Episode 3008

- [Host] All kinds of growing is happening in Tennessee, and we love bringing it to you. First. Troy Marden learns the new interests of a couple of home gardeners in this lovely landscape. It includes plants that support pollinators and bog garden beauties. Tammy Algood visits Farm in the City where adults and children come together to learn from one another. And Jeff Poppen tells us about the many garden seeds that are relatively easy to save. Let's go. Gardens matter to the health of birds, bees, and other insects. And they build community by inspiring conversation and connection between neighbors.

- [Troy] You know, gardens change over days, months, years. Sometimes it's worth taking a second look. And that's exactly what we're going to do today in Hermitage. Brian, you've added beds, taken out a lot of grass.

- Yeah, we don't have much grass left. Nice for our carbon footprint too, because we got rid of the gas-powered mower and.

- [Troy] Gotcha.

- [Brian] Now just have a push mower, so.

- [Troy] That's great.

- [Brian] Yeah.

- [Troy] So I noticed one of the things that you've added to the garden, a lot of. are these lilies and boy, we couldn't be here on a better day.

- [Brian] Yeah, they're spectacular this year.

- [Troy] So, you've got a variety of different kinds blooming. Tell me a little bit about some of them and the differences in them.

- [Brian] Well, we've got a lot of Asiatics which are actually finishing up pretty much right now.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] This one just opened this week, the red one on the left there just a spectacular color.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] And this is an Orienpet Lily, not one of the taller ones, but still blooms are amazingly huge,

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] Very fragrant.

- [Troy] Right.

- So it's been making the garden like in the evenings, the gardens are just.

- So the Asiatic lilies are a little, generally a little bit shorter.

- Correct.

- Although this one's kind of tall and this may be an Asiatic hybrid.

- It is.

- Or something, yeah. But the flowers face upward.

- Yes.

- On the Asiatics.

- Yes.

- And some of them are more like in the three-foot, 24 to 36-inch range, that kind of thing. And then we get into some of these a little bit taller types. And like you said, this isn't one of the tallest. We'll look at one of those here in a little bit, but these varieties that are actually hybrids between the big Oriental kind of florist type lilies, and then the trumpet lilies, and you obviously have a fair number of them. And I have several in my garden too, and I really like them because they bloomed for a long period of time for a lily. I mean, they have a season, but a few weeks. And like you said, they're fragrant and they come in a really nice range of colors.

- [Brian] Yeah, that's what I really like about them. And they're something I can stuff in between the day lilies.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] So that they get the shaded roots.

- [Troy] Yeah.

- [Brian] But then they can rise up above the day lilies.

- [Troy] Sure.

- [Brian] It's really nice.

- [Troy] So you also have a lot of day lilies in addition to your regular lilies.

- [Brian] Definitely.

- [Troy] And this one in front of us is gorgeous. I love those bright blooms.

- [Brian] Yeah, my favorites are always spider types. They're to me, some of the most beautiful, just because of their interesting form.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] And the color varieties are great too. This one is about a four-year-old clump and just one of my favorites. It's called Spin Dazzle.

- [Troy] Spin Dazzle, and like you said, it's a kind of a spidery type. And if we look at the individual flower, those petals are long and thin and spidery.

- Yes.

- Whereas some of them are a much fuller, bigger, rounder flower. Some of them are even double and have more than six petals. So a lot of variety in those. Any other favorites that come to mind while we're?

- Probably my most favorite in the garden is Primal Scream because it's a long, it endures the heat of the day and into the evening, it's still glowing.

- [Troy] It still looks good.

- [Brian] It's great orange and orangy red in the morning. And then it goes to an orange and then it just stays beautiful.

- [Troy] It just kind of glows.

- [Brian] Yeah, it definitely makes an impact.

- [Troy] Right. So I noticed as we walked through the garden, one of the other groups of plants that you have quite a few of are plants that are good for pollinators.

- [Brian] Yes.

- [Troyh] In addition to not just plants for their nectar and pollen, but also plants to host their larva.

- [Brian] Yes.

- [Troy] And I know because we're Facebook a and social media friends

- [Brian] Right.

- Also that you had quite a little project here a few weeks ago.

- We did.

- With some Monarch butterflies.

- Yes.

- Tell me what you got into this spring.

- Last spring, we had zero Monarch caterpillars in the garden. This year, we had so many that we wanted to try and give them a better chance at survival. So once they reached like the stage where they're almost ready to go into chrysalis stage, we went ahead and brought them in and got an enclosure, brought them inside, fed them until they turned into chrysalis. We brought in 40 caterpillars.

- [Troy] Wow.

- [Brian] And it was a really cool process to see them change into chrysalis. We caught it on film a few times, and then when they started to emerge, we also caught that. And it was amazing.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] And the really amazing part to me is that usually out in the wild, only two percent of the entire clutch of eggs that a Monarch will lay will survive to adulthood.

- Right.

- We got 40 butterflies out of 40 caterpillars.

- [Troy] So a hundred percent?

- [Brian] So a hundred percent survival rate.

- So as we're talking about plants for monarchs, obviously milkweed is their a host plant, their primary host plant. Different species they'll eat.

- Yeah.

- But these broader leaf types like speciosa, and you know, different ones are probably their, I guess, their favorites. As far as I've noticed.

- [Brian] This is common milkweed. This is syriaca. And it's very, unfortunately it's very aggressive.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] And it is running through just about all of my beds now, but the flowers smell amazing when they bloom.

- [Troy] Sure.

- [Brian] And the pollinators, just especially the Monarch caterpillars can just strip this plant. And I love that.

- [Troy] Right and it's a big, robust plant. So, you know, it can host the caterpillars and, you know, even if it gets stripped, it will releaf.

- [Brian] Oh yeah.

- [Troy] It comes right back.

- [Brian] And then we also have passion flowers growing here, native ones for another host. I forgot the name of the butterfly.

- Is it gulf fritillary?

- Yes, that's the one. Last year we had hundreds of caterpillars just in this back area where that was growing.

- Nice.

- And lots of chrysalis and it was just really fun. And finally able to see that. A bunch of hummingbirds in the yard this year, just great.

- So just on a small city lot.

- Yeah.

- And you have all of this great flora that you've planted that has drawn really great fauna also, you know.

- Yes, absolutely.

- You've got caterpillars and monarchs and all that terrific stuff.

- Yeah.

- So one of the things that you've done that really interests me a lot are these bog gardens. And I think this is something that people are starting to get more interested in are these carnivorous plants, the pitcher plants, and others.

- We can grow Venus fly traps here, sun dews, some sun dews a lot.

- Pitcher plants, obviously, which you have many of and they're gorgeous.

- Yeah, and a lot of local nurseries are carrying them now.

- Right, as more people start to get into them and they become popular, then it becomes.

- But they still put them in their greenhouse instead of putting them outside.

- Right, so these are actually native plants.

- [Brian] Yeah.

- {Troy] And a lot of places in North Carolina, a little further south than we are, but a good many of them, as you said, are perfectly hearty.

- Yeah.

- And there are bogs, you know, even all the way up into Virginia and further north from there where these things grow in the wild. So there's no reason that we can't do them here. And they're just a really fascinating group of plants. Everything from, you know, these taller varieties that are, you know, a foot and a half tall to little bitty, short ones, different sizes and shapes. And then their blooms, I think are just.

- They're fascinating.

- Fascinating.

- They're really cool.

- They're really pretty incredible.

- This isn't even the flower anymore.

- Right.

- It's just the brat.

- Yeah, so here's, here's the pitcher that opens up. This is the leaf and the way they, the way they're carnivorous is that an insect goes down inside this tube and there's water down in there. And that insect eventually drowns and feeds the plant. But this is the leftover, like you said, they're not even really in full bloom anymore. They bloomed earlier and that's a seed pod forming underneath there. But this is the flower of this plant that would've come up probably toward the end of April-ish.

- [Brian] Exactly.

- [Troy] It's just a fascinating group of plants. And I think, you know, like you said, it's one of those things that once you get started like day lilies or lilies or anything else.

- [Brian] It becomes a facet.

- [Troy] It's just another facet of gardening that, you know, you get into and all of a sudden you've gone down a rabbit hole, so to speak and.

- [Brian] I've got four of them now, four different bog gardens.

- [Troy] So this is obviously a garden that you and Chris have created on your own and designed yourselves. What's your inspiration when you're doing some of these things?

- [Brian] Well, one of our big things this year was to add visual interest to the garden. So we've done the wind spinners, but we've also done a lot more hardscaping design and some water features.

- [Troy] Right, and all of these you've built yourselves.

- [Brian] All of these we've built ourselves two disappearing water features right here. This one was an afterthought. That one was the first one that we really did. And it turned out amazing.

- [Troy] Yeah, well, and you obviously moved a lot of stone and did a lot of earth moving and digging and you know, other things to create all of these.

- [Brian] When somebody gives rocks away, we're usually on top of it because we love landscaping with a more natural look.

- [Troy] Yeah.

- [Brian] But we also do a little bit of modern incorporated into our design, like using concrete, gives it a very industrial look.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Brian] And that's basically, my style is industrial, but I love natural elements combined with the industrial.

- [Troy] Sure, and then obviously lots of plants.

- [Brian] And lots of plants.

- [Troy] So thank you so much.

- Oh sure.

- For letting us come back again and see everything that you've done in the last few years. And you both obviously have just knocked it out of the park.

- [Brian] Thank you. We're very proud of it.

- [Tammy] We are right here in the middle of downtown Nashville, an area that you would not think of as a great place to garden, but I've got my friend Latha Gokhale, and you are the manager of Farm in the City Community Garden. Thank you for joining us.

- [Latha] Thank you Tammy, for being out here today.

- [Tammy] We're in hot sun, close to the interstate, and yet you've got beautiful things growing in this garden. Talk to us about the variety of things you've got going on.

- Yeah, we are in the middle of the city and what better place to garden is what I say. I always envisioned any open space as a place that can grow plants. What we have here is pretty much anything that will grow in temperatures that we have here in middle Tennessee, and we try to actually grow year round.

- [Tammy] This area of flowers that we've got right in front of us. You said that all of that is re-seeds.

- [Latha] Right, I do love to let the plants go to seed just because the plants know where their seeds are going and the seeds tend to do remarkably well, wherever they get transplanted. One of the biggest challenges with urban gardening is your soil quality. So what we were really fortunate, well, some people may see it as a challenge to start up with no soil. We saw it as a great opportunity to actually build up soil. And there are lots of ways to build soil up. And this garden has been a testament to what you can do and how fast you can build really good quality soil. It's easiest to just start with raised beds. You get your instant soil, but now that we have the beds in place, we're also looking outside the boxes and thinking of how we can grow soil. And we do that with plant material, organic material, all from the garden. And we imported a lot of wood chips from around town. There are lots of trees as you know, coming down in Nashville. So we have a lot of different ways to get those trees, the wood chips, and even leaves into the garden beds. Most of these beds have been created over many, many years with multiple layers of leaves or treatment, which luckily we have pretty much every one of these garden beds that you see behind you is accounted for by a gardener Who's volunteered to take it on for a year, at least, as far as their contract. And then if they want to, they can be there longer. They've we've had some gardeners here Who've been here the whole 11 years since this garden has started. So we have them and everyone kind of figures out what needs to be done either in their own boxes or outside their boxes. So it's a group effort and you'll be amazed. One of the things that's always interesting to observe here is just how much people can grow in one little box. So that just gives you an idea of how much you can grow in any spot.

- [Tammy] So it's quite a diverse garden.

- [Latha] We do try to grow everything that can possibly grow in these, in this climate that we have here and the local temperatures kind of dictate what can and not grow. We try to keep things growing year round because the seasons change and there is different things that can grow each season.

- [Tammy] And honestly, it's beautiful, but I'm particularly drawn to the area that you call your food forest. So talk to me about your food forest.

- [Latha] The food forest is kind of going towards that regenerative agriculture that everyone's talking about now. I think it's the only way to do agriculture, but it's a focus on soil building soil, and then focusing on plants that are more self-sustaining. We think it rather than just putting out an entire garden at one time, we're just kind of take it year by year. And as things change, we modify things and plant accordingly, so.

- [Tammy] So right now in your food forest, you've got mainly fig. Talk to me about the plants that are here.

- [Latha] Sure, we've got mostly figs. We have some Asian persimmons in that bed and we have a bush cherry. We have a flying dragon, citrus fruit plant, which is very popular there just because it's got these very vicious looking thorns. All of those plants have been thriving there and with minimal care so far. So we, that's what we're looking for, minimal care, because as you know, with gardening, it is a very labor intensive process. And anything we can do to kind of help the plants do their thing is what we can hope to accomplish. My interest is always seeing how much can grow in one particular spot. It is amazing. You can go vertically and just multiply what you can grow instantly, right, by going up. So the focus is not necessarily spreading outwards, but really concentrating on each individual area, maximizing production there. And then when we do expand, it's literally handful of dirt at a time or an inch at a time. We just go very slowly because there's always so much more you can do with the space that you've already started with, so.

- [Tammy] And you said that soil has been your biggest issue here. And why is that? Why did? What was the layout of this area before it was a garden?

- Oh, in urban gardens in general, soil is an issue just because of contaminants. We have unfortunately plastics in our soil. We have arsenic. We have lead. In this case, actually, we started off with no soil, which was worked out to our advantage because then we can just build the soil as we go along. And we literally focus. A good day here is building a little soil every day, collecting seeds and planting. It's a whole spectrum of everything. And I always try to tell the gardeners, the big focus should always just be observing. We're observers mostly.

- [Tammy] And tell me how the community around you has welcomed you to this area.

- This, as you know, with Nashville, we are a volunteer city and a volunteer state, and that has really kept this garden going. It is a community of people that takes all this effort. And it's a small garden by garden standards by industrial agricultural standards. But it does require a lot of work and we have a lot of people stepping up to the plate and it doesn't matter if they're here for 10 minutes or they're here for 11 years, everyone has a contribution and we, and the garden looks the way it does and produces the way it does because of those contributions.

- [Tammy] It's there seems to be so much pride in it. And that's what I noticed as soon as I walked into the garden that it's well-kept and it looks loved. It is beautiful. And again, it's right in the middle of downtown Nashville, it's just a little gem that you would not expect to find here.

- [Latha] Thank you for having us.

- Many more gardens were planted this year. So much so that seeds became scarce. Of course, farmers and gardeners have been saving seeds since forever and many garden seeds are relatively easy to save. That's the ones we're going to talk about today. First off we have peanuts. We love to grow peanuts. They're a fun crop. They make their little flowers that have the shoots and then have the peanuts in the soil. And then we simply just take the peanuts, take them out of the shell and plant them right into the garden. They are something that you can just save the seed from, from year to year and have your own little stash of peanuts. Another crop that many gardeners like to save seeds from are beans. These are called Christmas limas. It's a pole bean. So these are the kind that we have to grow up on a stake. We take bamboo and we make teepees out of the bamboo and plant a Lima bean at the foot of each pole. Those lima beans at my place must be 10 feet tall. We've grown black turtle beans before, but this was a new variety. They're really pretty. Look at these things here. These are black cocoa. And that's a pretty good size for a black turtle bean. So bean seed are simply left on the vine and they just dry right there on the vine. All you have to do is pluck them off, shell them out. They do like to have a freeze. So many seeds need something called stratification. And this is where we freeze the seeds so that they think that winter has happened. And then they are ready to sprout. They won't sprout unless they've had a few weeks of being frozen. So one thing you can do with beans is you simply leave them out in the barn or out in a shed outside. If you do take them into the house, you may want to freeze them for a few weeks before you plant them. Now don't make the mistake I did one time and pull frozen seed out and plant it right away. They all rotted because they were cold and moist. So I had to dry them out and then sow them. And they did fine. This plant is okra. These are seeds from okra here. Now, okra is was picked when it's smaller. These were left on to get big. This variety is called granddaddy. And we'll just, you know, when we get ready to plant, you can just save them in the seeds, in the pods, all winter long, see they're right in there. And then when you get ready to plant you just shuck 'em on out and you have the seeds you need just off of a few pods. It doesn't take a lot. Yeah, okra seed. Look at that pumpkin. This is October and this pumpkin is the old fashioned Tennessee pumpkin. And I got the seed from local people in Macon county oh gosh, 35 years ago. This pumpkin was not grown this summer. This pumpkin was grown last summer. This pumpkin is over a year old and it's amazing how well these pumpkins keep. They were called cow pumpkins or hog pumpkins by the local folks up where I live. They fed them to their animals. They make a great pumpkin pie though. And they're a real easy to save the seed from because you can just leave them right in the pumpkin. And then you can take 'em like this, split it open and voila, you have seeds and you can just reach right in there, grab some seeds and they're ready to plant in your garden. You don't even have to do anything. This, you even have even have a cup to hold your seeds in, comes right with it. Yeah, these are great. And this variety is a related to butternut. So if I wanted to save seeds from butternuts, or this variety, I can't grow them next to each other because they would cross. And I would have some kind of butternut pumpkin cross. The same thing's true if I was growing maybe a acorn squash and a summer squash. Those are both peppos. So another thing we have to be careful with when we're saving seeds is to only use open pollinated plants. So some plants are hybrids and hybrids are fine to grow. We grow hybrids, sweet corn, hybrid tomatoes, but we don't save the seeds from those. We only save the seeds from non-hybrids. The hybrids are grown by having two different plants with known characteristics, letting the female open up and taking a male flower and putting it right on that female flower. And then wrapping that in a paper sack. And that keeps other pollen from getting there. And so you'll have seed then that you, that the breeders know will have these certain characteristics, but they, those seeds, then, when they are planted back after that crop, they're going to revert back to their grandparents. They won't be just like their parents, yeah. So use non-hybrid open-pollinated seeds. Some seeds that we saved, we don't really save seeds from. We save parts of them that are propagated asexually rather than sexually. So these are sweet potatoes. And if they're freshly dug, but this one here, because it got a little cut right there, it has little sprouts. Can you see those sprouts starting to come up there? So that's the eyes. Then each of these eyes will make sprouts. We plant the sweet potatoes beginning of April in a bed. Sometimes we'll put horse manure underneath it, because that'll heat up and warm up the soil above it, A little sand around it. And then these sprout up slips and when the slips get that high, we cut them off. And the slips then are what we plant in the field. We're not planting the sweet potatoes out in the field. We grow them in a bed to get the slips that go out into the field. We love growing garlic. Have you ever noticed how garlic has a little natural place where it breaks apart easily? That's a good example of that, see right there? So I can just go like this and break that apart. Each of these cloves, when planted, will make a bulb of garlic, yeah. So these are planted in the fall. We're planting garlic right now, end of September, beginning of October. If you look closely, you can kind of see this part right in here is where the seed is. See that little, these little things right in there? And that gets planted like this. If this gets ripped off when you're shucking your garlic, it won't grow. There's no seed value in this. This is just the food for the little seed that's in there. So I wondered why I wasn't getting good stands of garlic before I learned about that. But that's really important. And also if the garlic has like bad spots or something like, you know, black or brown, we don't plant that either. Another crop that we grow a lot of and love is kale. It's planted in the fall, oh anywhere past August 15th to September 15th or so. And it then grows all fall and all winter, and then in the spring it sends up a shoot. Well, even the little shoots that come up, they look like broccoli. They're about that big around. And we eat those all the way up to that point. And so kale is a great crop for Tennessee to have greens in the winter time. This is a flat leaf kale variety. And we've been saving the seed for almost 40 years on this variety. And I had just led a kale, part of my kale patch, just go up in the seed at the end of May. So most of it gets taken them out before then, but we let this grow up and it makes the big, big, tall stalk like that right here, yeah. So we cut these down and then we just dry them on tarps. And then at some point, we thresh them out. And this would be called threshing. And we're just going through here and we're popping the seeds and you can take a stick and beat them or any way you want to do to just try to get the seeds loosened from their hull, yeah. So each of these has seeds in the. Move it away. Look at all that seed right there. It's so easy to do to get kale seed. I am so glad that so many people are taking up gardening again. It's really a necessary thing and it can be so fun. Saving your seed adds a real depth to the gardening experience.