Episode 2909

- Is your landscape much to look at in the winter? Phillip Chadwick, strolls an estate garden to examine those trees and shrubs that can carry the garden long after the flowers have faded. Jeff Poppen shows us how he effectively stores surplus crops. And Tammy Algood visits a Murfreesboro gardener who has a knack for collecting cool plants come along. Interesting textures, colors, fragrance, and flowers. Yes, even in the winter months.

- You don't always need flowers in a garden to make it interesting. We're here in the dead of winter in this beautiful maintained garden. And we're gonna walk around and look at some trees and shrubs that add color and interest throughout the year. I'm here today with Paul Olynyk from Backyard Magicians, and we're gonna look at some really cool specimens in this garden today. What do we have here right here?

- This is a PICEA abies Little gem and little gem has grafted onto a standard lollipop. The nurseries will generally grow these as shrubs and this was grafted to give it that effect of a tree form.

- Do you shear this or does it keep that form?

- Just really just once a year do a very light shearing to it and it's good to go. It's a gonna keep that compact look. This tree I would say is over 20 years old.

- Wow and it's that small?

- Correct.

- So lots of really dwarfed things in this garden?

- A lot of dwarf things and again, the key thing I always like to stress for people to understand is that you see how it's built up.

- Right.

- Drainage is a key for all your spruces.

- Sure.

- It just helps to keep them happy.

- Yeah, so what's this tall cylindrical one we've got right here next to it.

- This is your PICEA Glauca pendula we've dealt with some of these that are easily 20 feet tall.

- Wow, and what kind of width on that?

- You're gonna probably max out about five feet.

- Wow.

- It's gonna grow similar to what an arborvitae would but just give you a whole lot more interest.

- So really tight. And is this, this is the same conditions of kind of good drainage, but even moisture.

- This drainage in this particular spot is not as good as that spot.

- Yeah, but out here on this clear day, I mean you really see the structure of this plant is particularly at the top.

- And look at the top straight as an arrow.

- Yeah, it really is straight as an arrow.

- So we're here on a four acre garden, pretty open space with a lot of mature trees, obviously, as you can hear there's a nice stream running through that runs to another big river on that really helps in the setting of a lot of these trees also. So we've got a really interesting one right here. I see some crazy bark on this, on this weeping tree. What's tell me about this guy.

- This is Acer palmatum Ryusen. Ryusen as your palmatum form of weeping Japanese maple but this one in was grafted to what they call bark. And that is that Piney bark that you see right here.

- Wow, yeah that's, I've never seen anything like that.

- Well this pretty dense with the foliage during the season. So it's really only in the winter time that you can truly appreciate the bark on this type of a tree.

- Yeah, but having this heavy of a weeper elevated that high makes it really really interesting too. Cause usually they're kinda low and they just run on the ground.

- Yes.

- So what's this a beautiful spruce tree we've got over here? That is your PICEA Orientals Aero Aureospicata. That should be one of the spruces if you want to tall, big spruce. That should be used here in Tennessee.

- Okay, yeah I know a lot of people have issues with spruce trees because of our heat and our humidity. So that's a little more tolerant of that down here.

- Yes, but still drainage of the key with them. This tree is very strong to our humidity

- And I love it's kind of it's arching out arms as opposed to kind of a dense tree which we get most of our evergreens are real, pretty dense. So it's really got a nice kind of open structure going there. We've got a really nice one here right here out by the road with this blue color on it. Tell me about this tree.

- This is the traditional Montgomery blue spruce. Also you could say globosa, I've talked to lots of people that say basically it's the same tree. This tree I got from a grower who is now in her eighties. And if I'm not mistaken this trees anywhere from 40 to 50 years of age.

- Wow, so it's a very, very slow grower

- Very slow grower. This is what you could go to a home depot and you'd get the plant this big and it'd be like 80 bucks.

- Yeah, if you can find it.

- Correct, the only thing I find with this tree does as it age is it tends to die off in the inside. And that's because it stops getting sunlight in there.

- Right, yeah.

- But to me, the more it ages, the more it intensifies its beauty.

- Yeah, it starts getting its own form. I see it's kind of got a cloud shape going on, which is really nice.

- We do shape it a little bit but most of the pruning is dead wood pruning.

- Yeah and I like how you have kind of shown the...

- You have to, this will grow all the way to the ground. It will skirt the ground. So we do take it off the ground also keeps you know any fungus or things you don't really want bug wise to get up on the tree.

- Right, that's probably another big one with a lot of these evergreens is allowing air movement in there helps them not kind of rot from the inside out. So another super cool thing I'm in a winter garden of course, is the Moss, have you cultivated this Moss? Have you cultivated this moss in this areas. We just gathered it and then placed it where we thought it needed to be anywhere that we're the water kind of drips that I knew would stay a little bit more wet.

- Right. We wanna ahead and planted it here. Sure, yeah and it helps too. I assume you've collected this from, from around the area. So it's, already native to hear so a lot of the inoculants are hopefully in this, soils already.

- We've got a couple of different Titans share that are growing together.

- Yeah, it's a really nice texture but the whole idea is to give you some almost like a green look like grass.

- Sure.

- And I love Moss I've just kind of an Asian thing too.

- Me too yeah, it's beautiful. And now's when it's really kind of takes off and grows and then it kind of goes dormant and almost disappears in the summer.

- Of course, you know, with Moss comes ferns which is another beautiful accent to these and for the most part, evergreen, I think this one is a an autumn Fern. So this is also one of my super favorites for the winter and a native to a sweet flag right here. Right. And it's, I mean, it's obviously very happy in this wet spot too.

- This an easy plan to divide and put in multiple places. But you see, it's literally grown on a rock. The only dirt here is what's kind of washed up on it and trapped around it. And if you were to try to pull this out, good luck.

- One piece.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and it's awesome 'cause it does have a little bit of a yellow to it. It's a you know, it's just a nice little marginal plant to use. And you could actually plant this up here and it would do just the same.

- Right, so it doesn't need wet feet to be this happy?

- No, but you can put it right in water.

- Yeah, wow. So this is a great location for this tree it's kinda falling in cascading off of this spot. What tree is this again?

- This is a Tsuga canadensis Cole's Prostrate

- Okay.

- And this tree is probably close to 30 years old.

- Wow, look at that trunk, that's huge.

- Correct and we just gave it a Woodland soil. We raised up these boulders and this is a kind of conditioning that you'd find naturally a hemlock growing in. One thing we've got here is this huge Japanese maple. And a lot of people wanna pick the leaves off. But I think it's kind of interesting from a distance. It almost has this kind of bronze look to it.

- As I've told people, it's kind of like frozen in time.

- Yeah.

- The SAP had not yet gone back down to the root system. However, the buds had already been produced for the following year. So the trees alive, it's got buds galore on it, but what's gonna happen is because these hadn't changed color yet because Tennessee has been doing that for the last three years.

- Yeah.

- These leaves will stay on until the new buds open and they'll actually push them out.

- Yeah.

- And this is a green variety of ACER Palmatum dissectum viridis But what I think is awesome about this tree is the fact that it's serpentine and growth.

- Yeah, that trunk down there is pretty spectacular. So again, back to the kind of, it's not just flowers in the garden that make things interesting. It's, you know, even down to dead leaves in a certain setting is kind of...

- We'll look at this even If you look at the branching, see how you got some almost green to red.

- Right.

- So if you really look at the bark on a lot of these trees you're gonna get some winter interests with the color.

- Yeah.

- And you only notice that in the winter.

- Right.

- I prefer looking at Japanese Maples in the winter because you can see all that wonderful structure all that base that the tree presents itself.

- Yeah. So this is one of my kind of favorite shrubs that people don't ever think about. That's an evergreen that's a really neat shrub pierce here. We've got period's japonica. Tell me a little bit about this.

- I think this is the mountain fire.

- Okay.

- Of course it's not demonstrating the flowers but when it does flower, the smell is really nice. You definitely want this near your house so you can enjoy the smell but it is a nice little evergreen. It prefers a little bit more of acidity, kind of like a rhododendron wood.

- Sure.

- But it's a pretty maintenance-free plant when it boils down to it.

- Yeah. And so these, these are actually the flower buds that will swell up and turn pretty bright white in the spring.

- Because we've been so warm, it's probably slowed it up. But I would anticipate this opening sometime late February.

- Yeah, oh, that early.

- Yeah, probably late February, early March before everything starts to wake up.

- Yeah and you said this is mountain fire verbally?

- I believe so, yeah.

- Which it's new growth is at a bright, bright, bright red.

- Yeah, so it's, it's a really nice kinda unusual plant. This is a really big standout tree to me, you know, this almost like flying saucer shape we've gotten here.

- This is an Acer palmatum and it's called Kashima. And Kashima is really one of the tightest dwarfs that there is. I mean, we're talking maybe three feet of height here with the span of 10 feet around. It would be a lot more but we literally keep pruning the outskirts of it to keep it off the ground.

- Yeah.

- And it gives it this like you say, a flying saucer look, but what I really like about it is when you see underneath.

- Yeah, that structuring in that branching is just really what makes that tree what it looks like. The cool thing too is if you look here at the foliage that's left on here, tiny, tiny leaf, Japanese, maple.

- You've placed it well too it's kind of on this little perch where he can see the underside of it and really appreciate the shape and the form of the tree.

- Yeah.

- Tell me about some of the design principles that you started with to kind of accentuate everything we've got here.

- Your eyes need to be drawn to multiple things. For instance, the rocks. The other things we look at are the different trees shapes are important. Of course, during the season, the colors very important too. I'm really not trying to have everything the same height I want things to be shorter, taller. So as you walk through a garden, your eyes will be drawn down to the shorter things behind it have your taller points of interest.

- Yeah.

- In here, they didn't want to have any more weeds or grass. So we went with this pebble rock. You know, you don't have a lot of stuff. A lot of plants cluttering around this. It's kind of silhouetting this beautiful little tree here and letting it speak for itself. So I can tell this is definitely one of your passion pieces that you work on. You've read some really beautiful specimens here and you really showcase a lot of awesome plants here. I just wanna thank you for showing us around the garden and teaching us, you know, about kind of form and texture. It's really, really nice place.

- Thank you.

- Yeah.

- Please, come back again when it's spring and everything's alive.

- Yeah, I bet it'll be beautiful as then just in a different way.

- Yes.

- Growing vegetables today brings the sorrow of throwing vegetables away tomorrow. They are a transitory wealth. I've watched a lot of vegetables rot as I've learned how to cure and store them, but waste not want not. We can always make our pigs happy with the rotten vegetables. Garlic is one of the first big crops that we pull out of the field to store. I leave it in the sun to dry for just a few hours and then we gently pick it up and put it on the back of the pickup truck and bring it up into the barn and lay it out on some hay. Sorting is a big part of storing vegetables. So we go through them and we'll pull out the real nice ones and then put them aside and then ones that have something wrong with them. Like we hit them with a fork or they split apart those will be seconds it will use up first. Some of the seconds garlic gets dried in a dehydrator to make garlic powder. And then a lot of it gets put into our pesto ones that are don't have anything wrong with them. Those are the ones who will save for a longterm storage. Oftentimes we just simply bundle them up, Oh, a couple dozen to a full bundle and time off and just hang them up somewhere to cure out a little bit more. They seem to cure better with the stems on them than with the stems off. Onions are another crop that needs to come in out of the field. After only a few hours in the sun, both onions and garlic have sheath around them that are their actual leaves. So the outer sheath of the onion was, a leaf. So we want to harvest our onions and garlic while there's still a few green leaves because that means it will have an intact sheath all the way around the bulb. So we bring the onions in and lay them out on hay also. So an onion, if it's laying directly on the wood we'll get a little flat spot on it and that will start to go bad. So we put them on hay, that gives additional air flow underneath. And yeah, it keeps them on something soft. We found that the ones with the smallest next keep the best. So we'll pick those off and put them to the side. So they'll store for the longest. We store our onions in bushel baskets or in the netted onion sacks, or we'll braid them because it's just nice to have a hanging rate of onions in the kitchen where you can pull one off every now and then for a really delicious addition to your meal. Potatoes love to be underground. We dig them and let them dry in the field for a few hours. But then we put them in baskets and get them down into our underground root cellar. As soon as we can, they must be stored in the dark. Otherwise they'll get little green spots on them. So we bring them down in here. And then within the week we have to sort them potatoes will go bad and if one goes bad then the other ones that it's touching will go bad. We particularly have to be mindful of the little stem and that's one side of a potato has lots of eyes and the others where the stem connected to the plant and they'll get a rot right there sometimes it'll make them hollow on the inside. So we're looking for that. And we just simply pour the potatoes from one basket to another and for just keeping our eyes and look for wet spots, see here's a bad potato right here. See that right there. And that is a bad potato so that has to come out and then we just keep corn yeah they're in pretty good shape, but you can see how if you have one bad potato to make the other ones you know, go bad too. Once the potatoes are stabilized they'll keep down here until next year's new potatoes come in. Our best potato storage area, is our cave. It has constant moisture and the steady cool temperature. Winter squash are planted in the summer or late spring and harvested in late summer, early fall. Their name comes from the ease in which they store over the winter. So we grow four different kinds of winters cross this year, we have the spaghetti squash. This is a small one called a small wonder. It's a good spaghetti squash. And then these are Acorn squashes and these are Delicata squash. Now all of these quashes are in the Pepo species and they don't store for much over four months or so. So we have to go through these baskets routinely and pull out bad squashes. similar to what we do with the potatoes, but we can't just pour them because they have these sharp ends where we've cut them and we don't want them to poke each other. 'Cause that'll make a bad spot. We can tell winter squash are ripe once the background color gets a little duller with the butter nuts, it's a tan color. So these butternuts and we'll keep all year long. If we just keep an eye on them make sure that they're not bruised or having any bad spots. I actually kept one of these on my mantle full in my house for two years before it got soft. The butter nuts are definitely the best keepers. A rainy season will exasperate the keeping qualities of most crops. And also just having the crop be full of weeds somehow makes the crop not store as well especially when with onions and garlic it seems like if I can keep the field totally free of weeds they keep better. many vegetables keep best canned up in jars. We put up lots of tomatoes and beets and cucumbers and green beans and store them in our underground cellar. Still the wealth of stored vegetables does have a time limit. However, with all the spaces we have on the farm for storing our vegetables the barn loft, the celler out, building the basement the cave we're able to keep our vegetables well beyond the harvest.

- A nice orderly peaceful garden gives the gardener a nice orderly, peaceful feel. And Linda, this is so calm, it makes me calm.

- Well, thank you. We welcome you to our garden. I mean, we're happy that you're here to share some of its beauty.

- It's gorgeous. And tell me how this wonderful vignette of your garden got started.

- Well, we've been in our home now for 39 years and when we moved here, it was brand new. There were no trees there was nothing you could see for a couple of blocks. And I guess I have some farmer blood in me from Pennsylvania, and I've always had the love of plants and flowers and wanted to develop something that I could manage. And we started out with putting in some trees, sort of as the bones of where we would want to have a shade on the house in the summertime and have the sun in the winter. And with that over the years, we just sort of developed different areas the way we sort of wanted them to look. My focal point always comes from the kitchen window.

- Right?

- What I see from the kitchen window sorta is what's going to give me an idea of what I wanna plant.

- And what you've done here then is utilize not only the trees for shade, but you using them as a area to plant things around. And what I think is interesting is anytime you lost a tree you gained a patio or a sitting area. Well that transpires over time, you hate to lose a tree. And we've lost two large trees over the past seven, eight years. And again, from my focal point from the kitchen window I think something needs to be added. And I think a raised bed would be good or we can't grow grass. So what about another hard scape

- Right?

- And which we refer to as the Island and just to develop then from that.

- So Linda what's interesting to me is you've lots of places to sit. And so this allows you to see your garden from different vantage points. And isn't it funny how it changes your whole garden?

- It does and I sort of see the places to sit as places to go and meditate and just to have a quiet time.

- Exactly, and what I love is your utilization of pots. You must love pots.

- I do like pots, I think they give a good accent. I think they give some, a different texture to a garden. Some of them bring in some color

- Right. Which I think is good. And some of my things actually grow quite well in pots. I have a few hostas and pots that grow better than some that are in the ground. Let's talk about some specific plants in pots because I love your Buddha plant.

- Yes, the Buddha belly plant is one of my favorites. It has a couple of different names to it, but a most common one is the Buddha belly because of the shape of it. And each winter I put that in the garage because it will not winter over outside.

- And right next to talk to me about your Begonia

- Well, Mr. Begonia is a Kane Begonia and I think it's probably maybe seven or eight years old at the most. And I was drawn to it because my grandmother always had one and the canes are almost like a bamboo texture to a point. And apparently they will grow as high as 10 feet. And right now it does have some good blooms on the top but again, that one gets wintered over in a greenhouse because it just would not survive.

- And talk to me about the macho man

- Macho Fern, yeah, macho man, for sure. Macho man was probably about an 18 inch plant when I bought them maybe eight years ago and he has grown and grown and grown. And I think the fern, some of them are about six feet long and I believe the plant itself can grow six feet high and six feet wide. And we have chosen to elevate it because obviously the ferns would all be on the ground. It just likes water and it likes the filtered shade and it will probably grow another, I don't know maybe another third of the size by the end of the growing season.

- Wow, and speaking of ferns your fox tail Fern is pretty spectacular.

- He has grown a lot, he likes his new larger pot, and it's putting out a lot of seeds and some little babies, and he always has quite a show.

- And Linda you've got trees in pots. So a lot of people overlook that they think that trees need to be in the grounds. Well, I think in our travels some countries, we've seen trees in pots and they caught my eye and the Japanese red Maples that we have in pots are actually the grandchildren of my parents' trees in Pennsylvania. 'Cause probably about 1984, my mother brought maybe a 12 inch seedling to us in her suitcase and we planted it and it grew and it had babies. So these are actually the babies of my parents', trees.

- Got it, and your Mondo grass. I love it, it makes me wanna just walk through it and lay in it.

- It's quite cushnie and when you walk on it, you feel like you're walking on a sponge.

- It is

- And it grows in shade and stays green

- And Linda, how many Mondo grass plants did you use for this?

- Well, I think there were 980 that were planted and it looked a little stark for the first couple years, but with some constant watering they have just formed one massive Mondo carpet.

- It's fantastic. And your guacamole hosta seems to be very happy.

- It is now that one's in the ground and it does well. It's getting ready to bloom and I've accented that with some Japanese beach Fern around it. And some lady in red. It's just so peaceful and calm here Linda, and I love how you've got little vignettes all over your garden. Thank you so much for letting us come and tour and see how beautifully you have arranged your backyard space.

- Well, thank you. I'm so glad you could be here today.

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