Episode 2802

- [Narrator] On this episode of Volunteer Gardener, join Phillipe Chadwick for a stroll through the many feature gardens at the Tennessee Executive Residence. Tammy Algood gets inspired by this vegetable and herb grower who has a very sensible and smart sales outlet. Come along. After much planning and a lot of hard work, these renovated gardens are ready for guests.

- Just a few miles south of Nashville is the Tennessee Residence. And in 2011, they finished renovations on the house. Through the Tennessee Residence Foundation, they expanded out into the gardens, and updated some of the historic gardens and added some new gardens. And we're gonna go take a look at some of those. We're here in one of the original historic gardens. I'm here with Sarah Lowe, the Tennessee Residence horticulturist. Thanks for having me out today.

- Oh, I'm so glad you're here today Phillipe.

- Yeah.

- Thanks for coming and checking everything out, that's in peak bloom right now with springtime.

- Yeah, it's wonderful. So this is one of the original gardens to the house.

- That's right. This is the Tennessee Residence, it was built in 1929 to 1931, and where we're right now is the historic garden, which is original to the site, when the Wills family lived here. It became the Tennessee Residence and home to our governors in 1949, when it was bought by the state.

- [Phillipe] So like the fountain and everything was original to the house?

- The fountain and the lily pond, this bone, this space is original. It has gone through a major landscape renovation plan, which was part of Mrs. Haslam's initiative when she arrived here at the Residence, was to restore the landscape. So she set out on a plan to revitalize it, renovate it, and put it all together so it'd be one beautiful space for all of our visitors and guests to the Residence to see. This is a very formal element, it's kinda that direct access into the house, view wise, and then it kinda then opens up to the sides. The Residence was originally named Far Hills by the Wills family, just because all of the views of all of the rolling hills that you could see in the landscape.

- Yeah, and it's nice I see three gates that lead you in different directions,

- Right.

- away from the house. It's kind of a great starting point when you're entering the gardens. This is a really nice, comfortable little quaint space.

- [Sarah] It's one of my favorite spots here at the Tennessee Residence. Just a beautiful little spot, part of the original historic gardens. The Wills family were big iris hybridizers here in Nashville. So we have several of their irises here, Nashborough, Natchez Trace, just to name a couple that are planted in the garden, as well as a lot of other perennials. Daylilies, the irises, coneflowers, gaura, just all sorts of fun things just come alive in this garden during the summertime.

- Yes, so it's real dormant during the winter, but in the summer it really fills in.

- It sure does fill in. It's just exploding with color. So we have violas kinda scattered through it right now, just to kinda have that pop of color.

- And I love this kind of rough and tumble wall that's along the edge here, filled with some sedums, and violas and things.

- [Sarah] Yeah, that's my favorite little moment kind of in this garden. Kinda really sets it in and frames it. Just kind of with the neat things we've been tucking in.

- Nice, yeah. And it's also, everything is so formal, and then you have this kind of rough and tumble wall

- Yeah.

- That kind of makes it a little more comfortable.

- Right, just a little more whimsy.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Feels like a garden.

- Speaking of whimsy, there was a, it looked like a little secret garden over there.

- Yes, there is a Secret Garden over there. So would you like to come see it?

- Yeah, I'd love to go peek in there.

- All right, let's go look.

- So this is definitely The Secret Garden I see here.

- Yes, this is The Secret Garden, a really cool, neat little garden room, all enclosed by yews. It was inspired by the book, "The Secret Garden", and just really a neat space.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, and I definitely noticed the four statues in the corners.

- Yep, the four statues in the corners are, were original to when the Wills family lived here. Through the landscape renovation process, they were kinda scattered all over the property, and they actually found them all and then put them all together to anchor the four corners here in the garden. They are Spring, Summer, and Fall. So they represent our four seasons.

- [Phillipe] Oh very nice, yeah. Kind of an overview of everything.

- [Sarah] Yes.

- And I also have to ask you about this really cool door, with the little hole at the bottom, what's that?

- [Sarah] That's the little mouse hole. So that kind of invites our friendly little friends into the garden, just kind of adding that element of whimsy into this garden as well.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, all are welcome.

- [Sarah] All are welcome.

- Very cool. And looking back through the door, I mean that view of the house from here is just breathtaking.

- Now, it's one of my favorite views. Just kinda captures everything that's here at the Tennessee Residence. And of the Tennessee Garden.

- [Phillipe] So this is a pretty huge vegetable cutting garden you got here.

- It's a beautiful garden. It's, a lot of our visitors to the Tennessee Residence love coming here. This is our Kitchen and Cutting Garden. So it's just a neat place, that's, the kitchen part of it is all the fruits and vegetables that we have growing here in the garden. Everything that we grow here is harvested and used inside the kitchen in the Residence for all the guests that come. And it's the cutting garden because everything that's growing in here, perennials, we use as cut flowers to make arrangements for our guests inside the Residence as well. So that's our

- Very nice.

- Kitchen and Cutting Garden.

- Yeah. I have to comment on this amazing statue in the center, too.

- [Sarah] Yes, at the heart of the garden is our Sundial Armillary. It was designed and created by Tim Matherson from the Tennessee Metal Museum in Memphis. So it's just a really neat piece. We really engage school groups with this piece, between it being a sundial, and how you tell time, to it also incorporates in all of the state symbols from the state of Tennessee. So it's always fun to quiz people, to see if they know the state bird that is the mockingbird, and the state tree is the tulip poplar. We've got the eastern box turtle on it, which is our state reptile, and of course we have three red tomatoes, which are, three of them are red for the east, middle, and west part of our state, and of course the tomato is our state fruit.

- [Phillipe] And as far as kid groups and school groups go, they can be really involved here, right?

- [Sarah] Right, we do a great field trip program here at the Residence, so kids will come and have a tour of the Residence, and then they get to come out in the garden. So we have an activity for them to do in the garden when they come, usually they get their hands dirty in some way, either harvesting vegetables or planting seeds, or planting a plant, so they always have something to do in the garden when they come.

- Yeah, great. Very cool. Is this some of the rows they did?

- [Sarah] Yes, they planted some carrots for us last fall.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, let's go look at those. So this is cool, y'all even label what school planted what and when.

- Right, I do, just to also keeps track of when we planted things, what they are, but it also just gives recognition to the different schools that were here. So a lotta the different school groups get to see what other school groups did, and then get to enjoy what everybody's done. And so then, this group was planted in the fall, these carrots, and then they'll be harvested, if they're ready, in May, by another school group when they come through. So it's kinda the quiet time in the garden. In the next week or two we'll get all the tomatoes planted, corn started, eggplant, so it'll really transition. This whole garden will look different in a couple weeks, when everything starts growing.

- And some of the warm vegetables, do y'all start those in the greenhouse over here?

- Yes, we do start some of them in the greenhouse. So it's a neat spot.

- [Phillipe] I see a lot of trees around the edge, and bushes. Are those some things that--

- Right, we have also fruit in the garden. It's just not vegetables, 'cause we've got some fig trees, we also have blueberries, blackberries, in the garden, because a lot of our groups with the school groups don't necessarily have seen things growing in a garden.

- Right.

- So for them to see what a blackberry grows on,

- Yeah.

- You know, they're always amazed by that.

- [Phillipe] So I bet this is a really popular place for groups to meet in.

- Yes, this is our greenhouse. So we will welcome our field trip groups in here. Some groups will come in, plant plants in pots to take home. We'll also set up all the tables in here, where they'll shell the peas. So we try to get the groups in here. Plus so many kids, also have not seen a greenhouse before. So they love to come and see what we have growing inside the greenhouse.

- Right.

- So we do have some seeds that we have started, some cuttings of some other plants, and then we just have some plants on display, just so they can see the different plants that we have growing here in the greenhouse.

- Yeah, and lots of fun texture and things.

- There's lots of fun textures, colors, we just try to have something fun for them to see, that they'll remember when they,

- Yeah.

- their visit here.

- [Phillipe] So if someone wants to visit, how do they go about doing that?

- [Sarah] All they have to do, you can Google Tennessee Residence, or you can go to tn.gov/residence, and you can get all the information about visiting out here. You can sign up for a historical tour, which is mainly inside the Residence, or you can sign up for a field trip.

- [Phillipe] It is a place not to miss.

- [Sarah] Thank you for coming.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, thank you so much for having us out, Sarah.

- We all know that vegetables give us optimum nutrition and nourishment for a minimal amount of calories. And fresh is always best. But if you can't grow your own fresh veggies, there's Reggie's Veggies. We're here with Reggie Marshall. Reggie, good to see you, my friend.

- Good to see you as well.

- And wow. You have incorporated a whole lotta vegetables in a little bit of space. Tell us how you do that.

- [Reggie] Okay, well, it's intensive market gardening. This is a demo garden setup at Tennessee State University. So meeting with Dr. Clardy and Dr. Matthew Blair, we came up with this idea of putting in a small garden at TSU, to demo how it could be done on a small scale. So we've got a quarter of an acre here. And I've got 34 100-foot rows on a quarter of an acre. And so--

- Wow, that's a lot.

- [Reggie] That's a lot. On nine rows of tomatoes here, I have 372 tomato plants, three different varieties, and I've got 200 bell pepper plants set up on four rows, so again, the idea is to, we talk about food security. This is a great way to introduce that to someone, even if you've got a half acre, quarter acre, your balcony, a few pots in your yard, in your house, you can grow a lot of vegetables.

- [Tammy] You've got a lot of plants here. Do they all start here? Or do you start your plants elsewhere?

- Some of them I've bought, but a lot of them I start myself in float beds. And that, again, that's an easy way to start things, and you're not, and then you can watch everything grow.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So that's another beauty of that. So you can, again, it doesn't cost a lot of money, and that's where we're going with this.

- Exactly.

- Putting things together with the least amount of input.

- [Tammy] Reggie, let's go look at those float beds. I'm interested to see how you get those started.

- [Reggie] Okay.

- [Tammy] And when you say float beds, it's literally a float bed.

- [Reggie] It is, it is.

- So tell us how this actually works. Because it's, to a lotta people that may not have seen this before, this may seem like, hey, does that get too much water?

- Yeah, and it can if you use the wrong medium. If you use a peat moss, will hold too much water, and you'll have what's called damping off, where your plants will die because of disease. This is just like tobacco plants were started years ago. As a matter of fact, I got this idea from a good friend of mine, Paul White, who used to raise a lot of tobacco, and still does. And he raises all his vegetables this way. So what I do is I'll start my plants. These plants are about two weeks old. They're up good, so I will add fertilizer to them at this point. All right? And those are about 3 1/2 weeks old over there. So I put fertilizer on those about a week, week and a half ago, it's water soluble fertilizer. So it dissolves easily in water, and once they're about four weeks old, I'll put 'em in pots, and then translate, and then let 'em grow out to two to three weeks from there.

- [Tammy] So it's just a stage. You start here with your seeds, and then as they grow, you just move them up into bigger and better things until they eventually end up outside.

- Right.

- And you don't have to do anything else to them? I mean they've got air movement in here,

- Right.

- And everything, so basically, this is just a maintenance area.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- And you said the right kinda medium. So what kinda medium do you use?

- It's a tobacco mix, tobacco float bed mix, which doesn't have peat moss in it. It's just like a, I believe it's coconut coir, something like that in there. So it doesn't hold a lot of moisture. It holds enough, you see. But it's not gonna saturate your plants.

- Got it. And you can pick this up, and you can see that the roots are coming out the bottom already.

- [Reggie] Yes.

- [Tammy] So, and that's what you want.

- [Reggie] Absolutely, absolutely.

- What a great idea for this. So this is an excellent way to start plants,

- Yes.

- And obviously, you've got a lot of plants that you've started here.

- Absolutely.

- And we're just gonna move on up. So here's some that you've already potted up.

- Yes.

- And that are ready to, ready to go.

- Right.

- So this is the next stage.

- Right, right, right. So, you know, again, I'll pot these, and put a little bit of a slow-release fertilizer in the pot, so that as I'm watering, it adds nutrients, and it's being slowly released and doesn't burn the plant, doesn't burn the roots. Tammy, these are Stonewall cucumbers, which is a hybrid cucumber. Grow really nice, eight to nine inch cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, and then I've got some squash here. And what I'll do, they're growing in these float bed cells, I'll pull 'em outta here,

- Wow.

- And I've got the ground already soaked over there, so I'll stick 'em in here. Even though it's hot today, with the ground being soaked, these succulents will do okay.

- And that's got a pretty long root system for that.

- Absolutely.

- [Tammy] So the float bed helps promote that.

- [Reggie] Absolutely. Absolutely.

- Got it. So that's ready to go and be trellised, and these'll be producing how quickly?

- [Reggie] These are large transplants, so they'll be ready to go in about three or four weeks.

- Okay Reggie, we're going to let you get these started, and then we're gonna meet you at your sales point. This makes so much sense, Reggie, to have produce available here at Saint Thomas Midtown Hospital, where you've got patients coming in and out, and employees. So talk to us about how this collaboration actually happened.

- Well, I'm a nurse here at the hospital, house supervisor. So I see everybody in the hospital, and I've been working with these folks for quite a while. Dr. Stacy Davis, who is one of the cardiologists, said to me, said, "Hey, Reggie, you raise vegetables. "Marla raises meat. "So why don't you guys have a farm stand here, "we'll have Reggie's Veggies and Marla's Meat, "set in here for the hospital employees to buy, "and for the patients and family members "who come to the hosital." So that's where all this came about. And I love growing things, and so this is just a culmination of all the things that I enjoy. Healthcare, healthy nutrition, I'm a testament to that myself, I'm off my blood pressure medicine because I've lost enough weight to reduce my need for the high blood pressure medicine. So I like to see other people use food as a source for healing their bodies, as well.

- It's just a value added thing for the customers here, and the employees, which I think is great. And a wonderful sales outlet for you.

- Yeah.

- Do you have any just basil?

- I do, right here.

- Have one of each.

- Honestly, this'll just keep going every month?

- Right, until the end of October. Is when we plan to end it.

- [Tammy] Got it. So it'll run just like a farmer's market will.

- Exactly, exactly.

- [Tammy] And Reggie, do you see it expanding, maybe including some more different kinds of produce as the season progresses?

- Oh absolutely. So my produce will pretty much follow the Tennessee harvest time frame, so like tomatoes, end of June, first of July we'll have some tomatoes, peppers, and squash will be here in June as well. So then I'll have a few watermelons late in August, and then more fall greens. I have some greens now, I have some greens now, but it'll follow the harvest season in Tennessee.

- Well, and I think that part of our job, as people who grow food, is to educate the consumer on when the season is.

- Right.

- They see it in the grocery store year-round. So they might not understand when is the good time for certain things.

- Exactly. And that's part of what I'm trying to do here.

- See, that's perfect, Reggie. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I think it's a perfect marriage of produce and patience.

- Yes, absolutely. A lot of patience.

- It's been a while since I've invited you all out to my garden. I think the last time we were here, there were just empty beds and white lines on the ground. So things have changed a little bit. We have just come out of two of the driest months and three of the hottest weeks that I can remember in almost 20 years of living in Nashville. And so I thought I would show you a little bit about how I sort of, my garden sort of survived that period of time, and what I do to keep things looking lush and healthy and full, and of course one of the answers is I water a lot. I have the luxury of being on a well, out here in the country, a really good well. So I don't have to worry too much about being able to water or how much I can water. There is no irrigation system here. It's all hand watering or sprinkler watering. And so I keep the hoses at the ready all the time. No matter how much water is in the soil, no matter how much moisture is in the soil, sometimes it is so hot and so dry, the air is so dry, that the plants still can not pull enough water up through their roots. Especially when they're big and lush and full. For example, this elephant ear really suffered during the drought. And it's not because it wasn't well-watered. It was because the leaves are so big, and they lose water at such a rapid rate, the roots can't take up the water in the soil fast enough to keep the leaves from actually burning and scorching. One of the things that I will do now that the weather has broken a little bit, that the heat is giving us a little bit of reprieve, we're back sort of to normal weather, which is still hot and humid, but not nearly like we'd experienced. I will go through and begin lightly fertilizing things, to encourage the roots to kind of get a jump start. We'll keep watering the same way that I have been over the last few weeks. It'll really keep the plants saturated. I also will use all of my organics. Any kind of liquid compost, or liquid compost teas, anything to encourage the biological activity in the soil. Because it suffers also. And keeping your soil healthy is just as important as keeping the plants themselves healthy. So that all of those systems work together and your garden stays looking great. There are a few plants that haven't fully recovered from this heat and drought stressing, and they may not. This grass actually looks pretty good, but you can see here in front of me that it actually has kind of split open in the middle. And what I'll have to do is go in and put some stakes on this and actually tie it back up. It is so weak down at the base, and has split open so far, that it probably will not stand back up on its own. So I'll have to go in and help it out a little bit. You know, coming into my little vegetable patch, I didn't plant a lot this year, but I do love to have fresh tomatoes during the growing season. And I have everything from really good cherry tomatoes, to nice, big slicers. And late in the season, we may even do a little canning if I have enough. I picked this beauty yesterday. Really a big one. Probably weighs a pound. It's not quite ripe, but I actually like to pick them a little before they're completely ripe, because it's a contest between myself and the critters who gets them first. And if I let them get completely ripe on the vine, a lot of times the chipmunks get to them before I do. Or the raccoons. So I pick them just a little bit green, and let them ripen up on the screen porch, and they're just as good. Now, this tomato actually came off of this plant next to me, which you can see is almost seven feet tall. What happens during the hottest and driest part of the summer, and especially when we have weather like we've had the last few weeks, the tomatoes actually will stop setting for a period of time. When the night temperatures don't drop below 78 or 80 degrees for several days at a time. So what you'll see on these tomatoes, if you were really to look under the leaves and get inside, there are lots of tomatoes up to about this point. And there really are not any more beyond that. Because this plant has gotten so tall, and because these tomatoes are so big, I'll probably come in in the next week or so and prune a lot of these branches back, and force a flush of new growth further down inside the plant, so that when these big tomatoes set, they're not hanging out here and breaking these stems off, but that they're down inside the cage and actually have some support behind them. The other thing I wanna mention, very briefly, is that it's not too late to plant. A lot of us don't consider planting in mid-summer during the hottest part of the year, but I actually lost a plant here a few weeks ago, and I have one to replace it. So what I thought I would do is just show you real quickly how I go about doing that. I have, I found a great little replacement for it at the garden center the other day, that still looked nice and healthy. I have a hole that was already sort of pre-dug, so I've kind of shallowed my place out again, so that I have a nice well here that will hold water. I'm going to scatter just a little bit of organic fertilizer in the bottom of the hole, so that the plant has nutrients available to it right away. We'll stir this in just a little bit. And then, as you've seen before, I'm gonna remove the bottom leaves from this plant, and I'm going to plant it pretty deep into this hole. We'll get it... Able to dig down in there nice and deep. I actually dug this out with a shovel and chopped the soil up really nicely. So we'll plant it two or three inches up the stem. Got my watering can here. We'll water it in good. And what will happen is this little plant will take off and grow very quickly. Tomatoes like the hot weather. They grow really quickly in the hot weather, even if they're not setting fruit. We'll put its cage back over it, it will grow right up inside there. It will grow tremendously fast over the next six weeks. It will fill this entire cage. And what I'll have is a nice late crop of tomatoes, that probably won't start ripening until mid-September, and I'll have tomatoes all the way 'til frost. So if some of your plants have, especially very vigorous growers, like cherry tomatoes and things, get a little tired looking at the end of the season, or the middle of the season, or if you happen to lose a plant like I did, you can always replace it and get a really nice crop of late-season tomatoes. Well, none of us want to be out here when it's 109 degrees outside, and we haven't had any water in weeks and weeks. We suffer just the same way the garden does. So remember, early morning, later in the evening is the best time to water, because it keeps the water off the leaves of the plants, or it keeps the sun and the water off of the leaves of the plants at the same time. Remember to keep yourself just as well-hydrated as you keep the garden, and I think we've all managed to survive this pretty well.

- Today we're at a Bells Bend neighborhood farm, that grows hops. Humulus lupulus has been grown for centuries for its medicinal qualities and for making beer. Here to help us learn more about hops is Linus Hall, a local brewer.

- Hey, thanks Jeff. Yeah, this batch of hops that we're growing out here is destined for a beer that we make once a year, called Bells Bend Preservation Ale. We take the hops, we make up a big batch of about, hopefully about 500 cases of beer this year.

- [Jeff] 500 cases.

- [Linus] Yeah, and then we donate part of the proceeds back to the CSA for the farm.

- [Jeff] Oh, that's great.

- [Linus] This particular patch, this is the third year that they've been growing it. We started with a row along the fence line there, and then transplanted that into this bigger field here. I put up these trellises, which are about 18 feet tall.

- [Jeff] Oh my gosh.

- [Linus] And we've gonna have about 150 vines to harvest in about two weeks here.

- [Jeff] So you say you started with a smaller patch, and then you propagated the plants? How do we propagate?

- [Linus] Well, hops grow from a root stock. It's called a rhizome.

- [Jeff] So that's not grown from seed.

- No, you would cut the root stock up into different segments, and transplant that in order to grow more and more of the same varietals.

- Oh.

- I get a couple shooting off here and here.

- You see the little bud right there? That is an advantageous bud that will make a new hops plant. All you need is just a small piece of the root. Like like that right there. As long as it has one of these little buds on it, that'll make a new plant. Linus, run us through the cultural techniques, starting this spring, for growing a hops crop.

- Well yeah, once you've planted your rhizomes in the early spring, not much will happen for a little while. You'd go ahead and get the soil prepared. What we did here is we put cardboard over all the rows, cut a hole out where we knew the rhizomes were gonna pop up, and then just put a shovel full of manure over that. But in early March, April, you'll start seeing little shoots start popping up. And what you'll do is you'll run a jute twine down to the ground, anchor it there, and try to get three or four of the strongest shoots popping up to twine align that. And you can actually take, cut the ones that are the weaker ones, and a lotta people will saute them in butter, it tastes a lot like asparagus.

- You can eat 'em.

- Yeah, you can eat 'em too.

- I'll be darned. I didn't know that.

- And then, throughout the season, they'll grow pretty aggressively. Sometimes in the early summer, probably as much as a foot a day.

- A foot a day.

- A foot a day, yeah. Me growing up in Mississippi, they remind me of kudzu a lot. The leaves are similar, and they're very aggressive vines. And then what you'll do is you wanna cut back the first three feet or so of vegetation off the ground. That'll keep the mildew from coming up off the ground and into the plant.

- So you have more airflow in there.

- Right, right. And then, in July, August, you'll start seeing the little immature hop cones start popping out.

- This is one that's not ripe.

- So this is one that's not ready to be picked at all. You can see, when we break it open there's really nothing into the interior of it. A ripe cone, like some of these we see here, these are almost ready to be picked. And you'll see that nice bright yellow

- Oh yeah.

- lupulin resin there. Once you pick these and throw them into a batch of beer and boil it, you're gonna start getting all those great, those resins will be boiled into the beer, and you'll get that nice kinda citrusy bitterness into the beer. So--

- Okay.

- We're gonna rush these back to the brewery and use them right away, but if you don't wanna use them right away, you need to dry them out. And so yeah, traditionally, they'd put these in what's called a hop house or an oast house in England. And run hot air through them to dry them out. And then they'll be preserved for the rest of the year. Because you only pick 'em once a year. And if you're a typical home brewer, one or two vines of these size would be enough for a 10-gallon batch of beer.

- Oh, great. So hops is an ancient crop, used for many years to help people as an herbal remedy and is great for making beer.

- [Linus] Sure is.

- [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.