Episode 2647

- [Announcer] Sit back and enjoy the view as Troy Marden strolls the sun beds, shade beds, and water garden designed and maintained by a dear gardening buddy. Plus, Sheri Gramer may just entice you to pickle this summer's cucumber harvest. Stay tuned. First, the making of a garden to sit and enjoy.

- Now when it comes to garden showcases, I can't think of a better place to be than my friend Robyn Brown's garden, here in Fairview, Tennessee. How long have we known each other, 15 years, close to it?

- Yeah, at least 15.

- And I've been fortunate enough to watch this garden develop over the years and see what it really has become. This is kind of your front entrance garden.

- Mm-hmm, we just did this one, I think it's in its fourth spring. When I say did this one, it was totally woodland except for one straight path to the driveway and a few big oaks and hickories with a little bit of understory.

- Right, people might recognize you from Moore and Moore Garden Center, where you're the manager, so you have a lot of access to plants.

- So does everybody else.

- Well, that's true, that's true. They can come see you

- That's right.

- and have just as much access, yeah.

- Come on down. No, I do, and the good thing is is I see 'em coming in daily, but then I have friends like you and our other friends that are generous and give me interesting plants to trial and try, and I'm just kind of a plant freak, I just love 'em.

- So, tell me a little bit about your experience out here in the front, because, really, this was your first opportunity to garden in the sun.

- Yeah.

- This was a really heavily-wooded lot for a long time. She said she wanted sun and then she got it.

- I'm telling you, be careful what you wish for. I'm learning sun still yet. I've got just a few pockets, and I know that the trees will come in, and I'm planting trees because I really don't know that I like sun that much. It's too hot in the summer, it's hot right now and we're in June. I specialize in shade gardening, is what I think.

- [Troy] I think this is a great example of the kind of results that you can see in a very short period of time, and you had some overstory canopy, a little bit still left, and then where did you go from there?

- Well, I went into, because they're big oaks and hickories and they're so tall, I added Japanese maples and some understory trees, and then from that point, I started thinking about winter, because, you know, I want it to be pretty in both, so I've added some conifers, and I work from size, so I start in the upper level, and then I add a medium level, and then I'll do more shrubs from, like, six to eight foot, and then I'll drop down to four foot, and then I'll drop down to two foot, and then I'll do ground cover. So it's layering, just like everybody talks about, but I do start with the upper, and that's really hard for people, I think, because, one, trees and evergreens are more expensive, so they tend to wanna grab all the flowers first. And I did the same thing going through master gardening, all I really cared about was flowers. I hadn't even thought, and this is 20 years...

- About all of those layers

- Yeah.

- that really build the garden and give you all of your interest.

- And winter, I mean, the best thing you can do is look at it in the winter and use some of that opportunity to put in some shrubs so it looks pretty in the winter, and even perennials that are evergreen. And I think Duncan Callicott, who you know, told me once to go in my garden and take black and white photographs of the garden so I would see how it looked when it was flat, and that was really helpful for me, and I do that occasionally.

- [Troy] Today, with digital photography, it's a click of a button on a computer, and very easy to do, but it takes all of the color out of it and shows you all of your shapes, and textures, and forms that you have and where you might be lacking.

- [Robyn] Right, exactly, and that's really important in a garden.

- [Troy] So your garden really started, kind of, here in the back yard, how did this all come about?

- Well, one of my best friends, Nora Robinson, I bought the house and told 'em to leave all the trees. We had a burn pit right where the main garden was and she brought a handful of clammy seeds and pitched 'em in the burn pit, and I had a stand of clammy, millions of 'em, and that started my gardening habit. So the bed, the main bed with the arbor, is the bed that was the initial bed, and it was redone twice because in the beginning, I didn't know what I was doing, and it never looked good, so I had to redo soil. My soil's terrible here, it's chert, and I had...

- [Troy] Which is clay and rock, basically.

- Right. So, unlike a lot of people that need drainage, I needed to retain moisture, so I use compost and soil conditioner, and lots of it, to get it ready. So that's how it started, the main bed of the garden, but as it progressed over the years, I would take one section at a time and redo it. This garden is a slope, so I worked within that for a while, just trying to get gardens established. We put in a pond, and again, I wanted it more natural-looking, so I didn't do a big waterfall. I wanted it to look like the water was just coming out of a fresh spring, so I just did one small rock, and I just built the garden around the small pond.

- Just started expanding around that.

- Right, I had no koi, 'cause I wanted water lilies, and I have a lot of shade, but I still get a bloom or two, which is fine for me.

- Right, yeah, and there are quite a few buds on them right now, so you'll be doing all right. So then, eventually, over the years, you kind of raised some of the bed edges and leveled the garden a little bit more.

- [Robyn] Yeah, that was probably 10 years ago, or 12, and we came in and leveled it so I could try to grow grass, which is always a fight, and I wanted hardscaping, and hardscaping, I really believe, that makes or breaks a garden. I really believe in hardscaping.

- [Troy] Yeah, these solid stone edges, your little low walls, it's what defines all of the spaces.

- [Robyn] Yeah, really, it does.

- [Troy] And you have great little vignettes here everywhere. There's a great overall picture of the garden, but everywhere you turn, there's some small, or smaller anyway, kind of vignette that also catches your eye and attracts your attention.

- [Robyn] I think that's because I kind of focused on individual gardens, one at a time, and I read all the books and did what they said, in shade. I don't have a lot of flowers all the time, but I watched my fine texture next to my bold texture, or my yellow foliage against my red foliage, and I still struggle with that because I'm a plant freak, so, you know, you gotta carry around plants and find a spot for 'em to fit in sometimes.

- [Troy] Right, and I think it's important for people to understand that we all do that, I mean, every one of us. Whether I'm a designer, or you work at a garden center, even those of us who are professionals, I carry plants around my garden and look for where it looks its best.

- [Robyn] Yeah, and sometimes I carry 'em around the garden and carry 'em around the garden and then they go back to the holding area 'cause I still don't have a spot. It's just what I like, I buy what I like and...

- Well, and you certainly created a sanctuary back here for yourself. I mean, you would never know that we're in the middle of, not necessarily a subdivision, but a neighborhood, certainly. There are neighbors on both sides, neighbors to the back, and standing here right now, the only thing that you can hear are the birds in the trees and the sound from the waterfall.

- And also, you know, people who are environmentally-conscious, you know, there's the right plant in the right place, so the natives are great, and there are a lot of non-natives, but if you know your soil and you know your property, then you have more success with your plants, you just have more success with it, and your soil. It was all about the soil here. If people will put as much money into their soil as they do their plants on the up end, their life will be so much easier, be so much easier.

- [Troy] And that's always kind of a hard sell, to get somebody to make that big investment in soil, but you can tell from looking around this garden that every dime that you've put into your soil has paid off.

- And I tried tweaking what I did once and putting some drainage product in it and it was just... I had to water constantly, so I had to re-dig beds out and redo because I was experimenting and it didn't work for me. I do almost all organic. I might get some chemicals out if they're really after something that is very expensive, but all in all, if my perennials are getting eaten up by a bug or something, I don't. I used The Well-Tended Perennial Garden. She is from Ohio, and I tweaked it for our more southern. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like you till six inches and you add six inches of good stuff. I always use mushroom compost and soil conditioner, and I top my beds... My mulch is soil conditioner, because it breaks down and feeds the garden quicker. And I only feed once a year with Flower-tone, in the early spring, or Holly-tone for my shrubs, but I don't... I'm a really low-maintenance gardener. I do some occasional pruning, but I let plants do what they do naturally and, again, choose the right plant for the right place, and if it's not, I move it, or I put something else in.

- So you've said that you're a low-maintenance gardener, and I think people seeing this on film for the first time would question that, but how much time, really, do you spend out here in the garden?

- [Robyn] I start in March, when it gets warm, and I'll start weeding and cutting back, and I'll probably spend a full day a week, March, April, and into May. By the end of May, I try to get any annuals I'm doing, and then I might spend three or four hours a week doing some deadheading, some pinching, some staking, and then in July and August, I don't spend any time in it, 'cause it's too hot, unless I'm dragging a hose, and then I go inside and watch TV or something.

- But I think almost any of us, on a Sunday morning, early, or whenever your days off are, have a couple, three, four hours that you can dedicate to your garden, and I think the point is that you can have a really spectacular space like this without being a slave to it.

- Right. And people laugh at me, but you know, get your soil good, fill it up with plants, 'cause wherever there's not a plant, there's a weed.

- [Troy] So this little side part of your yard is kinda the transition area between your front garden and your back garden?

- Well, we waited to do this area til we wrapped around our porch, and it was gonna be in deep shade, and it's also an area a lot of people don't see, so it's a service area for me. It was in deep shade, so we did aucubas, which are dry and darker shade, and I've even created a holding area for plants for people like you, that give me a ton of stuff to use. So everything in this area is pretty low maintenance, a dryer shade. A few things that I've done pretty well with that were surprising is very protected in this section, so I'm able to test a few things, like that little African hosta over here that's come back for me two or three years, and you may know the botanical name, but I just know it was by African hosta, and you may have given it to me, I'm not sure.

- Well, and other things, like the aucubas, are really protected back here, so they always look really nice, and it's nice and shady for them. Things like this big-leafed epimedium, which epimediums are just kind of coming into their own in popularity, but a lot of times, you don't see these great big forms like this, so it allows you to experiment a little bit more.

- Yeah, that's really a pretty one for me, and I do collect those. Tried a few grasses for shade, I trial a lot of things, working at the Garden Center, I can do that. You know, people who have shade definitely have to do a little more experiments.

- Of course. And in places where it was just too dark to grow anything, or where the path needed to transition, then you kind of went into this really nice brick and stone hardscaping.

- Right. You know, we had to have a patio 'cause we entertain some, and this was a good way to begin and end it. I just pulled pictures out of magazines, all of those gardening magazines and gardening shows that people watch, I'd seen this and I found a stonemason that was just very talented, and he implemented all of it for me, and we've really enjoyed it.

- Well, as we exit this little transitional area, there's a hydrangea here in full bloom, and a lot of people might think that this is Annabelle, but I think it's actually a different variety.

- Yeah, it's hydrangea arborescens 'Ryan Gainey', which is a smaller bloom, and this one is still not fully bloomed out yet, it'll get a little... But it doesn't tend to flop as much, and I'm under all these oaks and hickories, so I kinda like it a little more natural-looking, which, you know, I love Annabelle, and I have Annabelle, but she can get gigantic.

- Really big, yeah.

- So I kinda like it a little more woodsy-feeling.

- Well, and one of the nice things is that even after... I mean, we've had a couple of big windstorms and a couple of big rainstorms just in the last three or four days, and these still are standing upright, looking pretty good.

- [Robyn] Yeah, pretty good.

- We'll learn more from Robyn and the evolution of this beautiful garden, but right now, I wanna showcase just a few plants that have done exceptionally well in this dry shade situation. So this terrific little clematis is a native clematis, clematis viorna, or clematis, depending on how you wanna say it, and this is its little bloom, fully open, just a little four-petaled nod there at the end to an actual petal, but these great little kind of pinky-purple flowers. It flowers for probably a month, maybe even six weeks, early in the spring, and where you see this growing wild, you will see it growing with our native lacecap hydrangea. So on dry, kind of semi-shady to sunny hillsides, it's extremely drought-tolerant and a great plant for combinations with other plants that like the same situation, it can crawl up and through things. Another plant that does very well in this kind of transitional area between sun and shade is this scutellaria incana, this native scutellaria, or skullcap. The buds are just beginning to open on this, the one down here actually has a couple of flowers open. This is a really nice way to get that sort of violet-blue color that all of us are so intrigued by in the garden, and again, a really tough native and a good selection for these transitional areas that are in sun part of the day and shade during other parts of the day. And a final nod in that direction would be our native Saint John's wort, and there are a number of different species of Saint John's wort, both shrub forms, which this one is, and ground cover-types. This particular one is one of our native species. And you can see that it's sunny little yellow flowers, open during early to mid-summer, for, again, about a month or six weeks, and one of those transitional plants where sun or shade will suit it just fine, probably part-sun, actually, would be a good way to describe it. In full shade, it would not bloom as much, but where it gets some sun during some part of the day, it will do really well. And now we're off to my favorite part of the garden. And as we kind of wrap up our tour, I think one of the other things to note about your garden is that you've used garden ornaments, and pots, and things so well here.

- [Robyn] Well, in shade, you can't always get the height you need for perennials, or the color that you need, so for larger pots, I'll put them in the garden to get me some height and the color, so that's one thing, and too much is too much. You know, you can get too much, so I try to keep it into maybe one or two things per garden, 'cause I work at a garden center, we're over the top in color, and so I like it a little more reserved in my garden. So that's kinda what we do, but I really use 'em for height. Birdbaths for height, big tall pots for height.

- [Troy] And you have both annuals and perennials in a lot of your containers, I've noticed. I mean, I know over the years, some of your big hostas have started out in containers, and then when they've gotten too large...

- The big atlantis hosta started in a container. I just do whatever the texture is needed for that particular area. If I need a big, bold leaf, and if it comes back every year, great. So I do it according to the design of the garden, and it's all about foliage color, textures side-by-side, and height, from upper trees to down to the ground.

- Well, thanks so much for finally letting us come and see your garden. I had to kinda twist her arm, but she let us come in and we really appreciate you giving us the little tour.

- Summer is upon us, and we're visiting Madison Creek Farms, in Goodlettsville, right outside of Nashville, and what we're gonna do today is show you what to do with some of that harvest that you're getting from your gardens. And I'm with Peggy today, and she's gonna show us one of the workshops, and this is an easy one, for pickles, and I think everybody should give it a try, and I think they'll want to after they see this.

- Yes, well, one of the things when you're in the mid-summer is what you're gonna get a lot of, pickles. Lots of cucumbers, these come on like... Well, you know, Sheri, they just come on like crazy, so, what I thought we would do is just show you how to make a really quick, easy pickle, dill pickles, one of my favorites, out of these cucumbers. So I'm gonna use a mandoline slicer. You know, never slice down to the nub here, or you will come away with nubs. So just give it a quick slice.

- For the people that have never made pickles before, is there a good cucumber, is there a bad cucumber?

- Well, these are pickling cucumbers, and these are the kind that I grow here on the farm strictly for making pickles, because we make a lot of pickles here, and so this is just your basic pickling kind of cucumber, I think they're called northern picklers.

- And they're a smaller pickle, or smaller cucumbers, you'd say?

- They are smaller, and these are actually pretty big for that kind of thing, which I like them kinda big, 'cause I slice 'em, but if you're gonna use, like, a whole pickle, you wanna pick 'em a little earlier. These are the best for making dill pickles. Now you can use just regular long cucumbers, it's just they're gonna be a little bit... See how this one has the smaller seeds in here, more fleshy? That's what you're really wanting, 'cause that's what's gonna make your pickles nice and firm. If you don't have a mandoline, all you're doing is just going in and just giving a cutting. The thing about it with the mandoline cutter is that you can get nice, even cuts. When you're doing it with a knife, not so much. So that's gonna get us started. So now that we're finished chopping, let's get to making some pickles.

- [Sheri] All right. Well, there is certainly a lot of dos and don'ts, I think, when you're cooking, and I guess, probably, we should take notes and make note of what we should and shouldn't use when we're making pickles.

- This is a stainless steel pot, and that's really important when you're making pickles, anything with vinegar, pickling anything, is that you want a pot that, you know, either enamel, stainless steel, glass, but never aluminum, things that react while you're cooking. Water, and I'm just using... We have our well water here, so if you've got hard water, you wanna use distilled water, it can cloud your pickles. It makes cloudy pickles, so city water, those kind of things, you might wanna go with a distilled water, but for me, it's a well water kinda thing. And that's the most important things, is you wanna just get even. I always try to keep my vinegar to my water ratio even. The next thing I'm gonna add is a little bit of sugar. I think, what is this, about 1/3rd of a cup here?

- Correct.

- In sugar. Get that in there. And the sugar just kind of, again, sweetens it up. And then this is pickling salt, preserving salt, and I think the thing that it's just pure salt, it's not iodized salt, it's not kosher salt, and the thing with the pickling... Now, you can use regular salt, as long as it doesn't have any iodine in it, but the main thing with the pickling salt is it's a finer grain, so it really gets in there and kinda... And I'm not measuring really well here.

- That's all right. Good cooks never measure well.

- I never measure anything anyway, yeah. This is a 1/3rd of a cup of salt, get it mixed in there. I just always buy just the jar of pickling spices, so this has a little bit of cloves. Now, I add to it, because I can't follow a recipe. So I've got a couple of bay leaves, some more black pepper seeds in here, a little bit more mustard, and a little bit more cloves, so kind of sweeten it up just a little bit. And you just throw that right in. And you're gonna let it kind of dissolve, and I usually cook this for about six minutes, and I'm looking for kind of a golden sort of color to it.

- I want everyone to see how pretty and how bright and colorful this is. Tell me about the other ingredients while we're waiting for our brine, what else is in here besides our cucumbers?

- Well, we make a lot of pickles here for our market, and this is a hot pickle, so this is one of those that will get a little heat to it. So you've got the jalapenos... And that's the thing about pickles, you can make them anything that you want to. It's got a little jalapeno, it's got a little roasted pepper in it as well, then if you turn it over here, it's got lots of garlic, and onions, and lots of spices, and I hit it with a lot of pepper, so that's a kind of nice, hot pickle, and it's beautiful to look at, so...

- It is, it is. And so, in front of us, is this what we're gonna put in our pickles today?

- This is, we're doing just a regular, I call 'em a farmhouse pickle. So this is your dill, and this is one of my favorite ways to use dill. Now these are the feather dills that you see a lot when you go to the grocery store. This is the dill heads, and this is right before it's gonna start going to seed, and they look so beautiful in the jar.

- [Sheri] But I think this is what makes pickles taste like pickles?

- Exactly, exactly, fresh dill is key. This is something that you may not think about using in pickles, but I use a lot of, and it's fennel. And fennel has kind of a... Fennel, instead of the fennel seeds, where it sorta has that Anacin, sort of licorice taste, the fennel bulb doesn't, and it's really mild, and it kind of gives it a nice little deeper kinda tone to the pickle that I really like taste-wise. And of course, garlic, garlic, you know, my husband is Italian, so we're all about garlic, and that's a nice addition to pickle. Now you can add lots of other things, like this one here's the red peppers. You can add jalapeno, you can add herbs, mint is great with dill pickles, it kinda gives it another little taste. I've also used lavender with pickles, which has a little floral tone to it. Lavender, especially with... Have you ever done, like, lemon pickles, like, the lemon rinds? Really nice. So it's your pickle, do what you want to, throw it in there. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it's just so easy you can just start all over.

- [Sheri] It smells like the brine's about boiling.

- Yes, it's about ready, it's getting that nice kind of color, that caramel color to it, so we'll just turn it off and just let it sit here while we pack up some pickles. Now, when you're gonna start packing pickles, I usually start with putting something in the bottom of the jar, so a couple cloves of garlic, here you go, to go in, and then the fennel, I'm just gonna take and just kinda pull off these side bulbs here, like this, and just give a nice little cut of it right in, so, there you go. A little bit of dill. There you go. And then the big thing about packing these pickles is just putting 'em in here but getting 'em really tight in this jar, so keep pushing them down with your fingers as you go. Here you go. Just keep pushing 'em down. Now this is where if you wanna add a little bit more garlic, some more dill, it's kind of dressing up that jar. And packing 'em in there really tight. And you wanna go to about right here in your space, so right below this line, this first seal line, is where I like to keep it. And just pack 'em in there on the side, and don't stack 'em. You know how, like, that nice little stack? Nice pickle brine, and we're just gonna pour it into that glass, we're gonna get it about right to the top here, right over.

- [Sheri] Smells like pickles already.

- [Peggy] Yes, and you wanna make sure, let's put that bay leaf in there again. Just kinda get it in there.

- [Sheri] Do you prefer fresh bay leaves or dried bay leaves?

- [Peggy] Well, I never have any fresh bay leaves, you know, so I always... I love... do you have a bay leaf tree at your store?

- [Sheri] No, at my house, I do, yes, yes.

- I need one of those, yeah. And then you're just gonna let it set here for a minute, and we're gonna push the air out of it, and we're gonna do that with just a regular wooden spoon. Here, and I'm just gonna push them down. And you see those air bubbles that pop up? We wanna push those out of there, so we get a nice, good seal on that pickle jar. And I like to let 'em set here for a minute to see, to double-check, I might need to put another pickle in there. Ready to put the lids on?

- [Sheri] Absolutely.

- Okay, now these are nice, hot, sterilized lids. We wanna wipe this jar down. So again, it's all about getting that nice, good, tight seal. We don't want any of that vinegar and pickle...

- [Sheri] Here's something right here.

- [Peggy] Yeah, pickling vinegar on the top rims, so wipe those down. Just put your lid on, give it a nice, good turn.

- [Sheri] You don't want it super tight though, correct?

- No, you don't want it super tight, just kinda give it a nice, loose... And then we're gonna take 'em over and put them in the canner, and we're gonna process 'em for about six minutes in a boiling hot water bath. So we have this nice little tray here that I love, you just kinda stick it on the side. That's not good for just these two jars, but you just set it down in here, and you just set it down, put your lid on, put your timer on for six minutes...

- [Sheri] And it's supposed to be boiling, is that correct?

- Boiling hot, and let it set there and boil, and what it's gonna do is it's gonna seal those lids. So when you take that out, over the night, you're gonna hear pop, pop, pop all through your house, and it's those lids.

- There's no flexibility in this lid, and that's sealed, correct?

- Yes.

- Okay, and that's what we're trying to achieve?

- Exactly, you wanna have that kind of indentation down there.

- Well, Peggy, it's been very fun spending some time with you today, and I hope everybody goes out in that garden, picks those cucumbers, and tries your recipe out.

- [Peggy] Thank you so much, appreciate it.

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