Episode 2814

- [Narrator] This episode of "Volunteer Gardener" will have you buzzing, Jeff Poppen enjoys the pollinator walk at Mansker's Station where every plant has a purpose. Matt Kerske visits with a bee keeper who educates us on pollination services and Troy Marden shares some favorite native plants that are solid performers. Come along! First, a pretty plant palate that provides both food and habitat for pollinators.

- We're at Mansker's Station today in the Moss-wright Park in Goodlettsville. We're gonna look at a pollinator garden. And even though it says "Do not enter," we get to go see what's causing all this activity here. Dan, good to see you again.

- Thank you, Jeff, good to see you.

- Yes, tell us a little bit about what you got going here.

- Well, of course we have the milkweed. That was one of the first things that we, when we developed this garden, one of the first things we wanted was milkweed because we are a waystation for the Monarch Butterfly. And so this is the host plant.

- [Jeff] Monarch Butterflies are many people's favorite and here we have a milkweed plant and the larva of the Monarch Butterfly.

- We planted one or two that we dug up and they did survive,

- We planted one or two that we dug up and they did survive, and then on mainly by seed they have continued to expand. In fact, we're at a point that at times we have to thin it out because it would take over.

- [Jeff] Well, many people consider it a weed.

- [Dan] Yeah, they do. But here it's a luxurious plant for us. I saw lantana at a winery down in south-middle Tennessee, the swallowtails were everywhere and I said "I've got have a lot of this." So there's quite a bit of lantana in here and then we have coreopsis down here.

- [Jeff] That's such a pretty flower, isn't it?

- [Dan] It is a pretty flower and there's all types of species of coreopsis, Small Moonbeam and the larger flowers. So it's a great plant to have in your garden, both from beauty standpoint and as a nectar plant for the butterflies, all types of butterflies actually.

- [Jeff] Dan, tell us a little bit about this penta.

- [Dan] Well, it's a nectar plant. I was at Butterfly World in Coconut Creek, Florida earlier this year and pentas were everywhere. So, I made a point to plant more than I normally would because they're such a pretty plant and they're also, the butterflies love them.

- Yeah, and I notice you have some Passion flower.

- [Dan] It is a host for the fritillary butterfly.

- I just love the cleomes, don't you? They're such a beautiful plant and they are very old fashioned flower.

- [Dan] Absolutely, and you can't have just one. They are very prolific. We have a number of them and they're high enough that they're very visible and they come back naturally every year.

- [Jeff] Yeah, the seed pods come, all you gotta do is drop those seeds on the ground and you'll have more.

- [Dan] Yeah, in fact, here they go.

- The old fashioned Spider Plant.

- Yep, that's exactly right.

- And I notice you have the tallest zinnias I've seen. Look at the size of these things.

- Yes, I purchase them in bulk every year from a company. They are so tall and of course having kind of a stadium type view that we have, you can see them from the front of the bed.

- You grow basil here. We grow this for eating, but you're growing it here as a pollinator plant.

- Yes, it's a host plant for one of the butterflies and several butterflies, in fact. And of course goldenrod here behind it. We have to thin it occasionally because it again--

- [Jeff] It takes over.

- [Dan] It likes to move throughout the bed.

- Dan, I love the fennel, it's so big and it smells so nice. It's just such a beautiful aroma.

- It's a great plant for our garden. It's the host plant for the Black Swallowtail and fortunately for us, it's a perennial so we don't have to plant it every year and it gets larger and more... stems come out each year. So it's a great plant for us.

- And then you have your white cleomes.

- Yes, the goldenrod here. The white cleomes, then the--

- Oh you got the butterfly bush.

- We do. Of course more zinnias here and the butterfly bush, Buddleja. It's a great nectar plant. A lot of different butterflies enjoy it, especially swallowtails. One of the things about keeping it going is dead heading it.

- I see where you've been cutting the blooms off afterwards so it keeps it in bloom.

- It does, it'll stay in bloom till frost if we do our job.

- [Jeff] Dan, what's this big leafed shrub right here?

- [Dan] Carolina sweet shrub. The blossoms are pink, beautiful plant! And as you can see it's done quite well. We planted it about three years ago.

- [Jeff] And I notice you have a few buckeyes, they look they're different varieties.

- We do, we have in the center there, we have a bottlebrush buckeye. Then right up behind this plant we have a red buckeye. They're almost like a magnet for butterflies. They just circle, waiting permission to land.

- Like a little airport or something. And then I see a pawpaw tree. I always love to see pawpaws.

- [Dan] We have a couple of pawpaws in here. One of the reasons, they're a beautiful tree, but one of the reasons we have them is because they are the only host plant for the zebra swallowtail. So we like to get plants in that will attract certain butterflies, like the common buckeye butterfly. We've planted plants in there that attract them. So that's what we look for, to try to find plants that will attract certain butterflies.

- [Jeff] That's really cool. And this the Moss-Wright Park in Goodlettsville.

- [Dan] Moss-Wright, it's Caldwell Lane right off of Long Hollow Pike which is right off of I-65. So it's really easy to get to and you'll find an accommodating staff.

- Well thank you so much for inviting us out.

- Oh, Christmas tree! That's what I think of when I see cherries dangling ripe and ready to pick from the tree limbs. They look like delicious ornaments. We're here in Lewisburg talking to my good friend, Bill Forgie. Bill, you have lots of experience growing cherry tres and I'm hoping you'll set our viewers up for success who might want to grow their own in their landscape. So talk to us about this particular type of cherry tree because it is loaded with cherries.

- Yes, Tammy, this is an Ulster Cherry tree. It is not self-pollinating so I buy pollen for all of our trees that are not self-pollinating. I get that out of Washington state. We put that on with a leaf blower. We do two different pollinations, we do a 20% and an 80%. We do two different pollinations, we do a 20% and an 80%. And then I also rent bees in the spring when we're in bloom. And the blooms are white, beautiful blooms on all these cherry trees.

- [Tammy] Wow, that sounds like a whole lot work for this! But, obviously it's working because look at the crop that you got this year. Is this about a normal crop for this age tree, which is how old?

- This tree is probably 16 years old, it's old. But they'll last 30 years or so, even longer on cherry trees. And there's really not a secret to picking cherries. You just come in here and just start picking them off like this.

- One by one.

- I do, you can pick more if they aren't too soft. If you have a bucket you can actually pick quite a few at once.

- And are these ripe and ready because--

- Not quite, they are gonna turn blacker. When these cherries are ready they are almost black. These are a black sweet cherry.

- Got it.

- I lived in Traverse City when I was a young guy and we just loved the cherry festivals and we loved the cherries and when I came down here I said, "I gotta try some cherries."

- Got it, so even though looks like it's perfect right now, it's still got a little more time to go. This is May 22nd, so the season is fast and furious. It will be over within a week.

- [Bill] Right, we normally have by Memorial weekend, typically, you're gonna have sweet cherries in Tennessee. Which you're gonna beat anything in the stores. The stores will have red cherries right now, but they will not have black sweet cherries for a few more weeks. A week makes a big difference at this point.

- [Tammy] So this tree requires a lot of maintenance from the person that owns it. So you've got some trees that aren't as labor intensive.

- [Bill] These are you're dwarf trees. These are gonna be ten feet apart and 18 feet between rows. So you can have a lot tighter spot to put your dwarf trees. These are a semi-dwarf tree, they are on Gisela 6 root stock, which I really like. If you go with the Gisela 5, you're gonna have to start tying and anchoring your tree. They are not self-supporting. So we've always stuck with the Gisela 6 and have had great success.

- And these are self-pollinating?

- This is a self-pollinating tree. This is the black gold here. And we also have some lapins, which is also a self-pollinating dwarf tree. And also they bloom later, that's why we get those two varieties. With Tennessee weather you want something that blooms as late as possible. And you can see that I didn't have to put any pollen on these trees and we have an excellent crop. We try to keep the trees 12 feet, 14 feet high, but for an average homeowner, if you want to bring it down to 10 feet that wouldn't be any problem.

- [Tammy] Make it a little more accessible to harvest the fruit.

- Right.

- Tell me what you do for bird, because I know that's a big issue.

- What I use is called Bird Stop and it's actually a Concord grape concentrate. Birds have a reaction to Concord grapes that effects their nervous system. It's the same stuff we drink but it effects birds. I'll spray this on once the cherries start turning yellow. I'll start putting it on once every seven to eight days and then, as you can see, we are able to then keep the birds off pretty well. I might have seven to 20 birds in this whole orchard which is nothing.

- So Bill, what about your typical homeowner? What would you suggest for them to use?

- Because of the expense of the grape concentrate, which is a hundred dollars a gallon, which will make up a hundred gallons of water, I would just use nets.

- Got it.

- [Bill] That's what I would recommend is just putting some kind of netting over your trees. And if you can keep it away from the trees it's a lot better because if you look here, and you had your net tight like this, the birds are gonna get it.

- Oh, I see!

- [Bill] So you need to keep your net and you also need to tie it on the bottom or the birds will get under it and get stuck and they'll continue to eat.

- This is exactly what the bird will do, it will just pick at the fruit and make little divots in it and ruin it for all the rest of us that want to eat that.

- Right.

- So they don't eat the whole cherry, they just pick at it. So a netting is also great for these dwarf varieties because they're kept low and a homeowner could easily get the netting on there.

- [Bill] Right, and if you want to make some type of PVC frame to put your net over every year, it'd be really easy. And I would recommend a good net. We've tried cheap nets and we had just a few and they're really tough getting off. You get a good net and you can use it several years then also.

- [Tammy] Got it, and so what point do you take the net off?

- [Bill] Once you pick your cherries.

- [Tammy] So leave it on there through the whole season and then when you're ready to pick, and these are gonna turn black just like the ones that we saw?

- A black-purple, yep.

- And so when they start turning is when the net comes off?

- Well, once you pick your cherries.

- Got it, got it. Bill, so tell us, again, you pick these just the way you did the others. If you're a homeowner you're gonna take these straight to your refrigerator, right?

- [Bill] You can, yep. And what I would also recommend for the average homeowner is just go to your local co-op or something like that and get a all-purpose fruit spray and just use that. And try changing varieties if you can because diseases and pests get immune if you keep using the same thing over and over. But to get into commercial sprays for fruit trees, it would be too expensive.

- [Tammy] The cherry tree business is blossoming and so a lot of people want to incorporate these beautiful trees into their yard and you've helped them a lot with this today.

- [Bill] Thank you, I'm really glad you came out!

- Well we all know that our fruit production wouldn't be anywhere where it is without the help of the bees. And I'm talking here today with Jim Murff of WW4BEE And I'm talking here today with Jim Murff of WW4BEE who has made his livelihood with pollination services of hundreds of hives throughout the country and fascinating to talk to you today and learn about your yearly operation. But we're gonna get started here with typical hive and work into how your making your livelihood everyday.

- In the pollination business you get honey as a byproduct. But we do pollination for people, whether you're doing almonds or blueberries, lavender, or whatever, and we have to travel around the United States to do this. What will happen is when we come back to Tennessee we've got to increase our numbers because that's the whole business is numbers. How many hives you get, how many can you provide to a grower. So what we do is we get our hives back in here, lets say in another month, so this is a hive minus bees. I think y'all will appreciate that.

- [Matt] We're getting pretty close in here.

- [James] Anyway, you pull frames out, make sure your queen wasn't on it. And you put them over in a nuc hive and throw a lid on it and you've got a nuc in a new hive.

- This is considered one nuc?

- Yep.

- [Matt] And this is the ability to replicate and grow the hives after they've come back from the fields?

- [James] And here we are going into transition spring and it's going to be food everywhere. They're gonna explode and pretty soon. They'll stay in there for a little bit then we'll but them in a regular ten frame hive. And that's our whole game right here on being prepared for wherever we may go later in the summer to do a crop. Whether it's, like I say, cranberry, blueberry, whatever.

- Gotcha, and how many nucs are you trying to create every springtime to keep your hive healthy?

- Theoretically, our bee's will come back in here and they'll be 18 frames in here full of bees. So we can steal four frames and start a nuc or so. So if you've got a hundred hives, on paper, it means you can get our three hundred hives in a couple of months. When you to California, you'll go and you'll usually have a broker or sometimes you end up with a grower. The grower says, "Yeah I see all these boxes, "is there anything in them?' And they've been burnt before, and I'm not out there. I got a good broker and good places to go so we're always on the square, but they'll go out with crews and open up hives and count the bees. They count the bees by looking on the bottom and seeing how many bees are in here. If this top storage has got five frames of bees, they know they got about 15 frames in this hive.

- So keeping your hives up, keeping your hives healthy, very important. You mentioned the types of crops that you're pollinating on a yearly basis, you mentioned cranberries. Take me through a given calendar year for you.

- We're here in the tail end of winter fixing to almost be spring, if we have a spring. We're coming back from California and we're doing almonds. Almonds require two hives per acre. After they've pollinated, then they're ready to come back. Sometimes it can be the end of March before they're ready to come back. We'll come back here, we'll do all our splitting here. Turn around and go maybe to Wisconsin and do cranberries.

- Cranberries.

- Or you can go up east and do blueberries or cranberries. You can go out to the Dakotas and do clover. You can go out to the Dakotas and do clover. Sweet clover which is a type of clover about like we got. And the plant just makes tremendous amounts of honey.

- [Matt] Clover honey.

- And then the end of summer, you go back down Florida, below Orlando where it's warm year round, and you set you set your bees out in locations there. And as things bloom and everything it would be melaleuca tree, Spanish clover, there's something always happening down there. So we go down there and stay there until we get ready to ship from there to California in January. That's basically our calendar year, about five stops. We load them on a semi and there they go.

- So it's pretty much an operation that's meant for pollination services as well as honey productions. It's balanced out throughout the year depending on where you need to go.

- Yeah, my first priority is gonna be pollination, 'cause if you're a grower, I want to be able to fulfill your needs there. And when they go into almonds and do that, they'll have a June drop and that means that all the blossoms and fruit that didn't get pollinated hit the ground. So they can say, "Oh, we didn't get good pollination "on this end of the field," or something. So there's ways to check, that's just a layman's kind of way of doing this. But, yeah, my first priority is gonna be the pollination.

- Pollination, honey secondary.

- Yeah, and bees have been in the honey business longer than I have, so they're gonna make it. But it's also a food source for them. If they're happy, I'm happy. And we have to feed a lot. We feed sugar and syrup, all kinds of stimulants. Pollen patties and things like that.

- [Matt] How often?

- [James] As needed. If I get ready to go somewhere and they aren't topped out, and you stimulate the queen by feeding her or providing food, whether it be in a tree or a flower, then you stimulate her to lay more bees. Because we're looking for numbers, we want more bees, more bees.

- More bees, the more bees the better.

- Yep, 'cause half the bees you see in a hive are workers inside. They're going to stay there 20, 30 days. And then they get their pilots license and go fly around and be a worker bee in the fields until they die. Maybe 30, 45 days.

- [Matt] That's their cycle, yeah.

- That's what we've got to have, We've gotta have those fliers out here and so that's... a field bee works and works and works and brings everything back. Our bees are stationed on pallets instead of individual little hives. These are individual hives, but on a pallet. We use a big fork truck to pick them up, stack them up about three high. We normally just run bees in a two story hive, that's all we want. We pick all these up, stack 450, an even number, on a tractor trailer, put a net over it and they take off from Florida, let's say. And then in two days they can be in California. And they got another hummer bee out there, a fork truck, it takes them off and places them out. And maybe the next night he's got another truck or two coming. It just goes on and on and on.

- [Matt] Until the next stop. And they are staying out in these pollination periods for anywhere between one to two months, is that about right?

- Yeah, some before that.

- They get loaded back up and you got them sent off to another part of the country for a crop.

- Yeah, and it's kind of odd to not ever see winter. Yeah. They're always in the warm periods.

- [James] And I'm out there, too.

- You mentioned almonds, and then after that your doing cranberries--

- We're gonna come here.

- Come back here and then--

- Go do cranberries.

- Then we're going to do cranberries and then the clover season and then after that we're down to Florida.

- Florida and pollinating whatever is available and feeding--

- It can be anything, food crops in the agricultural scene.

- Look at what's at the grocery store, all that produce that's in there is made and grown in southern California or grown in Florida.

- Yep.

- Or South America.

- It's fascinating life you lead here Jim, and I can't thank you enough for all the services. What you do here is absolutely crucial to the food supply, so thank you for taking the time for speaking with us today.

- I'm glad to help.

- All right.

- Native plants are always a hot topic in Tennessee. And I can't think of anywhere they are a hotter topic than at Reflection Riding Arboretum in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Here with John Evans, who is the nursery and horticulture manager here and we're gonna talk about some of these fabulous native plants that you all grow and display and promote to the public.

- Right, yes, we've got just a few of our many things that we sell here. We cultivate a lot of things, we sell them, we also plant them around the property. This one I'm sure most people are familiar with. If you're a plant enthusiast you know this plant. This is butterfly weed, it's a type of milkweed. It's asclepias tuberosa. When it's blooming out in a field, you will see a lot of pollinators gathering around butterfly weed. Here are two other examples. This is spicebush, I just clipped this back, but this isn't very showy in and of itself, but it's critical to the larva of the Spicebush Swallowtail. They have to have something in this genus to feed on. And our local is lindera benzoin, spicebush. We carry that. This is also very interesting, this is a Dutchman's pipe or pipevine. Aristolochia macrophylla is this species. We also carry aristolochia tomentosa. This, the macrophylla, the big leaf is better if you're at a higher elevation with cooler temperatures and weather conditions. If you're down in the valley where you're baked in the heat I would go with tomentosa. So they both have their niche and it is critical to the spice, not the spice but the--

- [Troy] The pipevine swallowtail.

- [John] The pipevine swallowtail, yes.

- [Troy] What are these little seedlings coming up in this flat?

- [John] I'm very excited about these. This is Tennessee ironweed and I collected the seeds last year. I kept them in the refrigerator and I planted them just last week and they're already coming up like gangbusters. What's interesting about this particular plant, Tennessee ironweed, is that it's endemic to just this area, a few counties in Tennessee, a couple in northwest Georgia, northeast Alabama, that's it. That's its entire world distribution.

- [Troy] Speaking of saving species--

- That's the fun one there.

- Yeah.

- That's Franklinia, or the Franklin tree. It's actually named after Benjamin Franklin. John Bartram named it. It was discovered along the Altamaha River in Georgia. They made botanical trip down there, they collected some, they thought it was wonderful, they brought it back to Philadelphia to propagate it and then they kept it in the botanical garden there. They returned some years later and looked for more of them, they were gone. They've never been found again in the wild.

- [Troy] So the only way that you can get this plant is through cultivation. We mentioned pollinators a bit ago and, certainly, this is a great pollinator plant to have out in the garden right now.

- [John] It sure is, that's the obligatory purple coneflower. You can find these in garden shops everywhere. They are a very popular plant, echinacea purpurea. It's not only a great pollinator plant, but when the seeds mature, eastern goldfinches, they love it. It's like candy to them.

- [Troy] I know in my garden when those heads mature in the fall the goldfinches are just all over it.

- [John] Just trips back and fourth to the plant. Now, less common, you won't find this nearly as often in garden shops, is the pale purple coneflower. It's a different species, echinacea pallida. We like to carry several species. We also have Tennessee coneflower, echinacea tennesseensis. Lobelia cardinalis is Cardinal flower, hummingbirds love this. When it's in full bloom these are beautiful tubular flowers. Brilliant scarlet color. Hummingbirds are drawn to them once again, like candy.

- [Troy] And then bee balm.

- [John] Bee balm, also very popular with the pollinators. Bees, obviously, but also butterflies and other pollinators.

- I know in my garden this seems to be a favorite of the tiger swallowtail, that beautiful yellow and black striped swallowtail. I always seem to have those on the monarda and on the summer phlox. This shrub is in bloom right now but the blooms are just really tiny little flowers. What happens after this is finished?

- [John] Well, you get beautiful clusters of very brilliantly colored purple berries, and it's called beautyberry.

- American beautyberry.

- American beautyberry.

- This is our native.

- Not Japanese, this is our native American beautyberry. Interestingly enough, there was a study just published by the University of Alabama. There are a lot of folk remedies for things and some of them pan out and some of them don't. But the University of Alabama just demonstrated that this has been reputed to repel mosquitoes.

- [Troy] Oh really?

- So people have used it traditionally. They've crushed up the leaves, rubbed them on their arms and it's supposed to keep mosquitoes away.

- Interesting.

- Turns out its true.

- And so this has now become a place where people in and around Chattanooga and beyond, if you're passing through the area or coming to visit for a day and you want to add native plants to your garden, you can find them here.

- Right.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org or on YouTube at VolunteerGardener channel and like us on Facebook.