Episode 3121

- [Narrator] Troy Marden is very impressed and a bit envious of this gardener's success with growing lupins. These showy spires are a challenge to grow in Tennessee. Troy gleans tips and tricks from this flower lady to hopefully replicate this beauty. Also somewhat challenging to grow is squash. Several pests and diseases can wipe out the plants. Jeff Poppen shares his organic practices that ward off these adversaries. Plus Tammy Algood cooks up some delicious puffed pear pancakes. Stay tuned. A flower that stands out from the crowd.

- All of us gardeners have bucket list plants. And for me, one of those bucket list plants has always been lupin, or lupine. Either way is correct. Today, I don't know whether to be jealous or angry or thrilled, and maybe I'm a little bit of all three, because my friend Alecia Welbern, the Flower Lady of Gallatin, has cracked the code to growing lupins here in Tennessee. She's gonna tell us her secrets. Alecia, you're not supposed to be able to do this here. You're not supposed to be able to grow these. And they're just gorgeous. I can't get over it.

- Well, thank you. Well, I'm a pretty stubborn gardener.

- Yeah?

- And I like to try things that no one else can do.

- [Troy] Well, I thought I was a stubborn gardener, but I gave up after 20 years. And you didn't.

- [Alecia] And I thought you were a better gardener than me.

- You got me on this one. I love the color range of these. You've got everything from pink to blue, purple. Some of 'em have a little white.

- That's the first time I've had that bicolor. But no red. There's supposed to be a red, the elusive red.

- The elusive red.

- I don't have it.

- [Troy] I noticed a yellow one behind us, kind of a creamy pale yellow.

- [Alecia] That's my first.

- Yeah. And some of them, like you mentioned, are solid colors, and some of them have the little white center in them-

- Some of them have yellow.

- I see actually one over there that looks like, and maybe it's just the shadows, but it's pink and looks like it's a little darker in the center. They're just so beautiful. And even the foliage is pretty.

- [Alecia] I think so. And when the rain comes, the little droplets look like, you know-

- Of water bead up.

- Yeah.

- [Troy] Yeah.

- [Alecia] It's just absolutely gorgeous.

- [Troy] So beautiful.

- [Alecia] And this is the most lupins I've ever had. There's probably 200 in here, all various sizes and, you know, stages.

- How long have you been trying to grow them, and when did you have your kind of first success?

- My first success was probably when you were here five years ago.

- Yeah?

- And I only had a few.

- Yeah, they were just a handful.

- And when you made such a big fuss over them, I thought, "I can do better than this."

- [Troy] Right?

- [Alecia] Last year, they were lookin' really, really good, and I was inviting people over to see them. And I had tried planting them in the spring. I didn't think that was working so well. I was using, you know, several packets of seeds and getting five or six. Then I realized they don't like the summer. They were melting out.

- [Troy] Mm-hm, during the heat and humidity.

- [Alecia] So I thought, "Let's try fall 'cause it's cool, "and try to bypass the summer "and see if they have enough time to actually mature, "since they are biennial." And it worked. May not get 18 blooms per plant, but I'm getting at least 8 to 10.

- But you're getting... Gosh, just, I mean, better success than anybody I've ever seen really anywhere south of the northern tier of the United States. I mean, you see 'em in the Pacific Northwest, and you see 'em up in Maine and Vermont in the summertime, and, you know, those places. But, you know, anywhere south of Ohio, it's pretty much just, you know, a given that you're not gonna be able to do it. And here we are.

- And I've had a few... That bunch over there is actually it's third year.

- [Troy] Wow. So they actually have been perennial for you and survived the summer once they were established.

- [Alecia] Mm-hm. If you can get them large enough to not melt out.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Alecia] Back a month and a half ago, I pulled out about 12, potted them up, and I thought, "This probably won't work." But it took them three to four weeks to acclimate.

- [Troy] Mm-hm. Because they have a taproot.

- Oh yes.

- [Troy] You can tell by looking at the flower that they're in the pea family. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But they have a very taproot sort of system on them, and to dig that up makes them unhappy.

- It's not easy.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- [Troy] You probably have to get a really big root ball, and-

- You do.

- [Troy] Try to not let it fall apart.

- [Alecia] Yeah, don't let the soil fall apart on it. And I noticed, you see how deep green these are?

- [Troy] Mm-hm.

- [Alecia] 'Course, part of that is probably the nitrogen fixing to the plant. But I did use Triple 15 a couple of times. Tried not to do that too much, because I think that link you sent me to that nursery in England said that they would rot out if they had too much nitrogen.

- Nitrogen, yeah. Well, I do wanna get into the details of how you do this. So let's take a little walk and look at some other things and talk about how you have so much success.

- [Alecia] Okay.

- [Troy] This is the very beginning.

- [Alecia] The very beginning.

- [Troy] A packet of seeds.

- [Alecia] It's only seeds.

- [Troy] And they're not very big. You know, they're the size of, they almost look like a lentil, which is also in the pea family.

- Right, exactly.

- You know, all these plants are related. And so at this stage, what do you do?

- I get out a little container like that one right there, fill it with warm water. And the packet, some of the packets will-

- And in they go.

- Tell you 24 hours of soak, but I actually do it for 36. 'cause, you know, that's a hard shell.

- [Troy] A very hard seed coat, which is not uncommon in legumes, in plants in the pea family. Then I'm assuming there's some bed prep involved before you actually plant.

- But not really a whole lot. You don't have to amend the bed. You know, last time I told you I'd put sand in the bed. Not this time. There's no sand. No manure, 'cause you don't want that, you know, for lupins. Just get in the bed, and cultivate it down to about three or four inches, and then put your seed out, barely cover them. And then like I said, the hard part is keeping them watered every day. That bed has to stay moist in order for them to germinate. 'Course I start this in late summer or early fall, depending on when the night temperatures start going down.

- [Troy] So early September to late September?

- [Alecia] This last year, I started late August.

- [Troy] Okay. So it just depends on when the night temperatures begin to drop. To what, into the 60s?

- [Alecia] 50s.

- [Troy] 50s. Okay.

- [Alecia] You don't have to get down in the 40s yet. But, you know, sometimes in late August we do get down.

- [Troy] Yeah, we get a little cold snap, and it starts to level off a little bit.

- Just so that it's not so hot that I can't keep the bed watered.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Alecia] And that gives them just a little bit longer to make, you know, a nice rosette.

- [Troy] A nice rosette. Because like you mentioned earlier, they are technically biennial. So if you can give them long enough in that late summer-fall growing season, we don't have a hard freeze maybe until early November, then they have 2 1/2, 3 months to really get established.

- [Alecia] 'Course you know what happened in December?

- [Troy] Yes. Yes.

- [Alecia] And they went through that fine. When I was worried was in March, because they were starting form their buds.

- [Troy] Buds. They were big and green and lush when we had that later freeze in March.

- [Alecia] So I got out the sheets, covered every bit of this bed. 'Course I had peonies and everything else to do, but this was the priority.

- Sure. So once they're sewn, how long does it take them to germinate usually?

- [Alecia] Some of 'em came up within three days.

- [Troy] Wow.

- [Alecia] You know, it can take 14 to 28 days. And, you know, they kept coming up. But I noticed even this spring there was still some coming up.

- [Troy] A few, yeah.

- Yeah, which I-

- They just needed a little cold weather over the winter or something to get them kick-started.

- [Alecia] You know, I'm just rolling with the flow when it comes to these lupins.

- [Troy] Yeah. So are you collecting seed now?

- [Alecia] Oh yes. Last year I collected four, five gallon buckets of seeds.

- [Troy] And these are some that actually started flowering probably a couple of weeks ago.

- [Alecia] No, a month ago.

- A month ago?

- Yeah.

- [Troy] And you can see here that they flower from bottom to top. And these are the pods that are beginning to form. And they do look like peas, soybeans, you know.

- They definitely look like. And they will plump up a little more as the seeds form, and they will turn black and split open just like any other legume. And I will harvest these, put 'em in the buckets, and save 'em till, you know, this winter when I have time to work on 'em. And you notice they are deep green.

- They are deep green. And part of that is because they can also fix their own nitrogen.

- Yes, exactly.

- Like a lot of plants in the legume family, they have these little nodules on their roots that you can see here.

- [Alecia] This is just a smaller plant, but you can see a few of 'em.

- [Troy] And so inside of those nodules are actually a little bacteria that live and are able to fix nitrogen from the air and make it available to the plant.

- And what I've noticed, all the other plants that are in here, coreopsis, I even had some gaillardia, which I've taken out and put in other places, but they're a lot bigger and more robust plants.

- Because they have the lupins there helping improve the soil.

- It's either the lupins or because I've given the lupins so much care. Or a little of both.

- A little of both. You mentioned coreopsis. What other companion plants do you grow? I know the lupins are going to come and go in about a month or six weeks time.

- Yes. Well, my staple's in there. I still have herbs in the middle of this bed, oregano. I've got some lavender in pots. There's chives blooming. A little bay laurel and some oxeye daisies just to give it some contrast.

- [Troy] Right. And to keep the the bed flowering throughout the summer so that you don't just have a big dead space out here. And not dead, but non-flowering.

- [Alecia] It's just like when you plant peonies, you don't want them all by themselves.

- [Troy] Right. Something to come up amongst them or in front of them or whatever-

- Exactly.

- After they've finished their big display.

- I have roses with my peonies, so.

- So what will be the routine then? Obviously what's in bloom now are going to go to seed, like we showed. You cut those seed pods once they begin to mature and split?

- Mm-hm. But I'll still have a few more flushes to come on.

- [Troy] So you could buy just a few packets of seeds to get yourself started. And then from there on, if you're willing to do a little work and put a little effort in, you can collect, save your own seeds and-

- Exactly.

- [Troy] And have them from year to year.

- [Alecia] 'Cause you probably get, per flower, I would say, as many seeds that are in a packet.

- Wow.

- Per flower.

- [Troy] Per flower. Not per stalk, but per individual flower. That's amazing.

- Each year I buy new seed packets because, you know, I want more variety. And the colors in that, you wind up usually with just one or two colors.

- [Troy] Right. A lot of purple and pink and those shades. And you're still after the elusive red.

- Yes, I'm still lookin' for her. Right. And sometimes you'll get some deeper yellows, buttery kinds of yellows.

- Like this time, I did have the creamy yellow.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- [Alecia] So.

- [Troy] Well, you've obviously cracked the code, and you've been more persistent and more successful than I ever have. So thank you for sharing these incredibly beautiful flowers with us.

- [Alecia] And I do hope that people will try this, but they just need to be consistent about watering their seedlings.

- Seeds of squash plants found in caves in Mexico are said to be 10,000 years old. This makes squash one of the oldest of cultivated plants. When we want to avoid problems growing squash, we should use the principles of agriculture that those people developed thousands years ago. This would be the liberal use of organic matters, manures, and composts, plus the remineralization that happens from putting on lime and the slash-and-burn wood ashes that they used back then. These people also tilled the ground, and they might have just used, you know, whatever they had, sticks and stuff. But they tilled that ground pretty deeply when they were gonna grow a garden so that there was drainage and good air in the soils. They kept those soils loose and friable. Squash are heavy feeders, so we use plenty of compost in the squash patch. You can use about a half a bushel under each hill of your squashes. This helps the squashes to grow quickly and resist the problems of insects and diseases. But the real benefit of this good compost is not just the minerals and elements in here, but it's the microbes. They are what are working to make your squash plants healthy. Tennessee soils need the constant addition of organic materials. But almost all of these materials, the carbonaceous things that we're putting into our compost piles and into our gardens are acidic in nature. Carbon is an acid. So we have to balance that with something alkaline. We use two things mainly, and that would be wood ashes, which are a wonderful source of calcium, potassium, and lots of minerals that the trees have brought up from the deeper soil layers that the herbaceous plants can't access. I wanna put about a pound of wood ashes to every 100 square feet of garden soil. That would be 10 by 10. And just lightly scatter it, just like that right there, so you get a good even flow of wood ashes. Another way to raise the pH is to use calcium carbonate, common lime. This we put on thicker than the wood ashes. We spread it at the rate of 5 pounds to our 100 square feet. And again, we just walk through the fields and just fling it out. It's like that right there. Yeah, so there's an old saying that lime will make the father rich and the son poor. And that's because lime does really make things grow good. But if you don't add the organic matter back, it'll burn up the organic matter, and your soils will then start losing fertility. Tennessee's intense hot weather tends to burn up organic matter, especially when we don't have a cover of mulch on the ground. I can't stress enough the importance of deep digging so our fields are drained well. Thomas Jefferson was an avid gardener, and he had his garden areas dug six feet deep before he started gardening there and put in really good soil just to loosen it up so the plants' roots have access to all that ground and also the land doesn't puddle when it rains, that that moisture soaks in and then rises back up when there's dry spells. Many of the old textbooks recommend three foot, but I'm happy with a couple foot. But I don't like to see a garden that's only tilled a few inches, four or five inches, and then it's a hardpanned underneath it. So we want to get in our gardens and just dig. The more we dig, the better. There's double digging methods. Farmers use a subsoiler to get way down. But yeah, once your soils are dug really deep, then your plant roots can really get down there and play around, do what they need to do. Our first planting of summer squash in mid-May is history. And the second planting in mid-June is about gone, although it's still producing some squash. Here's a couple right here. There's a nice little yellow squash right there. And I like these ones that are about this size right here that are really just young and tender, and that's the size I like to pick a summer squash. But if you wanna have summer squash all summer long in middle Tennessee, you wanna plant it three different times about a month apart. The July 27th planting of yellow squash is in its prime now. We're just beginning to harvest it. And look how healthy the plants are compared to some of those older plants. Those third planting is perfect for September harvests. One of the problems that we can have with the squash plant is called a squash beetle. And it eats around the rims of the leaves and is exasperated when we have real hard soils. We need to keep our soils really loose in our gardens, so we hoe a lot and cultivate to do that. Or if you have a small garden, you might wanna use a hay mulch around your plants. Another problem with squash is called the squash bug. It's brown, about an inch long, and really stinks. It lays bronze eggs on the squash leaves that you can see. They're shiny, and you can get rid of 'em. And also you can lay a board down in your squash patch. Check it in the morning. As you flip it over, it'll be where your squash bugs have spent the night, and you can collect them and remove them from your garden. A third issue with squash is called the squash borer. It comes from a orange and black butterfly, or it's actually a moth. It lays its eggs between the stem right here, between these first leaves and where the squash is connected to the ground. And so when that happens, the squash plant then wilts. So in a small garden, the way to prevent that problem is to wrap that stem with a nylon stocking or a bit of burlap or pull your hay mulch, you know, up against the plant to physically prevent that moth from coming down and depositing an egg in your squash stem. As your squash plants get older, they may start getting diseases. A common one in Tennessee is these mildews, the downy mildew and the powdery mildew. And these are exasperated by the dry weather and wet weather respectively. So these younger plants don't have that problem yet. But we do have a preventative measure, generally speakin', for all vegetable diseases. And that is the plant horsetail. This is Equisetum arvense, and it's an interesting plant, because when you burn it, the ash is 90% silica. And that's very unusual in the plant world. And as you know, silica is a desiccant. They use it in windows to keep 'em dry or maybe if you're storing seeds. And so we're gonna take this horsetail plant, and we simmer it for an hour and make a tea out of it. And then we ferment the tea for a few weeks. And as we know, fermenting things increases their potency. So we're gonna take some of this tea, and about a cup of it goes with about nine cups of water. And we're gonna stir that up real good. So we're just gonna get in here and stir. I like to stir one way for a little while, then stir the other way. And I think the more you stir it, the better it works. It seems like it's kinda like one of those homeopathy things, you know, where you kind of potentize it like you would a homeopathic medicine. Anyway, after we get that stirred up real good, we simply take a whisk broom, and we go through and we take our concoction and just sprinkle it over the plants, just like that right there. Squash plants will lose their vigor once they make seed. So it's important to keep the squash picked. Don't let any get over 8 inches or 10 inches long, because once it's made seed, the squash plant says, "Oh, I've done my duty." Keep them picked off real small, and your squash plants will stay vigorous a lot longer. One of the problems with squash is overproduction. You have to pick 'em every day. So you have all these squash, and once you get tired of fried squash and squash casseroles, you have to start giving it away to your neighbors. Once they start locking their screen doors, you just take a little butter knife through it and flip the lock off and relieve yourself of your burden of too much summer squash.

- Pancakes are one of those things where it makes it so that the family can't eat together at the same time. We're gonna change that today. We're gonna make a puffed pear pancake in the oven so everybody eats together. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. We're gonna have our pears here. And what we're gonna do is just toss these pear slices with a little bit of sugar and cinnamon, okay? That's just to kind of coat them really nicely. That's two tablespoons of sugar, some ground cinnamon. Use your hands, your best kitchen tool ever, and just toss them pretty evenly and let them just kind of set aside. Now, remember that pears will kind of start to turn as you slice them. So you might wanna cook them with just a little bit of lemon juice to keep that from happening. So now we're gonna make our pancake crust. So we've got 3/4 of a cup of all-purpose flour. We're going to add three eggs to that, of course large, unless the recipe says otherwise, 3/4 of a cup of milk, a little bit of salt, and a teaspoon of either almond or vanilla extract. I'm gonna use almond today. Okay, so what we're gonna do is just whisk this together. And while we've been doing all this, we preheated the oven to 450 degrees. Now, you'll need a large skillet for this. So about a 12-inch cast iron skillet works perfectly. And the little trick to this is to make sure that the skillet is in the oven while the oven is preheating. That gets the skillet nice and hot. Okay, we've got our pancake batter ready. Let's get the skillet out of the oven. Okay, you can see how big that is. And we're gonna add our butter. You'll see it start to sizzle. And we're just gonna tilt the skillet carefully so you don't burn yourself so that all that butter melts just like that. We are going to add our pears to this. Okay, so you don't have to be crazy about this. And any extra, I just like to add to the pan. Just make sure they're in a nice even layer so they're not piled on top of each other. And then we're gonna take our batter, and we're gonna pour this over the top of it. Now, the important thing is that you do not stir this after you pour it over the top. You're going to see a little few lumps in your batter. Don't worry about that. It's okay. It'll cook out. So we're gonna give it one more good whisk, pour the batter over the top, and then back into the oven it goes. And now you've got breakfast that everybody can enjoy at the exact same time, puffed pear pancake.