Episode 2703

- [Narrator] Within this backyard fence, we find a grower who enjoys and appreciates all things roses. We'll learn her no fuss approach to caring for antique, vintage and modern garden roses. Plus, succulents are known as the hippest plants on the planet. Julie Berbiglia gets design help for a cohesive container. Join us. First, the fragrance, the form, the habit of roses.

- [Matt] Well, Susan, here we are in your amazing backyard, and the fragrance of the roses are just so overpowering, absolutely stunning. Tell me a little bit about your approach to rose growing and what captivates you, and how you've been able to maintain such a beautiful backyard.

- Sure, sure. Well, once I discovered the older roses, the shrub roses, the roses that were actually hybridized for garden use, I realized how easy care they are. They were created before the advent of a lot of chemical pest intervention and fertilizers, so they're meant to just be planted like a hydrangea, or a rhododendron and just kind of left alone with some easy pruning. So, the most important thing, I think, for shrub roses like this, the first three years you have them is to keep them watered during drought. Water is the best fertilizer, and it really guarantees the health of the plant. They really don't get sick with spots and things until they get a little heat stressed and we get a little drought. One rose that's particularly amazing is the rose here on the brick wall.

- [Matt] Yeah.

- [Susan] It's called Mel's Heritage, and it's named after a gentleman named Mel Hulse, who essentially founded the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden, which is 10 acres of roses.

- [Matt] Wow, wow.

- [Susan] The ramblers like Mel's Heritage, and this one over here on the fence, the whitish-pinkish one, that is called Alpenfee. The ramblers are usually once blooming, in the spring, with very flexible canes. So, they need to be allowed to ramble.

- [Matt] Run up something.

- [Susan] That's right.

- [Matt] Trellis', fence lines.

- [Susan] That's right. And, once they get to be of a certain size, they don't even really need to be tied in because they cling to themselves.

- [Matt] Kinda weaving in.

- [Susan] And, the only maintenance that you have to do with them is after the bloom, you just wanna take out the dead wood, and do a little trimming for size. But, because they do only bloom in the spring, you don't want to cut them back any later than, maybe, August, or you'll take bloom for the next year. This is a great shrub rose. This is a modern rose from an English gentleman named Peter Beales, and this rose is called Flamenco Rosita.

- [Matt] Beautiful color.

- [Susan] Yes, it is.

- [Matt] Rich.

- [Susan] It's a beautiful color. It blooms all summer long. Literally, you can see all the buds that are starting. It's already bloomed for the last month or so.

- [Matt] Just a repeat bloomer on and off through all the seasons?

- [Susan] Always. As much as a Knockout.

- [Matt] You have an assortment of companion plantings to your rose garden, and this one in particular, behind the fountain, the clematis that is just coming into full bloom.

- [Susan] Clematis are the perfect companion plant with roses, because even though they climb and twine, they're not heavy. So, they're not going to damage a rose in any way, or compete with your rose in any way. They like the same kinda moist, deep soil. They like their roots shaded, same as the rose, and their flowers up in the sun. The possibilities really are endless for how you wanna combine colors and bloom season. The rose there that you see now only blooms once, but the clematis will bloom all summer long. Well, cranesbill, which is actually a geranium, 'cause you know a geranium is pelargonium, right? So, the cranesbill down there, below the clematis, that rich purple flower, that will bloom for six weeks or so in the spring and early summer, and it spreads to create a ground cover which suppresses weeds. Some of the varieties have interesting foliage. They are wonderful to put at the base of roses. Anything that can shade those roots really makes the rose happy. I have quite a bit of Japanese Anemone. I use a lot of nepeta or catmint,

- [Matt] Yep, yep, great spreader.

- [Susan] That is wonderful ground cover. The more that you can plant under the roses, the less the roses will have to compete with the weeds and they're just a lot happier.

- [Matt] Gotcha. And something to keep in mind when you're doing this kind of low maintenance style of rose planting where I know a lot of people tend to panic when they see things in roses that may be out of place, like defoliation along the lower limbs and or maybe some black spot or powdery mildew on the leaf surfaces, that's not something to be overly concerned about is it? THat's just kind of a bit of their habit, there's ways around it, you don't have to go ahead and panic too much, right?

- [Susan] Right, absolutely. These roses will all shake off just about any kind of pest or disease you can throw at 'em, you just have to learn to live with a little bit of spot, that's why companion plantings are important, so that you're not just focused on the shrub but it's more kind of a impressionistic type feeling that your eye gets. When you do see some spot on your roses you can actually pluck them off by hand and your rose will produce new leaves within a couple of weeks. So one thing I would recommend when you're starting off is to keep your rose in a pot for a season and determine if it likes that spot, right rose, right place.

- [Matt] Right, right. And Susan, as I'm standing here in your garden, everything just looks so healthy for you to not have a heavy spray regimen. Can you tell me a little bit about some of your favorite soil amendments and feeding techniques to keep them so robust.

- [Susan] Absolutely. I think that composted manure, any kind of compost actually, it loosens up our clay but it still allows it to retain the moisture they need. Roses love moist soil just not boggy, so anytime you can top dress with compost, prepare the hole with compost, bone meal is excellent, actually any kind of organic kelp, fish emulsion, things like that, if you want to use a liquid feed, anything organic is good for them. I even used my great grandmothers methods of the banana peels with potassium, egg shells, et cetera. They like anything you can give them, really.

- Nice, nice. We have a really healthy, beautiful purple rambler, climbing rose, tell me a little bit about this variety here.

- This is an old rose, it was hybridized in Germany, probably around the late 1800s, it is called veilchenblau and when I got this rose I left it in the pot and it's still in the pot.

- [Matt] Is that right?

- [Susan] And you can see how it's..

- [Matt] Just growing right through it.

- [Susan] It's just, yeah, nothing slows it down, it's kinda taken over the boxwood hedge. The great thing about these once bloomers, they bloom usually in multiple clusters, so you have all stages of bloom at one time, you have the buds, you have the newly opened buds, you have the fading and that's what gives it this kind of multiple color effect rather than just all monochrome lavender and then you've got these little yellow stamens here, it just makes it a real cheerful and interesting rose.

- [Matt] Such a full cluster of them right here. And then behind us we're covered in just another single petal, white variety, is this another single flowering or is this a multiple flowering season?

- [Susan] This one will repeat, this rose is called Francis E. Lester and it was hybridized by Mr. Lester, who was a great friend and lover of the rose and it's simple but it has such a charm, absolutely healthy. It needs some room to grow, ya know, the larger ramblers and shrubs, they need some room to grow, not that you have to keep them massive but you just don't want to continuously prune a rose that wants to grow, you need to choose the mature size for your location.

- [Matt] Can't help but notice, this looks like a magazine cover page here with this beautiful specimen rose that you have growing over an old dogwood tree. Just absolutely stunning. Tell me a little bit about this variety.

- This is a found rose, meaning that someone found it and decided to propagate it. This one was found in California in the town of Arcata and it goes by the name Arcata Pink Globe, it's also known as the Moser Shed rose because it had completely covered a shed on the Moser property that had been there since the mid 1800s but no one knows it's official given name, so that remains a bit of a mystery, there are theories about what rose it could be and there are people who actually spend a lot of time trying to figure out the given name of this rose but it doesn't really matter does it?

- [Matt] This is incredible. You were talking a little bit about what is legal and what is illegal to propagate with found roses or patented roses, can you talk to me a little bit about that.

- [Susan] Sure, a rose patent in the United States is good for 25 years, if you and I created a rose and named it Matt's Joy.

- [Matt] Okay, I like that.

- [Susan] We would have the rights to sell that rose for 25 years, as Matt's Joy. After 25 years you can reapply for the patent, most hybridizers don't. So after that time has elapsed, anyone is free to propagate the rose and that's the great thing about the old roses too is that you can propagate them and pass them along to you friends, if you see them out in the wild somewhere or something I do a lot up here in Nashville is try to save 'em from the bulldozers, you can take a few cuttings and propagate your own. It's just important, when you do take cuttings, always ask permission and don't endanger the health of the rose but a vigorous rose like this, you could take as many as you wanted.

- [Matt] And doing it the right way, it's very important to keep the heritage alive in some of these strains that have been around for hundreds of years and making sure that some of these beauties just don't go extinct.

- Absolutely. This variety has a rather unromantic name, it's Gartendirektor Otto Linne, who was a gentleman in Germany and he's the creator of the rose, I think if it was named fairies dream it would be in every garden across the world but it is an absolutely fantastic rose, again, it blooms in clusters, so you get the variances and nuances of colors as the buds age, it blooms all summer long, all you have to do, yeah, you just cut off the cluster and it makes another one, it's healthy all summer long, it's got these kinda glossy leaves, usually the glossy leaves can fight the black spot a little bit better than the matte and it's absolutely a care free plant.

- [Matt] Wow. And for our viewers out there that are looking to purchase these older varieties of roses, do you have any tips on where they can find some of these tough old varieties.

- [Susan] Absolutely, absolutely. The Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas is a wonderful mail order nursery, they sell a little bit bigger plants than some other nurseries, which are helpful for beginners. There's also a wonderful nursery, Pat Henry in South Carolina has Roses Unlimited and she has from the very earliest roses all the way up to the moderns, thousands of beautiful, beautiful roses, she takes very good care of them, I highly recommend both those nurseries.

- [Matt] Nice, good to know. Tell me a little bit about this one here.

- [Susan] This is a beautiful rose, it's called Poseidon, it was hybridized by Tom Carruth of Weeks Roses, he is very much into the blues and purples, the unusual shades and this is an amazing rose, it blooms all summer long, it is healthy all summer long, it can be kept as a smaller shrub, I kind of experiment every year to see if I want to prune it and keep it short or just let it kind of grow big and I've realized when I let the main canes grow bigger then I get shoots, lateral shoots from the main canes, so it just doubles the flowers.

- [Matt] Wow, this thing's huge, it's six, seven feet tall.

- It is.

- Lightly staked, no major heavy staking here, just seems to perform well when you just kinda let it go to it's own devices, it looks very black spot resistant.

- [Susan] It is.

- [Matt] So Susan, as we're walking around I've learned a little bit about the difference between rambling and climbing roses, tell me again about the details of how they are different and what you have to do to really make sure that they stay healthy in the garden.

- [Susan] Sure. Ramblers are very vigorous and usually once bloomers and they ramble, thus their name, this one's going up a cherry tree and essentially, I just kinda toss the canes over a limb, wrap them around, they don't require any care at all, I don't believe I even dead headed this one last year and it produced beautiful hips that you can cut and use in your autumn and holiday arrangements.

- [Matt] And then as far as this beautiful yellow one that you have, off to your right here.

- [Susan] Oh yes.

- [Matt] Tell me about this one, this is a climber or a rambler?

- [Susan] This is a climber, this is a rose from Kordes, it's called golden fairy tale, all the Kordes fairy tale roses are very healthy, you can see the leaves are just as green as can be and once you remove the older blooms, new blooms will come very rapidly, it's a wonderful rose. I don't know if you can see here, the buds are very orange.

- [Matt] Tangerine.

- [Susan] They are, they're very interesting and they're super bright as the rose begins to open up and then it just fades to this nice soft golden yellow.

- [Matt] It's really been a pleasure walking around your backyard and really love the philosophy that you have when it comes to your antique rose varieties and shrub rose varieties, that low maintenance can be key in some of these rose growing techniques and it's just pleasant to see a sustainable, organic approach to rose growing and I just wanna thank you so much for your time and attention to your backyard.

- [Susan] Well thank you, I'm glad that y'all came, I hope that people will see how easy it is to grow roses, how beautiful they can be if just left to their own devices, if you plant some other plants with them so that you always have bloom and attract different types of insects, I think you'll be really, really happy with the antique roses, they're so fragrant and so cheerful and exuberant and they just really ask for so little.

- [Matt] Nice. Beautiful.

- Well I wanted to learn all about succulents and so it turns out there was a clinic at the 100 Oaks Home Depot location and I came out and met Tracy Copenhaver, who's here to tell me all about what to do with these lovely little guys.

- I sure am. Succulents are a great plant to have to put outside on a patio table or things like that and I have a selection here of succulents and cacti. Now all cacti are succulents but not all succulents are cacti. Cacti generally have spines and they radiate from a central point and a succulent is a more leafy kind of thing but the thing they have in common is they all store water for later use.

- Alright, so cactus and succulent.

- Right.

- And oh, let's see, there was another pretty cactus and these others are all succulents.

- They're succulents.

- Okay and they can all grow together?

- They can all grow together, that's important to find out the growth habits and the growth needs of the succulents that you're planting so that you can grow them all in the same container.

- [Julie] Well, Tracy, one of the big questions I've always had is what kind of soil do I need for cactus.

- The soil that we have here at Home Depot is great for it, I have cactus, palm and citrus soil, it already has what the succulents need to grow, it has a mixture of peat moss and sand and perlite and a wetting agent, so you're ready to go when you have this soil, you don't have to mix it up yourself.

- Oh, that's fantastic. Okay, so now am I going to proceed just as I would with any kind of container.

- Absolutely. So first you wanna fill the bottom of the container with the soil and then you wanna place your succulents around in a way that makes you happy. So generally you're gonna try to put taller ones either in the center, which is what I'm gonna do, put the taller ones in the center and shorter and ones that drape around the sides.

- Okay and some of these are going to spread, correct?

- Some of them are going to spread. Cacti are very slow growing, so you need to just keep an eye on your succulent garden there may be a time you need to pull one out or you know like the stone crop that's gonna spread, you may need to pull one out and put something smaller in at times. The one thing I can tell you is succulents like to be in a temperature of 40 to 90 degrees fahrenheit, so if this is something that you want to keep, you want to bring it in in the winter time and you also want to keep it out of the hot sun, which is great because it's in a container and you can move it, keep it out of the searing hot sun when it's over 90 degrees.

- [Julie] I'm never really sure what to do about watering these types of things, Tracy, can I just water it once and that's it I'm done?

- No, you definitely wanna keep watering it, they don't seem to react as much as other plants, like you won't see a cactus wilt or a succulent wilt so I would water about half as many times as I do my other plants. So if you're watering your other plants once a week, like a house plant, then I would do this once every two weeks.

- Well, a lot of times I like to include that moisture control soil in there should I use that for this kind of pots and then I could go for a month or something?

- I wouldn't do that because the mixture that we have for the cacti is specifically made for them and they really like to have the drainage properties of the peat moss and the sand in there, it really helps them out and that moisture control, although they would grow in it, I don't think they would generally be happy and as healthy as they would be in this kind of soil.

- Alright, I'll stay with what they need. Now, what about feeding them?

- Well, there is a cactus plant food that we have here, which when you put your soil in, the cactus soil, that's gonna last for two or three months so just about every two or three months you may wanna just feed 'em a little bit, a drop or two of this in some water and that'll help them and keep 'em fertilized and healthy and happy.

- Okay and I never know exactly how to finish off a pot, I've been looking at different mulches, I'm not sure what even color to choose for this, what do you recommend?

- Well, I would like to put, I like to put a soil covering, like of stones around it because what it does, it also helps it hold in the moisture, that's another thing that will make it so you wouldn't have to water as much but you can cover all around it with stones and then it's pretty as well.

- [Julie] Well and I guess I could always come back out here and ask if I'm looking for something new and different to fit in my container.

- [Tracy] You're always welcome to come and ask us anything, we're happy to help you.

- Winter squash is one of my favorites and my particular favorite is butternut. We're gonna use butternut squash today to make a tortilla and butternut soup that you are going to love, it's got a little bit of twist to it. So let's go ahead and get started, it's got a little complicated steps to it but it's still pretty easy. Okay, we're taking two tablespoons of unsalted butter and we're just melting that in the bottom of a dutch oven. Now, while that's melting, let me turn up the heat just a little bit on that, we're gonna go ahead and add our harder vegetables. We're gonna start though with our garlic. So, just go ahead and mince the garlic right into the pot, I'm gonna use about three cloves just because they're of varying sizes and we're just gonna melt that in there with the butter but you want the garlic to be on the bottom of your dutch over so put it in first. Okay, after you've got that in there, we're gonna add our onions and we've got two cups of chopped onions that we're gonna add to that. That's about one large onion if you don't want to have to measure that. Then we're going to add three stalks of chopped celery, if you don't like celery you can substitute bell peppers for that, use the green ones for it. And then we're going to add our butternut squash. So this is the chopped up flesh of butternut squash, you can substitute another winter squash for this if you want to but you'll see the cube size that I've got it in, just in large dice and this is one large, one pound butternut squash. So, the poundage is what you need to be looking at. Okay, we're gonna add that to this and we're gonna allow that to kind of saute for about 10 minutes. Oh, I forgot our carrots, we can't forget that, we're gonna add our carrots as well, so a little bit more orange, the same thing, three large carrot stalks just like your celery, so keep in mind three for that. We're gonna saute these vegetables for 10 minutes. Now, let's talk about winter squash because a lot of times people avoid recipes using winter squash just because these are so large and cumbersome and sometimes very difficult to cut. So I've got a little trick for you, if you'll take the whole squash, the whole winter squash and if it's a very big one you might need to take a rack out of your oven but just lay this on an ungreased pan in your oven and put it on about 350 degrees, stick it in the oven for about 20 minutes and that will soften the flesh up just enough so that it's much easier to cut. So make sure it cools down so that you can touch it really easily then you can easily cut it, scoop out the seeds and use it. We're going to add our liquid for the soup. So we're going to add a cup of dry red wine and then we're going to add chicken stock or vegetable stock if you want to keep this vegetarian use vegetable stock. So we're going to add 11 cups of stock and one cup of Tennessee dry red wine. Now the type that I used for this is a Merlot, you can use a cab for that if you want to, just make sure it's dry and red, it's gonna add the color and depth of flavor for that. Then we're gonna bring this to a boil and allow this to cook for about 35 minutes because we wanna soften up all of that winter squash and vegetables that are in your soup. Now here comes the unusual part, we're going to take tortilla chips, we're gonna add this to our soup, crush them a little bit with your hand as you add them to that and we're gonna get these nice and soft. I know, it seems a little strange, stick with me here. Okay, so I've got eight ounces of tortilla chips of your choice, then we're going to add some cilantro leaves and two cups of shredded cheese and I'm using some shredded mozzarella, excuse me, you can use Monterey jack if you want to. Then I'm gonna add just a little bit of pepper about a fourth of a teaspoon. Now we're gonna let that kind of melt, let the cheese melt and let the tortilla chips kind of soften in this, this is a little backwards than what you're used to cause we're used to garnishing this with tortilla chips but just hang with me with this. You can see how they've kind of soften up a little bit and the cheese has melted and now we're gonna turn off our heat and we're going to use an immersion blender. If you don't have an immersion blender, all hope is not lost but you would need to let this cool down completely and puree this in your blender but it needs to be cooled down completely or you're gonna have a kitchen mess on your hands. So an immersion blender is made exactly for what we're going to do, so all it does is it is able to immerse down into your soup. Okay, our soup is nice and smooth and now we're going to add a little bit of texture to this. So we got a four ounce can of chopped green chilies that we're going to add to that, some hot sauce, gotta add a little bit of punch to this, we're gonna add some lime juice, two tablespoons and then we're going to add some chopped green onions to that and just stir that in and it's ready. It's ready, it's fun, we're gonna garnish this with just a little bit of blue corn chips and some sour cream maybe a lime wedge and you've got a delicious butternut and tortilla soup that's a little bit different than what you're used to.

- [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.