knife because I forgot to take my pruning shears to the field. So we can cut them with a pocket knife. When you cut it, if that stem is hard to cut, then the okra's gonna be hard to eat. The seeds from okra are in many countries used to make a high quality cooking oil and or it can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute. Okra is a staple in many countries in Africa and Asia and around the Mediterranean. Okra is slimy. You either love it or you probably don't like it at all. If you're not thickening up a soup with it you might be frying it in cornmeal. That's the way it's typically eaten in the South. We like to pickle it just like you would make cucumber pickles. We love okra pickles. Okra has been part of our history for a long time and continues to grace southern gardens with its beautiful flowers, foliage, and seeds.

- Once in awhile we get to take you behind the scenes of a really special place and behind me is the West Meade Mansion which is the sister house to the Belle Meade Mansion. You may have driven by this house on occasion. It's right at the Highway 70-100 split on the Highway 70 side. And not only is this the sister house but this house was actually built by one of the two sisters of the Harding family who owned the the Belle Meade Mansion. This house was constructed in the 1880s for just under $13,000 believe it or not. And a few years ago it was refurbished and we're about to meet the landscape architect who was in charge of helping bring the grounds up to date for a house they really wanted to preserve and keep very much like it was originally but needed a modern landscape for. Well Todd, thanks for joining us today. Tell me a little bit about this property and how long ago you helped sort of do some of this refurbish.

- Probably about 12 years ago the owners had purchased the property. There had only been three owners in the history of the property and it was quite overgrown at the time and so we really were taking it back, clearing it out to see what was left if anything, doing historical research and that type of thing.

- Areas like this, obviously this magnolia was probably here.

- That was existing and a lot of wonderful trees.

- [Troy] You've had kind of over story but not a lot of under story. So, hydrangeas and things like that, were all of those added?

- [Todd] They were. They were favorites of the owner.

- [Troy] And also, even though this landscape wasn't necessarily taken from a historic perspective, these are still plants that would have probably been--

- [Todd] Could have been used. Maybe not in that same way but yes.

- [Troy] Could have been used during that time. So one of the things that I notice as we walk around this property is the important attention to detail. Tell us a little bit about your vision for some of the details we see around the property.

- [Todd] We always try to take cues from the architecture and this one being in the 1880s did have a lot of unique details. We reworked the crest work, the ironwork on the roof and also did historically accurate fencing around the property that's all hand wrought.

- [Troy] And then that kind of paired with your modern take on the landscape we see a lot of architectural detail even in the plantings. Lots of boxwood hedges.

- [Todd] Absolutely, it gives structure and organizes the spaces and ties in again with the architectural style.

- [Troy] And even the patio that we're standing on, the sidewalk that's over near us has a real architectural value to it and I'm assuming that that was by plan.

- [Todd] That actually was requested by the owner. So we try to work with their program as much as possible as long as it works with the style.

- [Troy] One of the things I really want to look at is this other little outbuilding that's out here. So let's take a walk this way.

- [Todd] Okay.

- [Todd] It was the original historic dairy for the property and it was converted to a guesthouse but if you visit the Belle Meade Mansion you can see one that's almost identical with the lower level, middle level, and upper level.

- [Troy] And I assume that most of this landscaping was not here. This was probably--

- [Todd] Right, it was all done. There was no smaller shrubbery or flowers, any of that. Nothing was left.

- [Troy] Just large trees and lawn. Not much under story. So here we have Annabelle Hydrangea. A little different than the one we saw earlier and a popular plant for everybody.

- [Todd] Selection of one of our native plants.

- [Troy] And tell me about some of the other plants that are in the shade garden around this building.

- [Todd] Again, we try to incorporate things that'll give interest throughout the year so we've got an evergreen base with some Laurels, Boxwoods, ground cover, such as this Wintercreeper and in some places we use pink and in the shadier areas we use Televores or winter rose. Also hardy begonias and ferns and hostas.

- [Troy] Well, it all just really flows and ties together really nicely.

- [Todd] Thank you.

- [Troy] It's a really pretty garden in a nice little quiet sort of shady respite.

- [Todd] Very serene.

- [Troy] Especially around what used to be the dairy barn and is now the guesthouse.

- [Todd] Right.

- [Troy] So, visitors having company have a nice little place to come out and sit. Over here on the side of the residence there's a garden bed that features a mass planting of Rudbeckia or Black-eyed Susan. Such a dependable perennial here with a long bloom time generally July through September. This easy-care plant makes a great foundation for a garden bed and when landscaping, don't overlook the possibility of keeping it simple and stately by choosing shrubs and ground covers that aren't big on bloom. Different shades of green and different textures can provide a soothing little vignette and they can play a background role for the showy parts of the yard. I would imagine that one of the challenges here was to help screen this property from all of the neighboring ones.

- [Todd] We really wanted to create privacy for the estate and that was one of the first things we did was created perimeter plantings, different mixtures of trees. We didn't want anything too formal really. So that it would blend in with the surrounding.

- [Troy] Look like maybe its been here for awhile.

- [Todd] Right.

- [Troy] I can see just standing here and looking around the back that you have things like dogwwods and magnolias and pines.

- [Todd] We do, we did a mixture of a lot of natives and southern things. It was quite rocky so we used some cedar trees. Also incorporated some fruit trees. Apple trees and orchard plants.

- [Troy] Even if you don't live on a large seven acre property like this one is. There are a lot of things that you can take home with you about a property like this that you can adapt to a smaller landscape. Things like structure.

- Certainly, the way plants are arranged, little groupings. Just putting elements in the garden that are architectural.

- And even the way maybe some of the patios are laid out or the sidewalks are laid out.

- Right.

- Getting from point A to point B. It's not any different on a small property than it is on a large property. It's just shorter distance.

- It's in the detail like we talked about.

- It really is the details that make the garden. Todd, thanks so much for giving us this grand tour of a beautiful place and we really appreciate your time.

- Thank you for coming.

- [Troy] Thank you.

- [Annette] Even though this is a thing of beauty today, I get a lot of questions. This is Charlsie Haliburton and she's a pretty known expert in the world of hydrangeas. I want you to tell us your pruning process and just how you don't just prune once. You are continually snipping. Give us the overview of how to make the best.

- [Charlsie] To show the blooms and show most of the blooms, I cut back unneeded pieces of the hydrangeas that do not have blooms like this.

- [Annette] Yeah, we could see right here.

- [Charlsie] So that you can better see the plant because it's covered up here.

- [Annette] It's already budded out. So you're opening it up.

- [Charlsie] Aesthetically I'm improving the beauty of what is blooming and taking away what is not blooming. I go down and--

- [Annette] And I can see this is new growth this year because it's green.

- [Charlsie] Yes, it's absolutely new growth. I'm cutting this back.

- [Annette] It's all green growth.

- [Charlsie] And I'm cutting it back deep inside there in front of...

- Yeah and see there's where it's coming out.

- [Charlsie] That's the old wood. I do not cut the old wood. Get this stick out of here in the meantime also. So now and these will come out and fill in there and now you can see the blooms better.

- Right, and these are actually though they're beautiful, these are actually immature because the season progresses right?

- Right, the blossoms will get bigger and they'll get darker pink as the season progresses. Actually, toward the end of the summer they'll begin to get pink.

- Right here for instance.

- It starts out white.

- Well, here would be stage one right there. And probably stage two could be like that because its got a little white and blue. And then this would be even a better example of the second staging of color.

- [Charlsie] And that's a progression.

- [Annette] Right there it's getting close to ooh, here's where it's close to right there.

- [Charlsie] Yeah, there it is. Isn't that pretty?

- [Annette] It is. Now, this is gonna get larger?

- [Charlsie] I'm not sure that will get larger. This looks like it's gonna be a large bud blossom but this will turn pink toward the end of summer and toward fall it will have lots of pink in it and it just gets dappled pink, it's beautiful. Pink and green.

- [Annette] It's a French hydrangea. It's got several names and lots of new varieties it's hard. You know, even an expert can't keep up.

- [Charlsie] But it's not an Endless Summer, I do know that.

- [Annette] All right, well I see what you've done now and so you actually don't need to do anymore.

- I'm not gonna touch this because the blooms are all on these. I just go for where there is not a bloom and where there's an unnecessary...

- You've got a little blank spot right here but nothing you can do now can eliminate this for the rest of the summer because I don't see any budding.

- [Charlsie] There's no buds so I'll probably will cut this off.

- [Annette] Yeah, that would bring the--

- [Charlsie] And I'll probably cut this off and they do get gigantic if you don't cut it back.

- [Annette] That's right.

- So I'm gonna cut this off right now. I'm gonna go down here... And it's gone.

- [Annette] Here's a good example also of that old deadwood and even if you wanted to you could even go back another cut right there. I see something right here. Here's one underneath there. If you can take this off.

- I will, I'll come inside here and we'll cut right here and we'll get this yellow leaf out of here.

- [Annette] You're a tidy gardener.

- [Charlsie] I am, I'm sorry that's just my nature.

- Well, if you do it now you don't have to do it later.

- Right.

- Okay, that looks good.

- Cut this back here. And they do just get gigantic. So you can see.

- [Annette] We're thinking about let's see, this is June. In July and August and this September, so a lot of growings is gonna take place. These can grow what, three or four feet in a season?

- [Charlsie] They grow a lot, yes. They came from just brown sticks to this. There were just brown sticks through the winter.

- [Annette] Yeah, and even though we're not on the backside I can tell that there are blooms back there.

- Yes there's a lot.

- So by cutting some of these that have no promise of color this season then those will come up. You've really enlightened me and I'm proud to be right here so you could tell us what to do.

- I think we all agree that you don't prune after Fourth of July.

- Or anything blooming in the spring.

- Yeah, hydrangeas don't bloom after that.

- [Annette] So as you can see, no one knows better than the person who's growing this the best way to take care of this macrophylla hydrangea. Thank you Charlsie.

- You're welcome.

- Last week we talked about a bunch of gardening problems and this week we're continuing that series. We're gonna look at a whole bunch more. This is an aster. One of those beautiful perennial purple asters that grows in garden. This one is Purple Dome, very popular variety. And this brown business down at the bottom is caused by a fungus called Botrytis, gray mold. Botrytis occurs everywhere in the landscape, you cannot avoid it. Asters get Botrytis on their lower parts for whatever reason like clockwork. The top of the plant will still look great. With asters I just tend to plant something in front of the ankles or so called of the plant so that you just don't see this part because this just gets this way over the course of the summer. Easier just to disguise it than go spraying chemicals all the time. Botrytis by the way is what makes geranium flowers mold when the petals get a little old. It's what makes those weird blotches on peony leaves. Same exact thing. It's a widespread fungus. Here's another thing that people see all the time. If you've got hydrangea, big Mophead hydrangeas, hydrangea macrophylla. It's rare that you don't get this kind of leaf spot over the summer. Especially if you've got overhead irrigation or if there's rain that's splashing around, heavy rains. This is called cercospora leaf spot. And although it can be disfiguring and people go ew, that looks terrible, it actually doesn't really hurt the plant. It is more of a cosmetic issue than it is an actual effecting the health of the plant issue. If you really hate it, pick off the effected leaves. They tend to be the older leaves down inside. The newer leaves tend to be okay. If you can stand to live with it, leave it alone. One good thing you can do though is at the end of the season and this is true with any garden disease, clean up leaf litter. Don't leave these old leaves that fall off the plant at the end of the season down around the base of the plant. They'll just reinfect the leaves next year. Clean up, really helps. Here's another disease that is really getting quite common. This is a relatively new one to Tennessee, I think the last 10 years or so. This is Daylily Rust and you can see on the blade of this daylily leaf those little rust colored those are sporings, bodies of spores. That's it reproducing. This is another disease that basically looks crummy. Oh and I picked a good one because it's got an example of both problems. The Daylily Rust is just unsightly. Don't worry about it. It really won't hurt your plant. If you can see this little milky track going down this blade, this leaf, that is a brand new guy. I first saw this in 2011 on a planting of daylilies in Davidson county. This is Daylily Leafminer and I believe it just made it over to this country from somewhere else. Asia or Europe is usually where those things come from. And I'm not sure what to say about how badly this hurts plants because this is so new we don't know. I can say of the patch that I watched last year, it didn't seem to have that great of an effect. I think it's more unsightly than anything else. But it bears watching. These oddball looking things are actually coneflowers. Purple coneflowers. And you may have seen something that looks like this in your garden. You come out expecting to see this beautiful magenta daisy and instead you get this oddball green thing and this odd cluster of something that doesn't quite know what it is. Flower? Leaf? Something else? This is caused by a disease called aster yellows. And it's one of those sort of pseudo virus type diseases that lives in the plasma of the plant. In other words, the juice. And it messes up the expression of the plant. It'll totally goof up flowers as you can see. That's the most common thing that you see. Once a plant has this, it doesn't go back to blooming well. And yeah, there's no cure. The thing to do though is to rogue it out. You just take out the affected plant off and the plants nearby will be fine. This is spread by a leaf hopper. There are plenty of them out and about in the garden. It's very difficult to control leaf hoppers in my experience. You can try I guess with a seven or some other pesticide but better just to as soon as you see this kind of action starting on your coneflowers, just pull them out, replace them. This doesn't live in the soil. It only lives in the plant. So you're okay with that. Now I wanted to show a couple of things that are not diseases but look like it. This is just flat out heat stress. This is a Japanese Maple. We had a incredibly hot and incredibly dry June and this is the result. This plant was taken care of but it just couldn't quite manage it. It will come back but it's gonna look kind of toasty until next year when it re-leafs out. Same thing with this dogwood. This is heat stress, not a disease. The first thing plants will do is sacrifice the leaves furthest away from the core of the plant or the tips of the leaves in this case. And so you can see how both of these plants are doing this. If you see this in your landscape don't assume it's a disease, a fungus, don't assume it's necessarily some kind of insect problem. A lot of times it's just environmental stress. And the last thing I want to talk to you about is the biggest pest of all. And that is voles. And when I say voles, I'm saying voles with a V, not moles with an M. It is a little meadow mouse kind of job, not a mole that eats earthworms and Japanese beattle grubs. We have had a huge number of moles in middle Tennessee because of the cicada boom last year and they eat the cicadas as they come up to the soil surface so there was a mole population explosion. The thing is moles make little tunnels as we all know. The voles use the mole tunnels to get around. Voles eat plant roots. They're the bad guys. And they will eat a huge variety of plants and it seems like every year they're trying something they never tried before. Hostas are a favorite. I've seen a hosta sitting on the ground and then just disappear like it was sucked down in a hole. It was by a vole pulling on its roots and just taking the whole thing out. I've seen knockout roses almost cut through just below the soil line where the voles have eaten through the main roots of the thing. It's not uncommon at all. So what do you do about it? Well, you can plant smart. There's a product called VoleBloc. This is also called PermaTill because it improves the tilth of the soil. We use this a lot when we're planting things that need really good drainage. But this voles hate digging through rocks. And these have little sharpish edges. Won't hurt you but they don't like to dig through this stuff. So if you're planting a plant that you think they like, for example hostas, roses, dig the hole wide, put some of this on the bottom, put some of this in the soil. It's gonna go around the plant and then plant the plant in and fill it in with this mixed with some of the soil. You're basically making a little container of this stuff around the roots of the plant. And it really does protect them. I've seen beautiful roses, last year saved some roses that were positively flopping on the top of the soil they had so little stem left at the soil line from the voles. Replanted them with PermaTill and they look gorgeous this year. And this is a brand new other solution for voles. Vole guard, somebody got smart and they're making baskets. All you do is dig the hole, put this in, plant the plant in the basket and fill it in. Now, for years people have been sort of making their own baskets with hardware cloth or anything and this just takes all of the labor away from that. This comes in various sizes. This would be good for say a gallon plant or two gallon plant but they come all the way up to pretty good sizes for larger container sized plants. Both of these will work. There's no way that a vole's gonna get through this. It seems to be pretty sturdily made and it's dipped. It's not raw metal. It's gonna last, it's not gonna rot out in the soil. So that's another good plan. Voles are definitely on the increase. There seems to be more and more every year so either one of these are a really good solution for that. I hope you found some of these tips really helpful and if there's anything more that you'd like to hear about just let us know on Volunteer Gardener, we'd love to help.

- [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.