Episode 2706

- Behind every Pick Tennessee Products' logo is a real Tennessee farmer. Pick Tennessee Products has helped people find those local farmers, food, and fun for over 30 years.

- [Woman] While the centerpiece of this backyard is for water play, Annette Shrader finds there are plenty of flowers, foliage, form, and fun in the surrounding garden beds. Plus, Jeff Poppen visits Hootin' Hollow Farm, where there's always something growing and something to harvest. Come along. First, when done right, landscaping is an art form.

- [Annette] When you look at this red door and this beautiful red mandevilla, you know, right away, inside this home, there lives two gardeners and an artist. And when we look into the gardens in this home, you're gonna be so satisfied with all the beauty that you see. And Ron and Carol Watkins, thank you so much for this lovely walk and this beautiful garden.

- Well, thank you for coming.

- And right here, we're gonna start with what I call show-stopping plants.

- I know. I love the oakleaf hydrangea. They're so many different varieties of it. And it's one of my favorite plants.

- [Annette] Oh, and that one is so beautifully lush, also. The leaves are just huge, aren't they? And I love how the porcelain vine, here--

- [Carol] I know. I have to contain it because you know it will grow everywhere. But if you just keep sticking it in the little structure, it's fine.

- [Annette] Now, this is a bloom, right there. What does that do? Is it a--

- It's seeds.

- Oh, it's already bloomed.

- Yeah.

- [Annette] Okay, and then your white echinacea, there.

- [Carol] This is something else that I love to have flowers, and I haven't been able to because you know about one o'clock, I stop getting sun. So I found that if I plant just little pockets, that it will stay because it gets enough sun, apparently.

- [Anette] And you're successfully growing something that I can't.

- Hostas?

- No, the--

- Oh, the holly fern?

- The holly fern, I'm a little bit too cold--

- Oh, gosh.

- where I am.

- [Carol] Well, that's my favorite fern, too. And before I put the hostas in, I actually had this. This was all holly ferns. And then, I decided it was, you know, it needed a break.

- [Annette] And I like the texture contrast between the shiny, and then your hosta leaf is puckered and a little bit dulled down. Course, you have lots of fern. Now tell me, what kind of maintenance do you have to do?

- [Carol] These are established gardens, so as you can see, they cover the ground. So there's very, very little maintenance. I do have a lot of autumn fern. And I leave it all winter. And so, that means that, in the beginning of the summer, I do have to come out, and I have to pull out the dead, from underneath. But I like to leave it, all winter.

- [Annette] I do, too. I like it because the birds also like things that they can get into.

- [Carol] Autumn fern loves Memphis.

- [Annette] Well, it loves Clarksville, too. And I'm gonna stop right here, at this beautiful hosta. That is a blue one of some kind, isn't it?

- [Carol] I wish I could tell you the name of it. This is "Dancing Lady." And this is one of those giant elephant ears that I got at the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show, I wanna say four years ago.

- [Annette] Well.

- [Carol] And it comes back, every year.

- [Annette] That's good. That's what I like. We all need to have those things.

- [Carol] Every year.

- [Annette] I saw another Colocasia that's happy, here, too. Looking back, I see the art that's hanging there, that makes wind chimes. And so you've got the sights and the sounds and the fragrances. It's all happenin', right there. Carol, this hosta, in this container, I love the combination of the two. This is a Sum and Substance?

- Yes, it is. I knew they get very large, and I wanted to put something. I like lots of plants. And I wanted to put something in here that was going to get real large. And it actually does, many years. This year, believe it or not, it's kind of smaller than it usually is. It usually comes over--

- It had a slower start, this year, too.

- and hides the elephant. It did have a slower start. I like, you know, I like a little bit of contrast, in things that are in beds and things that are out on the concrete.

- [Annette] Yes, and I noticed that you also put Heucheras in the container pots, too.

- I do; it's my favorite way to raise Heuchera. And so, I've got one, over there, that I stuck in that little spot. And I actually did that, this year. But I have another one that I did, eight or nine years ago, that's still in the pot.

- [Annette] Carol, the beautiful hydrangeas, this is a spotlight in this corner of your garden.

- [Carol] And I really love these hydrangeas. Actually, last year, none of the neighbors got blooms because of the winter. And I still had blooms. I still had all these blooms.

- [Annette] You probably have a little microclimate, here, because you have the pool water, and, course, it's under a Little Gem Magnolia. So another beautiful plant in your garden. This piece of ironwork makes me want to laugh. These are buzzards?

- [Carol] It is. They're buzzard trees. It's a buzzard tree. I've loved it for years. I've had it a long time. I've got a metal artist that does a lot of things for me. And I planted all these fatsia, underneath it. And actually, I just had the green fatsia. And then, I discovered these variegated, and I fell in love with those. And then, I don't know if that's a brand new cultivaror or what.

- [Annette] That variegated one down here?

- [Carol] Isn't that beautiful?

- [Annette] It is, and it's beautiful beside another yellow hosta. All of this is very cohesive and monochromatic. It's just beautiful. Carol, standing here beside your home, I can see the gracefulness of your trees that surround this area. And, you know, I know they just don't naturally grow in these positions. So I think you've taken that ability to see things and made it fit its environment, haven't you?

- [Carol] Well, I feel like I've had to do that. I've had to prune, do some pruning on my trees, to make sure that people can walk, number one. And also, you know, whenever you get a tree, it will make its own way. And sometimes, it's not way you want it to be.

- [Annette] It's intimidating to prune on our Japanese maples. Give me the process of how you got the courage and what you do.

- Well, you really should prune in the wintertime. And that's when you know the structure of the tree. Pruning is a science, and I'm certainly not an expert on it. But I have a million books.

- [Annette] Right, so you want it to go that way, instead of this way.

- [Carol] It was leaning this way because the sun comes, I guess.

- [Annette] Yes, it seeks the sun.

- [Carol] It was small. And so, it was just leaning that way. So I kept pruning it to try to get it more upright.

- [Annette] You know, Carol, your gardens are Southern-looking. But this, right here, puts us in the tropics, doesn't it?

- [Carol] I know; it does. It's one of my favorite plants, and it's so colorful that, you know, I just have to get it.

- [Annette] Well again, I can't imagine this corner without this color. And that's the wonder of container planting. There's no denying what yellow does, is it?

- [Carol] I know; it's a popular color.

- [Annette] It is, and these are beautiful.

- [Carol] I just love 'em. And they get a lot of attention from people.

- [Annette] Sometimes, in life, we have to make a decision. We have to move. And as garden and plant enthusiasts, we have to decide, can we leave behind things?

- That was a hard thing for me to do when I left my other house because I had invested so much in all the plants I had there. So I talked to the woman that bought the house and told her, I wanted to be able to dig up quite a few things. And she agreed that I could. This is a Phantom Hydrangea, which doesn't bloom until the end of the summer.

- [Annette] That's a good thing to know, Phantom Hydrangea.

- [Carol] Mm-hmm, there's a redbud, back there that was in our front yard, at our other house, that was not near that size. And we brought it. These roses were in the front of the house. And we wanted to keep them when we did this addition. So my husband built a big berm, over in the back. And we called it our hospital. And we moved all the plants that we wanted to save into the hospital. Then, these roses got moved here.

- Well, I think that is encouraging because all of us face that decision, sometimes. I hope I don't. But we get attached, and it is something that we do with love, hopin' it'll work out.

- Right, we sure do.

- [Annette] How can I say thank you, Carol and Ron? This is so pleasant, so beautiful, and so welcoming. And thank you for allowing us to come into your very private space and learn the knowledge of what you've done, here in Memphis.

- Well, thank you, Annette. It's been great having you. I really appreciate it. Can I give you a hug?

- Well, of course.

- Well, it's the beginning of May, and we are in Jackson County at Hootin' Hollow Farm, today, with Jim Wolfe. Jim, so good to see you, again.

- Good to see you, too.

- [Jeff] Jim, looks like you've been planting lettuce.

- [Jim] Yeah, this is some head lettuce that we've put in. We try to keep it goin', in succession. We have a market stand in town at the Downtown Green Market.

- This would be Cookeville.

- [Jim] In Cookeville. And so, we always try to have a supply of whatever's currently growing.

- And over here, there's some--

- This is mature lettuce.

- How long ago did you plant this lettuce?

- That would've probably been a month or so, ago. When we do plant, a lot of our. Now this spinach, we'll plant by seed. With lettuce, we'll have little starts, little seedlings that we'll put in. So it gives 'em a little head start. And there's more success in their getting mature.

- Yeah, and so this spinach was seeded, quite a while ago, then.

- Yeah, that would have been. It takes, I don't know, about a month for it to get that big. And, of course, it depends on the weather and the rain. And, you know, we get some cold nights. But spinach really likes that. And it'll thrive on those conditions.

- [Jeff] Jim, tell me about your soils and what you put in these raised beds.

- [Jim] Well, every time we plant, I put some kind of organic matter, either our own compost or worm castings, which is a lot of nutrition.

- [Jeff] Yeah, they're great.

- [Jim] But it's just every time. It just builds the soil, more and more, every time. The organic matter just holds moisture, just aerates the roots. It's just a good medium. Everything we do, there's no chemicals, no sprays, basically yeah, all organic.

- [Jeff] I see what you mean, Jim. These beets are gorgeous.

- [Jim] These, we put in seedlings, probably around end of February or March.

- [Jeff] Wow, that was early then, huh?

- [Jim] Well, it was a warm spring. You know, you take advantage, everything you can. The earlier you can get 'em in, you know, the better off you are.

- They're beautiful. There's not hole in it.

- [Jim] Well, that's part of that organic farming.

- [Jeff] Wow, beautiful, isn't it?

- You know, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of insect problem with the beets.

- [Jeff] And the greens are really popular now, when you sell 'em, aren't they?

- [Jim] Yeah, I've got customers who won't buy the beets unless they have the greens.

- [Jim] But they're real tasty. They have a great texture. And you know, I tell people. They ask me what variety of something is more nutritious. And I'll tell 'em, "Usually, the darker the color, "or if it's red or blue." So you can see, beets are--

- You can't get more red than that. And over here, you have some beautiful looking carrots. They were put out pretty early too, huh?

- These were put out early. And I use that row cover method to--

- Oh yeah, to get 'em to seed.

- To go with the seed. But we had really hard winds. And you can see that the success wasn't as great as I'd like. But they'll be okay. We also have another bed. You always have backups.

- [Jim] If you have the room, put somethin' in.

- [Jeff] Do you use cover crops as part of your rotations and fertility program, here?

- [Jim] We do. This year, well, we had our corn and winter gourds and squash. We have winter rye and hairy vetch. And the vetch is a nitrogen fixer. The rye has a dense root system that loosens up the soil.

- [Jeff] Oh, it really makes good soil, doesn't it?

- [Jim] Yeah, it really does. And then, we just lay it down and just let it mulch in. And we'll just plant over top of it.

- [Jeff] You won't even till it in. You just plant like, leave it as a mulch.

- [Jim] I'll till enough to get my plants in there.

- [Jeff] Okay. Well, there's some beautiful lookin' cabbage, here. That must have been planted early.

- Yeah, there again, the temperature's been with us. These, we started. We'll start 'em inside, under lights and bring 'em outside when they're ready and put 'em in as little seedlings. They just seem to do a lot better, you know, the direct seeding.

- Yep, and over here, peas, look at these peas, already making peas.

- [Jim] Yeah. Now, the peas will be direct seeded. But they do better that way.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- [Jim] Peas and carrots.

- [Jeff] Seed directly.

- [Jim] Yeah, they're direct seeded.

- [Jeff] Wow, look at the broccoli.

- [Jim] Yeah, we had two varieties of broccoli. We're checkin' out which one we like better.

- [Jeff] Which varieties are you growin'?

- [Jim] One's called Packman, and the other is Green Acres or Green Magic, somethin' like that.

- [Jim] Okay, well that's always good to experiment, isn't it?

- [Jim] Yeah, yeah, that's the name of the game. Have fun with it.

- [Jeff] Right. Well Jim, it's just been so great to reconnect with you and see Hootin' Hollow Farm.

- Yeah, I'm glad you sha--

- you came over and saw the operation.

- [Jeff] Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful. Thanks again, so much.

- Well, as the growing season begins to wane, and our summer containers, right now, are looking gorgeous and full. We've watered 'em and fed 'em, all through the growing season. But we're not very far from that first frost. In the wintertime, you can still have great looking containers, beautiful containers. Rita Randolph, my gardenin' buddy. And Rita's gonna tell us all about the fantastic containers that she does and what you can do to add some pizzazz to your garden for that season when it sometimes seems like we'll never get back to growing things, again.

- [Rita] Or you're afraid that there's not gonna be anything pretty and alive through the winter.

- [Troy] That's right.

- [Rita] But there really is. In fact, a lot of these conifer containers, that we choose to do, look good, year round. They even look good, like a little alpine village or somethin' like that. So a lot of our clients, including myself, choose to go straight with evergreens and evergreen grasses.

- Broadleaf evergreens, conifers.

- Persistently pretty foliage is what I like to call it 'cause it looks good, year round. Sure, it looks great for winter. But you'll be surprised. I've got some of my pots that are two and three years old. So what we do is, add a little gravel to the bottom. I'll just set him, right there. And I save my styrofoam and put it over the hole, instead of dumpin' it in the dump, you know. I hate to put it in the landfill. And I use my basic potting soil, which is a handmade mix. And I always tell people, "When you're buying potting soil, "you've heard that $2.00 plant in a $10.00 hole. It's true. Really use good potting media. I use about five different ingredients, from peat and coir, bark, perlite, sand. And then, you get this good mix. The only difference with conifers and evergreens is they like sharp drainage.

- Right, they will like a lightweight soil that's not gonna hold a lot of water.

- So you use your same, good compost-based mix, but you just add more gravel to it. And then, we top dress with it, too. So I'm gonna start with this conifer, right here, 'cause he's got the biggest root ball. And just beautiful. I loosen up the roots a little bit. You can see; there's some gravel in the bottom of it. Because when I pot 'em up, I always add a little bit of gravel. Doesn't that have just beautiful drapey foliage?

- [Troy] It's a gorgeous shape.

- And this is, euonymus. I just love euonymus. You know, it's a shame that one of my favorite plants has a disease named after it,

- [Rita] or an insect disease.

- [Troy] Yep.

- [Rita] Anyway, I love euonymus because they are evergreen. And see how root bound they are? We just loosen up the roots a little bit, to get 'em goin' out of the ball. And I never use a knife. I've seen people use a knife. I like to just tear it with my hands. It seems a little more gentle. And the other rule is, usually, you've heard the rule of three?

- Right.

- The thriller, the filler, and the spiller. I don't really go with that. But it does work.

- Right, exactly. If you need a recipe, that is a good recipe.

- If you need a recipe that works. But the other thing that I'm gonna say. What my favorite, I'm a chartreuse-aholic.

- I am, too.

- I love variegated plants.

- Variegated plants, gold plants.

- Look how bright these are? And even just plain green is nice, if you add some chartreuse or variegation to it.

- [Troy] Right, there's nothing like this to brighten the gloomy days of winter.

- This is Carex Evergold. It's not really a grass; it's a sedge. But it got its name, Evergold, because it's evergreen. It looks good year round.

- It looks this way, year round.

- Year round. So we're gonna snuggle him, right down there, in front. And then, I'm gonna work on my soil for just a minute.

- [Troy] Once you've got all of your soil in around your rootballs, Rita, what's your next step?

- Well, remember how I said we need to mix gravel in with the soil? I also top dress with it because top dressing keeps evaporation, you know, from leaving from the surface. It helps hold in moisture.

- [Troy] So we're basically mulching, but we're mulching with gravel.

- [Rita] Mulching, and I poke some of it down in there, for drainage, so that I have a little bit of the gravel mixed in with my soil.

- [Troy] So it'll air the soil.

- [Rita] Yes. And then, at this point, see the gravel actually outlines the plants and makes 'em look good. Now, if you don't wanna do just evergreens, you wanna add some color to it. You can always add some nice violas, in there, like that. I'm not gonna plant 'em. I'm just showin' you how nice it would work.

- Now, before we go, I wanna mention one other container that really just caught my eye, when I came in. And it's just full of beautiful evergreens. It looks like, maybe a Sky Pencil Holly.

- [Rita] It is, and an osmanthus and a juniper, Procumbens Nana, hanging out. That pot is about three years old. So when you do these conifer/evergreen mixes, you get years of life out of it.

- [Troy] Right, and the thing that I really love about that one is, it's just such a great mix of colors. We've got dark green. We've got chartreuse. We've got kind of a cream and green, variegated. So you can mix all of your plants up together. I think people worry too much, a lot of times, about, "Oh, is this combination going to be right?"

- You know what I do? I hold 'em up, together. We call it "the yuck factor." You know, you hold 'em up, together, and if it looks good--

- Great.

- It's automatic. It's like pickin' out a scarf for a shirt.

- And everybody that you ask is gonna have a different opinion because all of us like different things. So if you love it, then I say, "Go for it."

- [Rita] It works.

- [Troy] Rita, thanks so much for letting us come and visit.

- [Rita] Thank you, anytime.

- [Troy] It's always a pleasure.

- [Rita] Now you can go shop.

- [Troy] That's right.

- [Tammy] So we're here, in Nolensville, Tennessee, at Morning Glory Orchard. And I'm with Curt Wideman. And Curt, you have cherry trees. Now, I know that a lot of homeowners look at cherry trees, and they think, "Oh, I wanna have some of those." Because when they do produce fruit, they look like little Christmas tree ornaments, all over the tree. So there are challenges to growing this in your home. So tell us some good and bad points about putting a cherry tree in your own yard.

- All right, Tammy, the cherry tree is like any other fruit tree. It requires air and light and good nutrients. So one of your first challenges when you plant this as a homeowner is to make sure it's in a location that's gonna have plenty of sunlight. You then wanna prune it so that you don't have a lot of crowding around each and every limb. You wanna have it open. And there are two ways of doin' that. One is with a normal leaders tree that grows straight up, and you simply prune the limbs around that central leader. The other method is what we call the open system, where you take out that central leader and create kind of a bow shape, in the middle, which leaves it open in the middle. And more light and air gets into the limbs that are gonna produce the fruit.

- [Tammy] So this cherry tree that you've got is about how old?

- [Curt] This one is only three years old. We've had magnificent growth, out of these cherry trees. So depending on how well your soil is, you can get tremendous growth out of your cherry trees, in a short period of time.

- Well, and I noticed that you don't have any competition, here, for nutrients because you keep everything mowed and everything around the tree. Is that a good thing for the homeowner to do as well?

- [Curt] It's a very good thing. And what we're trying to do, here, and the reason we keep the grass out from under our trees, is because the voles and the moles will get in there. And they don't know the difference between the roots of the cherry tree and the roots of a weed. And so, they will actually eat on the roots of our cherry tree, and we don't want that. So we discourage them by killing what's under it.

- [Tammy] Got it.

- [Curt] Keepin' it nice and clean.

- [Tammy] Got it, so this would behoove the homeowner, if they want to have a beautiful cherry crop, in addition to a cherry tree, is to remove that competition from the base of the tree.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- And then, the same maintenance program that you would use with a normal fruit tree. Obviously, you're gonna prune. And how much spraying does a cherry tree need?

- [Curt] Cherry tree has to fight insects, and it has to fight fungus. You get a number of different fungus that will show up. The fungus doesn't always kill the fruit. But it can make the fruit look ugly and be misshapen. So you don't really want that. The insects do serious damage. And of course, once you've got fruit, you gotta really watch out for birds. Birds love cherries.

- [Tammy] Yeah.

- [Curt] Again, the main thing is, to make sure you keep it well-pruned. Do not prune in the summertime. You wanna prune in the wintertime. Trees go dormant when it gets very, very cold. So we usually like to wait for the first or second freeze before we start prunin'. And then, we prune in the winter. And when you're lookin' at a limb on a tree, this limb, now, coming out this way is exactly what you want. What you don't need, and we would prune here. We would prune these two limbs out because they're goin' straight up. They're what we call "waterspouts." They aren't really productive. Your fruit tends to grow on the limbs that are about 45 degree angle or less, comin' out from the tree.

- [Tammy] Okay, so if a homeowner's a little hesitant to prune, concentrate on these limbs that go straight up versus these that come out, this direction.

- Right, and what you wanna do with this one, out here, is you reach a point to where you're tryin' to maintain the orchard. And you don't want that stickin' into your mower.

- Right.

- You cut it off at a point where you're not gonna hit it with your body or your mower when you're comin' through here. Other than that, you let the tree develop. Most homeowners are afraid to prune. They're afraid they're hurting.

- I know.

- In most cases, they under prune rather than over prune. It's pretty hard to over prune, unless you've got a tree that's way out of growth.

- Well, and Curtis, that's a good tip because we do tend to be a little hesitant, honestly, because we don't know what we're doing. So err on the side of over pruning, and you're probably not going to hurt the tree.

- You're probably not gonna hurt the tree. The tree will recover. We had the same problem when we first took over the orchard. We were scared to prune enough. And consequently, we always had overgrown trees durin' the crop season. The tree will take care of itself as long as you help it do what it can't do, which is shed the limbs that it doesn't need.

- [Tammy] So get over your complex.

- [Curt] Right.

- [Tammy] Prune it, and the tree will reward you, hopefully, with some nice, beautiful, delicious cherries in the end, right?

- Right. And then, all you have to do, Tammy, is worry about the weather. You know, if you spray and take care of the insects and the fungus and if you prune and you take care of the air and the light and you feed the tree the way it's supposed to be, then the only thing you have to worry about is Mother Nature.

- That's it.

- Yeah, and then we have the possibility of a late freeze. We have too much rain. We have not enough rain. We have too hot; we have too cold. Prayer helps.

- Okay.

- But this particular tree that you're seein', today, there's not a cherry on it because we lost it, due to that late freeze that we had this year.

- Well, and again, this is the glories of gardening--

- Absolutely.

- is that it's unpredictable. But that also makes it a challenge.

- It's a challenge.

- Thank you, Curt, for helping us with this. I know that this is a popular thing for many homeowners, in their yards and gardens. And you've definitely helped us, today.

- Just don't be afraid.

- So thank you.

- [Woman] 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. Behind every Pick Tennessee Products' logo is a real Tennessee farmer. Pick Tennessee Products has helped people find those local farmers, food, and fun for over 30 years.