Episode 2816

- [Narrator] Growing vegetables can be done all sorts of ways. In containers or raised beds and, of course, in the ground. We'll visit with a couple of gardeners to see what works for them and their crops. Plus, Julie Berbiglia wants to know if gardening and backyard chickens can coexist. Yes, but with effort. Join us to find out how. In any kind of growing situation, experience is the best teacher.

- People often ask me in their backyard whether they should grow in a raised bed or if they should grow on the flat ground. And so, today we've come to Clarksville, to Penny's garden. Hi, Penny.

- Hi, Jeff. Good to see you!

- It's good to see you. I love they way you have a flat garden and you have the raised bed both, and I'd love to hear about your experiences with those things.

- Well, I think tomatoes make way more sense on the ground. We like to do them with these cattle panels. One of the things I don't like about growing tomatoes are those cages that are constantly falling over. So this has been a really good solution for us. So we just let the tomatoes start put up one side and as they get a little bit bigger, put the other side.

- [Jeff] And just weave them in?

- And just weave them in and out. And they're easy to pick it. It works really well for us.

- [Jeff] There's two kinds of tomatoes, the determinant varieties that only get about three feet tall and bear all their tomatoes at once. Then this would be like a Celebrity. But most tomatoes are indeterminate and they just keep growing and growing and growing. So I could see where in a raised bed that would just be a mess.

- [Penny] And we have a good example of one of those that came up as a volunteer. So you can see what happens in a raised bed.

- Well I can see how it would be hard to fit this big squash patch in a little raised bed.

- Right, we plant these in hills with usually three plants per hill. So you can see what it makes. I can't imagine fitting this in a raised bed, you'd have to have a king size bed in order to get this to work for one plant. So this is an obvious choice for the direct in the ground. Plenty of space needed.

- [Jeff] Well, Penny, your zucchinis are gorgeous! You like to grow them on the ground rather than a raised bed?

- [Penny] Absolutely, you can have the difficulty, it's just keeping them picked everyday. Really, I picked them yesterday and look how big they are already and how to use them. Zucchini fritters, sauteed zucchini, grilled zucchini, everything.

- [Jeff] As the old saying goes, your neighbors are locking their screen doors?

- [Penny] Exactly, yeah, can't give them away fast enough.

- And I see you have eggplants on the ground level, but then over here we have peppers up in your beds.

- [Penny] This just seemed to go. I needed just a little bit of space for these, we're not big eggplant eaters. So sometimes it's not really planning, it's just, "Oh I've got three plants, here's a spot for them."

- [Jeff] Find a space for them.

- [Penny] Yeah, but the peppers, I like having those higher. We use a lot of peppers in the summer, so I like having those in the raised beds. We do have one whole row in the ground, too. It's sometimes not either or, just where you've got the space. But I do like having those little bit higher in the raised beds.

- [Jeff] The ground in the bed looks so dry.

- Well, it is, and that's the other problem with the raised bed, we have actually two levels. This isn't quite as bad here, as we'll see at the other one, but it dries out faster. I guess it's got more air going over it and requires a lot more watering than this. This we're able to mulch and it stays pretty moist. Luckily, we've had a good rain pretty often this year, but we still have to water a little bit more in the raised beds.

- Yeah, there's air getting to the sides and the sun's drying out the soil more.

- Yeah.

- But sometimes you get volunteers coming up in your raised beds?

- Yeah, over here we've got an example of not sure what kind of, maybe a cantaloupe, that started in the raised bed just a volunteer.

- [Jeff] The root is still in the raised bed?

- [Penny] The soot is still in there.

- [Jeff] But you moved it so it's out here.

- [Penny] Well it was taking over the bed, we gently moved it out here so the peppers could survive.

- [Jeff] Look at the cantaloupe!

- Yeah, there it is way down in there. Yeah, so it's doing well here. Sometimes you just have to let them grow where they want to grow.

- [Jeff] Onions, particularly, like drier soils when they're maturing otherwise they get rotty and stuff and so I notice that you have your onions and they look beautiful, but they're up here in the raised bed.

- [Penny] Absolutely, we've had great luck with the onions this year and that seems to be a perfect spot for them.

- [Jeff] And you go both the red and white ones?

- [Penny] Red, white, and yellow. Most the yellows were gone, they were in this bed over here. But yeah, all three.

- [Jeff] Well, Penny, these raised beds look like they'd be really easy on your back.

- [Penny] They are, this is where you want to weed at the end of the day when you're tired from planting in the ground. It's so easy just to stand here and weed, so that's the beauty of this. This is also where we plant things that I don't want a whole lot of. I don't want a great big row of anything.

- I notice a lot of this is your salad stuff. You have radishes.

- We call this a salad bar.

- And carrots and beets.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- [Jeff] And they look really good.

- [Penny] They do, the only difficult part about the raised beds, easy on your back, but we spend a lot of time with the hose out here. We didn't realize when we did this that this was going to be dried out so quickly. So nearly every day.

- This is porous and so it dries out.

- Yeah, if we had it to do over that would be wood or some other material, but it is what it is. Luckily the hoses nearby.

- I wonder if you could stucco it or something, if it would help.

- [Penny] I don't know, that's a thought!

- [Jeff] But this bed would then warm up a little quicker in the spring, too. Get planting or a little earlier.

- [Penny] Yeah, before anything else is ready in the garden over here, we've got lots of stuff going here. The cabbage's up quickly, the bok choy, the herbs. Everything's up quickly here.

- [Jeff] I have found in my experience that the fall garden in Tennessee is one of the most productive that we can have. We have such mild October, November, December that it was just a little bit of protection, maybe a little bit of that floating row cover on it or something when it's real cold, and we can keep the vegetables going all the way until a hard freezes. This setup here is good for that because it is going to be a little warmer than it would be right against the ground where the cold air sinks. Well thank you so much for inviting us out to your garden.

- Thanks for coming to visit!

- [Jeff] It's so beautiful here, Penny.

- [Penny] Thanks very much.

- Well I've always wondered what came first, the chicken or the garden. And how do you keep the chicken out of the garden? And in this garden, whats this weird wire thing I see? Well, know what? Today we're going to visit with Judy Wright and we're going to learn all we can about chickens. I get to come into the chicken coop! I'm so looking forward to this. I see already that you have a handy latch here to keep all the varmints out.

- Like Fort Knox, I've had fox, weasel, raccoons, possum, and honestly, my dog has killed a couple of them. And I've read that it's very common for pets, that's like their biggest, the people that sell chickens, sell a lot to dog owners because even though your dog is having fun out here with them, he doesn't know the line between fun and killing the chicken. So we cannot let them out at the same time.

- [Julia] Well that is one of the most important things in the metro ordinances is to make sure that you understand that these are live animals you're raising and you need to care for them. Now, another part of the ordinance, I understand, is that you need to take care of your neighbors. And I don't mean just giving him eggs.

- [Judy] Yes, we want to be friendly to our neighbors. This structure was built, it had to be 10 feet from the property line and then 25 feet from the next structure in the neighborhood, next house. We can have six chickens if we have an acre, and we have an acre. As as your lot size goes down the number of chickens you're allowed to have goes down. Once you get out of Davidson County you can have all the chickens you want on a farm. The other things that are in the ordinance are that you can't raise chickens for slaughter or breeding. So it's all hens, no roosters either. And the reason for no roosters is that they make a lot of noise in the morning. And so, no roosters.

- [Julia] What I love about being out in these backyard chicken places that are done so well, like yours, Judy, is that they don't smell. An I notice you're doing all kinds of things to protect us from other problems that people might be afraid of with chickens. For instance, you've got a nicely sealed container for the food.

- Yes and underneath here, I put the food, you have to keep the food dry or it becomes moldy, I have that under this. On this side a chicken block, I've found that chickens like to peck when you introduce new chickens. There's a pecking order, right, and they will peck on the newest ones. So whenever I replace chickens I always get two at one time and I put them in the coop at night so that they all wake up together and hopefully happy together. But they are going to, they're going to go after the other two a little bit in the beginning. But I've found that if I have a second food source that they're are little bit okay with that. 'Cause the pecking order really is all about who gets the food first, it's pretty interesting.

- [Julia] So these are some lucky chickens! They have a wonderful coop here and they have a really nice water supply that I see.

- [Judy] Yes, I used to just have the one that was hanging low but they get their feet, they walk all through it and they get their feet in it and they also will poop in it. And so this is a great contraption. It has four nipples on the bottom and it holds about three or four gallons of water and I fill that up every three days.

- Now what about the winter? What do you do for them? Because it can get quite cold out here.

- [Judy] So my husband found this, it's a dog feeder that has a electric cord attached to it and we run an extension cord, outdoor extension cord, out to the house and it doesn't keep the water warm at all. It just is at regular temperature like it would come out of the faucet. And so they we keep out here and I have to bring water out to keep it full.

- The real fun about having chickens, I think, is the fact that they're going to help you with all your gardening. I love the idea that you have free helpers and free eggs, as it were. So let's head out to the garden!

- Okay, great.

- All right, Judy, I see that you're getting ready for the fall and therefore getting ready for next summer. You've got a lot of Buckwheat in here and other cover crops.

- Yes so the best thing you can do for your garden for next summer is to get to use the winter to enrich the soil. And so I have a Buckwheat, Daikon Radish, Crimson Clover growing in these beds. To enhance it even further I open the gates to my garden in the winter so they can poop and then it'll have the winter to turn into compost 'cause you wouldn't add poop right out of a chicken near anything because it would kill the plant. All the nitrogen in it and stuff.

- [Julia] I'm now wondering, Judy, I know that chickens like to peck at a lot of things, which I think includes plants. So what about in the spring and summer when it's time for you to be in the garden?

- [Judy] Yes and one time, I left the house to go run an errand and I didn't close the gate and I came back and everything was topsy turvey in my garden. So my two gardens are totally fenced in, my vegetable gardens. And one of the things I realized with this garden is that as long as they have a platform to land on, the chickens could land here and then get into the garden and so my husband devised this, his fishing line, these nails, they hit this barrier and they go back.

- [Julia] Now, I guess they do get to help maybe, what, trim some of the garden vines during the summer, things that stick out?

- [Judy] Yeah and I actually I don't mind it at all. I totally enjoy it. I will be sitting here working in my garden and I'll look up and all of my chickens will be right there just pecking on the first thing I plant, on Valentine's Day, is peas all the way around here. I love when I'm working in the garden and they're very social so they want to be where you are. So I love when they come over here and they start eating the leaves and the peas I enjoy watching them. There's plenty for all of us.

- Well not only do you have to protect your little chicken friends from hawks and other critters, but you have to sort of protect them from flying out on their own, don't you?

- Yes, and what was happening in the beginning was they would get up to here and then it wasn't a small jump to get over there and to get out. And so with the chickens you have to, what we do what about once a year we trim their wings. We take the chicken and we open up it's one wing and we trim it and it's like cutting nails. They don't feel it and we take about this much off of their flight wings and we do it on just one side, so it makes some unbalanced for flight. And that's what keeps them in the yard. They want to stay close, but every once in awhile they will get out. Like the last time they all got out was when a hawk was here and they just took off in every direction to get away.

- [Julia] Well this gal is letting all of us know of a recent accomplishment. She's performing what's known as the egg song. This happy cackling could go on for an extended period. So for all of you would be backyard chicken keepers, be advised, it's not just roosters that can cause a ruckus! Well this garden is also pretty and I see it's fall and ready for the girls to come in. What are some of their favorite foods out here?

- Well they love, I have sugar cane that I like to grow commercial crops just to see how they grow. And so when they come out here they'll eat these right up and it is when they fall over like this. And it's just fun to watch them eat it and love it. And seeds are good for their diet because there's a lot of protein and you need protein to make eggs. So I love when they eat these.

- Well chicken seem to be a great form of entertainers.

- They're totally entertaining. I film them all the time, they crack me up.

- They're garden helpers, as you mentioned, they supply you with some eggs, but they're also a waste management caretaker for you. So we've got your compost pile here, but it really is sort of a breakfast bar for them.

- [Judy] Yes, well said! So, yes, I throw food out here nothing that's cooked, egg shells, coffee grounds, I just can't believe how much they empty those those little packets out. So I've recently learned that because I didn't have any eggs for most of the last two months and of course we had a heat wave, but I also was really excited to give them some compost and I was giving him like pasta and rice and bread and of course they were eating it up because they love it. It's carbs, who doesn't like them, but what happened was they weren't eating their grain that's totally formulated to make sure they get about 18% protein in their diet and they need protein to make the eggs, which of course have a lot of protein in them and so I now have them on a diet of uncooked vegetable scraps, egg shells, and grapes, things that are good for them, seeds, there on a diet! No more carbs like that.

- [Julia] Even chicken shouldn't have just candy, I guess.

- [Judy] Right, exactly! If you want him to make eggs and that is the primary purpose. now the other thing that is just bonus has been that they're composters. It's like they they eat and poop all day and I love it because I love throwing stuff out here and finding nothing later on in the day. So that has just really been fun. Now what usually happens after Thanksgiving, my friends will call me and ask if they can bring all of their you know squash gourds and all that kind of stuff and so I just this whole thing is filled up every November and then by May, April, it's all gone and the chickens are in here eating the pumpkin and the seeds and they're also just decaying at their normal rate. And here's the other thing I never turn my compost because the chickens turn it all the time as they dig and look for worms and it's great, it's fun. It's fun to watch.

- Well happy chicken, happy garden, I guess is the story here.

- Now see here's the we clean out there every few weeks, put it on here this is going to compost over the winter, like I said I would never put this directly onto any of my crops. They're going to move this around and at some point in the spring I'll mix all this together and put it out on my garden for compost.

- Well, there's one other thing I've been thinking about with the chickens is I know the ordinances say that you can only have the girls. So what happens if you accidentally get a boy, does that happen?

- It happens. So a lot of times when you see the chickens are being sold in various Ag stores usually in about February and March in various Ag stores usually in about February and March and they say that you're getting they've all been sexed and that they're females but like our first brood, one of them was a rooster and that happens. And you have to be prepared for it and we gave it away to a farmer who was happy to get our beautiful Buff Orpington. It's hard to give them up because it's hard to raise them from little baby chicks 'cause they're dirty, they take a lot of work. It seems like fun especially around Easter time, but it's a lot of work to clean up after them and feed them and keep their water clean. The little chicks like to walk in the water, they like to walk in their food and their feet are dirty from walking in poop. So it's a lot of work and so when you have to give up one of those six chickens because it's a rooster, your little let down that means one less egg. So anyway, we give him away when that's happened, it's happened twice.

- [Julia] Chickens are a big responsibility, but if you're up for that responsibility and you're willing to learn a lot about it, it sounds like I having chickens is really a great thing to do, especially for gardeners. You can mix and match with your chickens in your garden. If you ever want to go into chickens yourself, well you could figure out which did come first, the chicken or the garden? And in the meantime you could enjoy your eggs!

- [Marty] Everybody wants to grow great tomatoes and this is Jim King who is the wonderful gardener growing these massive plants. Your plants for this time of year look terrific and tell me how did you get started with this? Last winter I read a book by Craig LeHoullier, called "Epic Tomatoes." Turned out I read it just in time, in the January time frame, to begin planning for the spring.

- Yeah, that's perfect.

- I've never grown tomatoes before but I read Craig's book and basically just followed his recipe. I went through his book I picked out a bunch of varieties that I wanted to grow, ordered seeds from places like Seed Savers Exchange, Johnny's Seeds, that kind of thing.

- It's all online.

- It's all online.

- Mail order.

- Got the seeds, I had ordered the mix. Started off with the stuff called Metro Mix 360 he recommends, put up the seeds with the help my daughter in a bunch of small seed flats, started him on March first.

- Under grow lights?

- A grow light and a heating mat--

- So, bottom heat.

- Bottom heat, about 80 degree temperature. Once the seedlings came up I put him under a grow light. Two or three weeks later I transplanted the seed seedlings from their individual small pots into individual four inch pots. Again, using the Metro Mix 360. And then transplanted them out into these larger pots, probably mid April.

- [Marty] Right after the last frost date, which in our area, which is middle Tennessee, is April 15th, tax day.

- If I had to do it over again, I probably would have put them out a little bit later 'cause we had some cold temperatures right in April and I think that contributed to some of the catfacing I got early in the season.

- It can, yeah. Catfacing, for those who don't know, is where the bottom, the blossom end of the tomato, has this weird kind of distortion and almost looks like scarring. It looks kind of like a weird cat face. I water them twice a day. This patch here has drip irrigation setup on it, so it's on a timer. Comes on for five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the afternoon. Keeps the water level fairly constant. And these containers you really can't water too much 'cause the excess water runs out the bottom.

- [Marty] You've got some mulch on top of this too, right?

- [Jim] That mulch to help keep it from drying.

- [Marty] Yes but this is the Metro Mix down in here?

- [Jim] The pots themselves contain a mix of Metro Mix and composted cow manure.

- [Marty] Okay, so really rich soil. Tomatoes are fairly heavy feeders. And now you're caging them too, I see.

- I started off, some of them I'm caging. I started off with the intention not to cage them, but the work involved in tying them up every day and every week got to be too much.

- I'm a huge caging fan.

- So, I think next year I'll use more cages. I used the concrete reinforcing wire.

- I did a segment on making these one time.

- Okay, I played around with different diameters, I think the ideal solution is a smaller cage, for me, that sits inside.

- [Marty] Right, so it can be as tall as--

- [Jim] You can use the whole height of the metal reinforcing wire.

- [Marty] Yeah, this is a five inch, I mean 5 foot.

- [Jim] Right, it's a little short with the plant in the pot. So this one over here has the cage in the pot.

- Right, this works a lot better.

- This is the Mortgage Lifter plant there, going to, probably, nine feet tall.

- That's vast! Look at all the fruit coming on that! What do you feed your tomatoes with?

- [Jim] I've been using just the Miracle Grow Tomato and Vegetable--

- [Marty] Is that a liquid that you add or--

- It's a powder that I dissolve in water and I supplement that with some added phosphorus for flowering aspect of the tomato plants that's so important. So about every two weeks I'll put some Miracle Grow fertilizer on there.

- Did you mix any fertilizer into the original soil mix?

- There was there was about 1/2 a cup of pelletized fertilizer that I started with in the Metro Mix in the beginning. I also had to adjust the pH. Initially the pH was around seven.

- Yeah, that's a little high.

- Little high, so I added some sulfur try to lower that make a little more acidic, I got it down around 6.5.

- That's good.

- And then about every two weeks I spray with a sulfur based spray, Bonide tomato spray, and--

- [Marty] Sulfur as a very good organic remedy. And when did you start? Let me ask you this, when did you start your spray program?

- Well from what I've read, you don't want the blight to get started you want to try to hit it ahead of time. So I started spraying the Bonide in early May--

- Before it ever showed up.

- Yeah, fairly early. I've just kept it up concentrating mostly on the bottom half of the plan for the most part. I also keep the water off the plants, I use the drip irrigation which achieves that, but I work hard not to spray any water yeah leaves.

- Yeah, it's some moisture born fungus and splashing water, rain of course isn't your friend, in that way but how you water makes a big difference. This is a Potato Leaf plant, but it's a Lillian's Yellow.

- Lillian's Yellow.

- [Jim] Delicious tomato, one of my favorites as well.

- If you're wondering about what that means, potato leaf. Tomatoes come in sort of two flavors of leaves and it's just varietal it doesn't have much to do with whether they work well here or not. This is sort of normal leaf, you can see that's what you're used to over here and this is what's called potato leaf because it has leaves that are reminiscent of the potato plant leaves. Potatoes and tomatoes are related, so that's not super unusual. So, Jim, here's another bunch of tomatoes and these are not in full blasting all day sun.

- They're not, they miss the morning sun, they get good midday and late afternoon sun.

- And that's obviously enough.

- Yeah and this is where I started early in the season, but I realized that more sun would be better and so one of the advantages of container growing is that you can move the yeah the plants to better location. So that's what I did I move these to the other location in the front of the house and they get much better sun there.

- Right, these look good!

- They grow well, but it's just not ideal.

- You were saying you had some blossom end rot early on.

- I had a lot of blossom end rot in the first batch of tomatoes. The second, the subsequent batches of tomatoes had not been affected by that, but really the first batch was badly affected.

- That's where you see it is with the first tomatoes of the season, it's 'cause the calcium isn't made its way through the plant moves extremely slowly through a plant. So you'll get the first tomatoes that look crummy and you wonder what's wrong and then the problem takes care of itself, it disappears. Well thank you so much for sharing all your expertise, this is just wonderful.

- Thanks for visiting.

- Lovely! Like Jim, I've always wanted to grow, there's so many varieties, and I've always wanted to grow more tomato varieties and I ever had room for or could deal with if they started producing. So over the years I would trial every year, I would do some new varieties in addition to my favorites and I've made a list of the one set that worked best for me and I'm sharing them with you as well as with Jim. And I hope you try these and love them.

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