Episode 2817

- [Narrator] Many Tennessee farmers say hemp production isn't living up to the hype. Pests, the drying and finding a buyer are some of the challenges. Sheri Gramer visits Allenbrooke farm in Spring Hill for a year in review report from farmer Dan. Plus, Phillipe Chadwick learns how the good work of Compost Nashville, is reducing landfill waste and contributing to soil health. Stay tuned.

- [Narrator] First, Tennessee is a great place to be growing hemp, but it has its challenges.

- [Sheri] We're at picturesque Allenbrooke farm in Spring Hill, Tennessee today on a sultry late summer day and we're visiting with Dan, and he is going to share with us one of the newest crops that is very popular in the state of Tennessee, hemp farming. You grew the seedlings?

- [Dan] Yeah, we grew all our seedlings this year, had all our fields furrowed and prepped.

- [Sheri] And how much acres do you have in hemp?

- [Dan] We did like 12 acres this year. But only like four or five was the early stuff that we're harvesting right now the rest will come on in the next couple weeks, like even in November, I believe.

- So this is your first year to do this?

- Yes ma'am.

- You learning on a curve here, right? What to do and what not to?

- Yeah, and there's a lot of lessons I've learned too. It's a really hardy really strong plant, unlike vegetables that will just kind of get a specific disease, or a specific insect, they like they'll get them all. Everything that any plant will get, they get it.

- [Sheri] And so how do you control the insects then?

- [Dan] Well, being certified organic, there's not really much that we can do, we just had to take a little bit of loss on that. But yeah, and also with this new crop, it's not regulated to have a lot of different pesticides and everything, you know, it's going into people consuming it, so it will get kicked back if it has too many pesticides on it. So we basically use nothing and just took a little bit of loss, but it all worked out in the end.

- And so, from the time frame, from when you started your own seedlings, so give me a time frame from starting the seedlings to now we're harvesting it and it is the middle almost the end of September.

- [Dan] Yes, okay, when y'all were out last time, those seedlings we had been planning for about three weeks from seed to grow into about that tall. We planted them out the week after that. So that would be like middle of May, I believe we planted everything out, cultivated a few times and some irrigation, then they get so big you kinda can't get in within the kinda the grasses have to grow up, so that would be four months in the dirt. And now we're pulling big hearty plants out, big nice colas full of oil.

- What do you call that?

- Colas, they call the big flowers colas. They're full of oil and now we're harvesting them all on these wagons taking them up to our drying barn.

- So Dan, we've got some critters here?

- Yes.

- Tell us what's going on.

- This is a patch of silver haze. It's a really high oil content plant. Some of the problems we're seeing in Tennessee right now with this plant, are mainly caterpillars. The caterpillars will go in and basically everywhere they touch, it'll just turn to brown destruction, everywhere. Here's your guy right here.

- So when you harvest there's a pillar right there, yeah?

- Wherever they're touching, it just falls apart. So that has been a really big problem for a lot of farmers in Tennessee combating and dealing with that.

- [Sheri] Cause obviously as you said you can't spray 'em with anything?

- [Dan] There's not much that you can use in this crop, especially much that works well. So yeah, it's kind of like something you just gotta live with, and try to get out before they all take it down.

- [Sheri] These plants are still salvageable.

- [Dan] Now these are totally salvageable, I'd say like off of this plant, we only have maybe 2% loss, so there's still tons of really good oil,

- [Sheri] So when you're stripping these do you just pull off that or do you not worry about it?

- We'll pull this off, sometimes, if you were to hang dry it, you would wanna take all of this off before hang dry it, 'cause it could cause mold and the slow dry situation. Not just that, we have problems with there's basically every disease, I can take you and show you southern blight that will just kill an entire plant overnight. There's septoria problems, there's fusarium wilt, there's powdery mildew, there's basically every disease you think of in here, but at the same time, the plants really are strong and it does like to push through a lot of that, but of course it's gonna affect your yields, soil quality, crop rotation, those things always help. Very heavy feeder, I've heard that you don't really have to, you can replant the next year right after, I probably will not. I'll probably furrow these out and cover crop and then do heavy compost on it. Do my acreage like in a couple other spots on the farm. I'm just really big into rotations and cover crops and I want to make sure I get those on the soil. There also, there's such an interesting plant, I mean, they literally have the male and a female.

- Okay, I did not realize that.

- So part of our thing this year was we had to walk through every field, every row looking for males and

- [Sheri] And how do you distinguish that?

- [Dan] Well, the male will have little flowers, it's structured differently, actually little flowers that open up a little pollen sacks. This stuff obviously is just kind of a big, flowery kind of thing so, they look very different. It's just takes a long time to find out.

- [Sheri] Do you have to have a certain ratio then?

- [Dan] No, you want zero males.

- [Sheri] Okay, so you

- [Dan] 'Cause males will pollinate and then start producing seeds and then that lowers the oil production.

- [Sheri] Okay, so you pull them out when you find them.

- [Dan] Yeah, so we had to go find every single one, which on this batch from Oregon CBD seeds, they claim to have one in every 4000, and that's about what we found.

- [Sheri] Really?

- Yes. So we found two males out here and like a 6000 plant grow.

- Wow!

- Yeah.

- [Sheri] Dan, this is a different variety, what is this?

- [Dan] This is called Late Sue. So we planted this in the middle of July, towards the end of July even, and it's supposed to harvest around Thanksgiving.

- [Sheri] And the frost will bother it?

- [Dan] That's what they say.

- Wow, so this looks like potentially could be taller than the other varieties.

- [Dan] Yeah, it definitely could be, it just started to go into flowering, so you can see the baby little flowers just starting. What I've noticed with the others is once they go into flowering they typically will double in size before they're ready to harvest. And I've also dry farmed all of this, so it has had no irrigation and it has not rained here for forever. Actually, I think since I planted it, so I'm pretty surprised at how good it's done with not having any water in six months.

- [Sheri] How is the state of Tennessee for growing hemp, compared to other states?

- [Dan] It's really, really good. They've changed a lot of the laws, they've reduced the amount of paperwork, they've made it more friendly for everybody to get licenses when they wanna get licenses and not have a certain window to get license now it's open up all year. They're really good about the Total THC vs. Delta-9 THC which is a thing. Hemp is considered hemp by being less than .3% Delta-9 THC, Hemp is considered hemp by being less than .3% Delta-9 THC, which is the compound that gets you high or whatever. Some states have the Total THC, which limits the amount that you can grow, and you have to take them down earlier. The laws in Tennessee allow us to really max the potential of this plant out, so we can get every drop of oil from there.

- [Sheri] So longer growing periods they allow you is basically what you're saying?

- [Dan] Yes. Also the movement permits are very easy to get. So that's a huge thing to be able to go online and print off a movement permit, so you can move your biomass within just a matter of a couple minutes, and so that way, all the law enforcement knows and everybody knows, and that to me is huge. There's a lot of states that don't have that and heard people are getting pulled over and get in trouble cause they don't know this or that, but the way they put everything in place in Tennessee is really awesome. They've done a really great job, whoever's done it thank you very much.

- [Sheri] So explain to me how you find a market for this. So you've you've grown it, you're harvesting it, you're drying it with a big commercial dryer that you've purchased, then where do you go?

- [Dan] Well, we're looking to processors, specifically some out of state because they have the big facilities to handle, you know, 10,000 pounds of processing a day.

- [Sheri] And how much pounds do you get in a day?

- Well, right now we're getting about 1000 pounds dry day.

- Significant amount.

- Yeah, pretty good.

- Considering it's pretty lightweight.

- [Dan] Yeah, it's nice. Like we will have this all dried and put in bags today. So that kind of speeds up the process for us. And yeah this wagon, I've noticed every wagon its a bit about 100 pounds of biomass.

- [Sheri] And I noticed this is a tobacco wagon.

- [Dan] Yeah, they are working really good.

- [Sheri] That's kinda cool that you discovered that it.

- [Dan] Yeah, well, there's a bunch of old tobacco farmers that have a bunch of these that don't use them anymore. So a couple of them let me buy a few and it's working out really good for the hemp. We've actually pulled them in and not gotten to work on them and let them dry out just on these and that worked really well also.

- [Dan] All right Dan, I want you to walk us through the drying process from start to finish, I know you do things a little bit differently cause you have a commercial dryer and I want you to share that with everyone.

- [Dan] Yes ma'am. For us, we will harvest, put on wagons, we'll take the wagons up to our drying facility up there. We take each plant off, we strip it down to just stems.

- [Sheri] And that's all done by hand?

- [Dan] Yeah, we're cutting it, we were using loppers, now we're using some hedge trimmers, but that goes a little faster, but then we take this by hand and feed it to machine to just basically strip all this off. Once we have this in big buckets, we just continually load the machine, it goes through about a three hour cycle and then comes out dry ready to put in bags.

- [Sheri] And once you start that machine?

- [Dan] We just feed it, as long as you feed it, it's pumping stuff out.

- [Sheri] But you can't stop it in the middle of the drying process and go to bed for the night, right?

- [Dan] We can, we found that we can like leave the box full and then come in in the morning and just do it real fast if we're getting really tired and it's 1 a.m and we wanna go to asleep, but it's better just to keep it going.

- [Sheri] So what do you see in the future, for hemp in Tennessee? You are kind of hitting on a few little problems that there's a lot of people that think it's a sort of get rich quick.

- [Dan] Nothing's ever get rich quick.

- [Sheri] Not in farming.

- The US Navy, the lottery maybe, if you win a lottery. You know everything takes a lot of hard work, it takes a lot of marketing, it takes a lot of planning, it takes a lot of coordinating workers and still even in that the bugs can come through and mess you all up or something. So the market I think is gonna be good. It's just, I think it gonna take a little bit to sort out, we got a lot of processors in Tennessee, they're gonna be coming online in like late October and early November, that'll be wanting to source local biomass and I think that'll be good for people.

- So what's this smaller person that's just doing a few acres, what kind of problems are they running into, you had touched that they don't have commercial dryers, so.

- [Dan] Well yes, drying is an issue. It takes a lot of room to dry this crop. They're saying about whatever square footage you're using for tobacco you need about triple that for hemp, so a lot of these five acre tobacco bars can only do maybe an acre and a half, which is a problem when someone has six acres. So I'm sure people can get very creative and figure out a lot of different things, and which will help the industry too, 'cause someone smart out there will figure out something how to do quick and easy. I've had fun with it this year, it's been a really fun plant to grow. Any plant that will grow a foot in a day, it's just really fun to watch.

- It grows that fast?

- [Dan] It can when it's covered up in veg you can literally watch it grow, and that's really exciting and really fun.

- [Sheri] Well, I wanna tell you, thank you on behalf of all of our viewers. We've learned a lot, we've seen a lot and hemp, I think it's gonna be a good cash crop for the state of Tennessee in years to come.

- [Dan] I believe so too.

- [Sheri] Thank you so much Dan and Allenbrooke Farms for hosting us today.

- [Dan] Thanks for coming out, anytime.

- [Sheri] Thanks.

- Compost is one of the best things you can add to your garden. Today we're gonna talk with Compost Nashville and how they partner with individuals and companies and how they help grow food, and not landfills.

- [Phillipe] I'm here with Beadle from Compost Nashville, he's one of the co-founders. So this is probably some of the most beautiful compost I've ever seen. Tell me about kind of yours practices.

- [Beadle] What we do as a business, is facilitate people and businesses having access to compost. Compost Nashville itself doesn't make the compost from start to finish necessarily, but what we do is we provide a collection service to homes, apartments, businesses, so that they get their food scraps and other compostable materials from their location to a processing facility. So we take it out to a processing facility in Ashland City, Tennessee, where is in turned into this beautiful material, so that's a big shout out to the compost company as well, who we partner with to bring everything full circle.

- [Phillipe] How often do you pick up from you said residences and commercial?

- Yeah both, so residential is once a week, so we come by your home, apartment or condo once a week and take away all your food scraps and compostables. And then for a commercial like a restaurant, you know, they they tend to need more frequent pick up than that, so twice a week seems to be what we normally do for them, sometimes three times, sometimes once, it depends on their needs.

- [Phillipe] What kind of guidelines do you put on, you know what people give you?

- [Beadle] Well, that's one of the great things about what we do, is that we can take things that you can't compost at home. So in your home compost bin, you wouldn't typically put meat and dairy and bones and certain things like that. You also wouldn't be able to compost certified compostable plastics, which is now a big market out there to help people get away from plastics and start still being able to have their to-go items but have to be environmentally friendly. So we accept meat bones, dairy, like I said, Compost will take out containers, and then your whole gamut of fruits and veggies, and also anything that was once a plant, right, can be turned back into soil. So that goes for paper, cardboard, etc.

- Yeah, so that's important for our home viewers to know that a lot of the things that you do take people do not wanna put in their home compost, such as, bones and those plastics because they're a long term thing and they're going to attract animals and stuff. So how large of an area do y'all serve?

- [Beadle] Yeah, well we started out real small you know, it was just me, a Camry and two customers. So I kinda serviced wherever they were. But now we've grown a lot since we started the business, and we service pretty much the greater Nashville area, Brentwood and Franklin.

- Oh wow.

- Yeah. So we've grown a lot. We've had some demand in other parts people sign up in La Vergne and Mount Juliet, but we're not there yet. So eventually we hope to be everywhere. But yeah, if you live in Nashville, it's pretty much a good bet that you're in our service area.

- Yeah, very cool. So, if somebody signed up with you, they would have this?

- Yes, wow!

- This is what they would fill, then you would pick up weekly?

- Right, this is a residential bin, it's four gallons. We also provide you with a starter package which comes with a Compost Nashville bumper sticker and a fridge magnet, that shows you everything you can compost with us. So we make it really easy for you just to look at the list and be like, "yep, that's on the list and it goes in here."

- [Phillipe] That's really helpful, so.

- [Beadle] On top of that, a portion of the soil, or compost generated from their food scraps is given back to them. Twice a year, early spring, early fall, for peak planting time, we deliver that compost back to your doorstep. And then if they don't have a use for that compost, if they live in an apartment or a condo, or they don't garden, we donate that compost to a local farm or community garden like you see here. We're just trying to close the food loop here in Nashville keeps out of the landfill.

- Yeah, and your motto is?

- To grow food not landfills.

- [Phillipe] That's great, yeah. As I mentioned, Compost Nashville depends on commercial and residential. I'm here with Wendi from Mitchell's Deli in East Nashville and y'all are one of the commercial contributors to their compost.

- [Wendi] We compost our front of house, to go cups, and pretty much anything that a customer would get. And then we also do all of our vegetable waste, our meat waste, and we also have a cold room so anything that comes out of there, yeah, gets composted.

- [Phillipe] So like this whole I have like a potato salad with bacon this product, so what's in there, the whole thing or

- Yeah once once it's eaten, the whole container can get thrown into the compost, and then we send it off to Compost Nashville and they are able to break it down, just like our coffee cups or soup.

- Well, these to me these look like traditional things, 'cause they're kind of paper product, they feel like that, but this is what's striking my opinion. So it seems like plastic to me, and it's not an actual plastic.

- It's not an actual plastic, Its well, I think they're calling it a plant based plastic. But since it is plant based, it is able to be broken down with high heat. And so that's what Compost Nashville does.

- Ah, nice. So in your kind of by your trash areas, you have a specific thing for patrons to drop compost material.

- [Wendi] Yeah, we have three different bins and one of them specifically called labeled compost. We go through a lot of cups in a month. And so the main goal was to get away from having a disposable cup for everybody. So we've started handing out pint glasses for a tea or a soda. But a lot of people like to take it with them, and so we are now able to hand out a compostable cup and it's clear just like the potato salad. But it's now compostable.

- [Phillipe] That's wonderful. So just cause I know just in not talking with different businesses, a lot of people use styrofoam, which is totally like the opposite of kind of what we're doing here, are these products a little more expensive, like where's that range?

- Yes they're a little more expensive, but it's not as much as you would think it would be. We had already been getting like paper things. And so when it came down to it, I think this packaging actually was less because it's one piece instead of two. So it was equal or a little bit less, the more we were paying. But the cup, I think was with the lid was 10 or 15 cents more. And so with some of the savings that we were able to grab, by using glassware, we now no longer have to worry so much about as large of an increase. So we've reduced, at the same time we've switched to compostable, we've reduced the amount that we're using.

- Yeah, cause I know the bottom line is very important with a small business you do have to be conscious of that, while being conscious of your choices of what to use.

- Yeah.

- That's great. And I'm sure people notice that too. Have you had like customers make comments on that, like, "I appreciate that, nothing's styrofoam here."

- Yeah, so we've been doing some social media pushes and almost every time we get lots of good feedback. And then in-house too, I've had a few customers say, "I've noticed what you're doing, and I really appreciate it." So it's people and our customers, they really do notice.

- [Phillipe] Good, that's very important. It's also a pretty good thing too.

- Yeah, that you're not just doing something that could just, you know, you could be saving money otherwise but...

- Right. It's worth it to you?

- It's worth it, yeah.

- Cool, so Well, I appreciate you telling us about everything and I appreciate your good decisions. Beadle mentioned earlier that you can donate your compost if you don't have a use for it. I'm here with Sylvia Ganier at Green Door Gourmet and y'all are one of the recipients of their compost, right?

- We are a delighted recipient of that compost because it's fabulous. We have a number of CSA customers that live in apartments, or don't really have as much gardening use for as much compost as would be generated by their family, and they designate us, as a way to get compost back after they've purchased our vegetables. So it's a full circle as well. It's a win-win.

- [Philipe] It is a win-win, that's great. And so with compost, I mean we're here in a beautiful winter greenhouse full of lush stuff. I assume that y'all would come in and kind of top dress this when you first plant these, is that how you use it?

- Absolutely. So what we'll do is, in a hoop house situation we'll come in, we'll broad fork everything before we're ready to plant, then we take some of that beautiful black gold out there that you saw earlier, and we'll blend that in with the soil, so it creates this very rich but loamy and pliable workable soil, and the seeds and the plants just love it.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, that's wonderful. So do you only apply at the beginning of the planting?

- [Sylvia] Only in that particular form. Now the other thing that's really great for farmers is making compost tea. And so we'll come back and do a foley or compost tea a little bit later on, as things need a little bit more nourishment, but usually this is pretty good until far into their lifecycle to need anything else. It's very diligent and how it's able to deliver a long period of nutrient to the plant.

- [Phillipe] Right, that's one of the best things about organic gardening, is that it's a slow release into it, so it's slightly less work for us in that aspect.

- [Sylvia] And we always love anything that's just a little bit less work.

- [Phillipe] Oh, yeah, can't beat that. People really underestimate the value of compost in a garden, whether it be home or on a large scale like this, it really is a huge benefactor to growing plants.

- We can't grow things without the nutrient value. We've gotta have it.

- Yeah, and most people most of the time at home, you need to add compost to your soil because you've leached it of everything growing the same things in the same spots.

- [Sylvia] Yes and I think a lot of people think, "oh, I've got to start every year and I've got to dump all the old soil out and start over." And really, if you learn how you can use that material that you have, and enrich it with really great stuff coming in, you might not have to buy as much but you're still getting the benefit of rebuilding the soil, which is better in the long run than just having it runoff into a creek or anything somewhere like that when you dump it out. So you wanna rebuild your soil and you do that by using compost.

- Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can tell that it's really helping you out here, I mean, these plants that were standing in here absolutely beautiful, it's making me hungry.

- [Sylvia] We can have a salad bar lunch, right?

- [Phillipe] That sounds great, thank you so much.

- [Troy] Some of my favorite gardens are small gardens. And we're in the Richland-West Neighborhood today, at a really beautiful, early 20th century home, built probably sometime between the 19 teens and 1930 or so. And most of these houses, though the houses are quite large, the lots are really very small. And this is a garden that has really taken advantage of their small lot, their small space, and created a tremendous amount of interest. So come with me and discover a really beautiful garden. One of the the first things that you'll notice about this house is that it sits very close to its neighbor. And they have really taken full advantage of the narrow space between the houses. This is full of mostly native wildflowers, but there are some non-native things in here also. There are few hostas, there are some shrubs, this beautiful mock-orange that's flowering, and a couple of really spectacular native shrubs that are good plants for any garden. The first one is Itea or Virginia sweetspire, and it's just coming into bloom, and once these are completely open, they'll put on a good little show for several weeks, and they're also sweetly fragrant. And then next to it, is one of everybody's favorite native shrubs, and this is what they call Silverleaf Hydrangea or the native Lacecap Hydrangea, it's Hydrangea Arborescens and you can see that it's just getting ready to come into bloom. In a few more weeks, this will have a little white lacecap type flowers on it. And they call it Silverleaf because the backside of the leaf is fuzzy and silvery white. There are a couple of varieties where this has been selected for being really white, and when you get a breeze and the branch turns backwards or upside down sort of, you get this really nice silver backside of the leaf showing also. As you enter the back garden, there are many flowering shrubs that extend the season from spring through fall, and we're about to meet the homeowner. This is Carter, thank you so much for having us in the garden this morning.

- Troy, thank you for coming.

- Tell us a little bit about the garden and how many years you all have been here and sort of what the process was.

- Right, we moved to this neighborhood in 1970 Troy, which is 40 years now, hard to believe. At that time the yard was pretty much it looked like it does now, except it was larger. And because we have put an addition on the house, and as a result the garden got to be a mess after the addition. And that's when we began to put it like it is now, and get it into its present form. A number of the bushes and plants are old, date back into the 1930s probably. For example, this duchess over here, which is a native plant, a pretty rare one. We have a farm down at Dixon and we brought a number of native plants from there as well as buying them from different places.

- [Troy] You've really utilized every square inch of space to its fullest advantage I think.

- [Carter] Yes, we feel like we have.

- [Troy] And you have interest, I feel like in this garden probably year round. Even when the leaves fall there are interesting structures, there are some evergreens here and there,

- [Carter] A number of branches that look great in the winter.

- [Troy] Right, obviously we're in mid May right now, the peonies are in bloom, the hydrangeas behind us are just getting ready to start, but there are daylilies and so many other things throughout the garden that keep the season going.

- [Carter] Correct.

- [Troy] And I also noticed that the peonies are huge, and they have to be old plants.

- [Carter] Yes they are, those were put in by one of the former owners, who actually lived here for 30 years. From 1925 to 1955, so you see how old they are.

- [Troy] So they're at least 50 years old, and some of them maybe even approaching 60, 70, 80 years old.

- [Carter] And as we put on the addition, we had to move all the peonies, almost every one of them, and usually people say they won't come back, right?

- [Troy] Right.

- [Carter] But these have done very well.

- [Troy] Yes they have, they're beautiful. One of the things that really strikes me about your garden is that there are so many layers of color and texture, and everything from the lawn on up to the ground covers, and right on up to trees and shrubs, it makes you feel like you're not really quite so much in a neighborhood, even though you've got neighbors right next door and very close to you. Certainly one of the most spectacular plants in the garden is this beautiful rose that's climbing the side of the garage, and I understand there's a story about that, so fill us in.

- [Carter] This rose is called the Seven Sisters, or the Greville rose. It was introduced into the US in 1817. And my wife, Emily's great great grandmother grew that in her garden. So we were able to get a cutting of it, and here it is.

- [Troy] And here it is. Thank you, Carter for letting us come and visit your garden and for helping us show the folks at home that even in a small space, you can take the most advantage of it and have a beautiful garden, thank you.

- [Carter] Well, thank you for coming, we appreciate it.

- [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.