Episode 3207

- [Narrator] Rita Venable takes us on a tour of a sizable backyard landscape featuring massive border beds and a plant palette supportive of the area's wildlife. It's all a labor of love for the homeowners who relish their time spent working in the dirt. Sheri Gramer learns tasty recipes for tomatoes, corn, and herbs when harvest time is at its peak. And Jeff Poppen shares his experience growing October beans. Join us. Happiness is found in the trees, the hydrangeas, the hosta, all the plants that thrive in the Mid-South.

- Did you ever wonder if you can handle a big landscape with your garden, like an acre or an acre and a half? Well, here is an example of a beautiful, large, bigger-than-life garden/landscape in Brentwood, Tennessee, and we're going to talk today to Hardy and JoAnn Hock because this is their home and has been for the last 20 years, and this garden has been a labor of love. JoAnn, tell us a little bit about how you got started in gardening.

- Well, being from Florida, we were into tropicals, right? So when we moved up here, we had to change direction completely. You cannot have tropicals in Tennessee. So I didn't know anything about, I mean, I always loved the idea of having hydrangeas, I just loved hydrangeas, never could have them in Florida. I loved iris, I loved all the things that you can find in Tennessee that grow wild practically. So when I came up here, I started studying, and I got Judy Lowe's book at first and asked questions. We went to the garden shows at the fairgrounds every year. And every year, they gave away free trees. So we got two poplar trees from them, planted one in the front, one in the back. So that was a start. I pick seeds everywhere. I mean, I do anywhere I go if I see a little flower that I don't have.

- Now, Hardy, you have a extensive gardening background, right? But it's not quite in flowers.

- No.

- It was in what?

- Well, trees, bushes, shrubs.

- Yeah.

- But being from Jersey, you studied mostly what?

- [Hardy] Well, that's a misnomer. I know it's the Garden State.

- Well, yeah.

- And all that, but we were city dwellers. But we had a country home in Saddle River, which is where... What president?

- Nixon-

- Nixon had a home there.

- I think had a home. Eventually, they developed all that area.

- So my grandparents, who came from Germany and Poland, and they did all their gardening.

- Oh, yeah.

- Mm-hmm.

- They did everything from fruit, vegetables. They never went to the store. They grew everything their own, and, of course, that's where we learned.

- [Rita] Okay, so, here we are at the beautiful, this looks like you've added a pollinator garden too, and I see a bee flying around.

- [JoAnn] Oh my gosh, yes, the bees love it. They do. The coneflowers, yeah.

- [Rita] Yeah, you've got purple coneflower, and it looks like a blanket flower. Some-

- And there's some cleomes coming up.

- Cleome. And some sedum for the fall-

- Yes.

- Which is great. And a lovely oakleaf hydrangea back there in the background.

- [JoAnn] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- [Rita] So, it's really popping right now.

- Yeah.

- And our flowers are also geared to the wildlife we have. But I noticed starting a couple days ago, goldfinches came out.

- The goldfinch's coming in now-

- Oh, really?

- They're starting to feed.

- And they were on the flowers.

- Yeah, on the-

- And on this tree, you get what?

- [JoAnn] Well, we were scared about it when we first moved in.

- Yeah.

- [JoAnn] We had a arborist come out and look at it to make sure it was good. And then he put a sling at the top where there were two forked branches.

- Yeah.

- And he put a sling up there for us. And so we feel pretty safe.

- [Rita] Do you get woodpeckers in the-

- [JoAnn] Oh my gosh, yes.

- When you live on a slope, and this looks like about a 40%, it's important to think about erosion control. And here they clearly have. This is a wonderful native grass.

- It is.

- It is called river oats. It's a Chasmanthium. And not only is it great, the roots go down so deep. But also in the fall, it makes a lovely cut plant, the seed heads do for flower arrangements. And it's also the host plant for several of our butterfly species. So, you have chosen, well, JoAnn, in your choice of plants for erosion control.

- [JoAnn] We already have the anemones creeping up. Those anemones, I won't... They're gonna fill up eventually, they'll come up and fill up. But we'll probably move some of those hostas also and try to fill in that whole area a little by little.

- [Rita] This is another sloped area in their large backyard. And the limestone rock is sort of the bedrock of this and the focal point, really, of this whole area. This was not only here but extended over to the side. And they thought about doing a waterfall, but JoAnn has said she didn't wanna mess with the naturalness of it.

- No. Yeah.

- And I agree. I think it looks beautiful as it is.

- Right.

- We've got ferns over here.

- [JoAnn] Mm-hmm.

- [Rita] We've got a beautiful hydrangea which forms a really great shrubbery understory to the large trees that are here. And then you've got a yucca plant, and you come down here finally for more erosion control with a large bed of hellebores. And I bet this is a picture when they're blooming.

- [JoAnn] Yes, in February. They're all-

- Beautiful.

- [JoAnn] Amazing that they survived, they died off in the winter, which they've never done before. But this winter was so bad that they died to brown. But they came up, they came up all overnight! And then we had our flowers, the Lenten roses, as they're called.

- [Rita] So, Hardy and JoAnn, you've got this beautiful sugar maple tree, which I'm sure is a picture in the fall. And you can see it from your porch.

- [JoAnn] It was a volunteer too.

- A volunteer came upon-

- It was a volunteer.

- The understory here is, as we've said, the hellebore, and it will grow right under these trees because it can take some shade. And then you have a gorgeous dogwood-

- The dogwood.

- Which just gets enough shade to keep it really healthy. You've got more purple coneflower here with a bee on it, which is amazing.

- Oh, yeah, yes.

- And there goes a moth in there too.

- Yes, yes, absolutely.

- So, and coming on around the corner, you've got more hydrangea. And I love seeing your beautiful wild bergamot, your Monarda here.

- Yeah.

- [Rita] A great pollinator plant for the garden, so. You've just done a fantastic job of bringing your pollinator plants all around the-

- Right.

- [Rita] Mixing it in with your landscape.

- Right.

- It's just beautiful. Hardy, this is overwhelming to me even. And I can't believe that you can take care of all of this by yourselves. Do you have any help out here?

- [Hardy] No, just recently, I have started one of my grandsons. Every Saturday, he comes and he does some of the labor stuff that I can't do anymore. I just can't bend over that much anymore.

- But you're passing on the legacy to him.

- Yeah, oh yeah.

- So that's a cool thing.

- Yeah, he wants to do this forever.

- Wonderful.

- He's got a regular job with Vanderbilt Health, but he wants this Saturdays.

- Okay!

- He enjoys it.

- Well, it's just fabulous. And not only have you covered the whole yard, but everything, the borders are so wide. And I love the rock that you've used here. Tell me where the rock came from.

- Well, the rock was mostly mine, so to speak, when they built the house.

- Uh-huh.

- Most of it is limestone. There's a few things that came from somewhere else, but not really that much. Some fill-ins.

- Hardy, I bet you have 1/10 of a mile in these rock borders that you put down yourself. How did you do it?

- All by hand.

- All by hand.

- And a wheelbarrow. You'll notice that we've moved it in. They were out here.

- Uh-huh.

- And we had so much wild growth, I decided to move them in. So we had moved them all back in a couple feet.

- Well, I like the curvature.

- Yeah.

- You know-

- Right.

- It looks-

- We tried to keep that.

- [Rita] It's a great design. You've got a beautiful magnolia here with signs of a yellow-bellied sapsucker going around the-

- Yeah.

- The trunk. That's really cool. And your Rose of Sharon is blooming. You've got great overstory trees. Wonderful layering here, it's just amazing, where you have the big trees, then the understories, and then finally the-

- Yeah. The trees were-

- Herbaceous.

- [Hardy] The first thing we planted in here when we moved here.

- JoAnn, I love the way you and Hardy have provided these low understory trees, such as this eastern redbud, for a little bit of shade in the garden, because every gardener needs a little spot of shade.

- Absolutely.

- This is a fabulous shrub too. It's a ninebark, which is also a native plant. It provides a lot of early nectar for our pollinators. And this goes right out into the sunlight again, where you've provided a lot of the plants that are in other areas. And it's just a wonderful design. Did you design this yourself?

- [JoAnn] It's happenstance. We started with a pure vegetable garden. And after a few years, we knew it was much too much work. And we thought, "Well, let's fill it in." And we had separate gardens, so we combined everything and made it just a mixture.

- Okay!

- Just a little bit of everything.

- That's fabulous! And I love the fennel you've got over there. A lot of times people don't think about the herbs for pollinators, but that happens to be a host plant for the black swallowtail.

- Really? Ooh!

- So, beautiful, and not only do they provide some host plants but flowers as well.

- [JoAnn] Well, we have some blueberry bushes here that we love to feed the birds with because we normally don't get a chance to harvest too many. But we did have a great bumper year a year or two ago, but that was the only year that we really were able to harvest any. There were so many blueberries that the birds couldn't eat 'em all. So, that's okay.

- [Rita] Well, JoAnn and Hardy, I just want to thank you so much for letting us come to your beautiful home and garden today.

- You're welcome.

- It is stupendous. I still don't know your secret of how you take care of all this and do such a wonderful job, but it's glorious, so thank you both-

- Oh, you're so welcome.

- For inviting us in.

- You're so welcome.

- We really appreciate it.

- We enjoyed it. I mean, it's so much fun working in the dirt, right? It's fun working in the dirt! Yes!

- Every other day.

- Every other day.

- We have to have a day to recoup.

- I hear you.

- Summer's upon us and you know what that means. It's harvest season! And we're here today with Rhonda Galligan, and she's gonna show us how to use up some of those vegetables. We are gonna do roasted tomatoes and we're gonna do some corn. Rhonda, how you doing?

- Doing great, Sheri!

- Show me what you got going on here.

- Okay, so one fabulous recipe that I make a lot because you can put it in the freezer when all those tomatoes are coming in, and this is oven-roasted tomatoes. So we have oregano, thyme, parsley, basil, some chopped garlic, and rosemary. So what we'll do is we will just gather some of these herbs that have been chopped.

- Just a good pinch of each one, okay.

- Good pinch of each one. Yes.

- If you like more garlic, more garlic.

- You can add whatever your favorite herb is.

- Or omit! Omit some herbs if you don't like certain herbs.

- Yeah, and then just, we just sprinkle our tomatoes with this herb mixture.

- [Sheri] Does this work with any kind of tomato? I bet you this would work with store-bought tomatoes as well.

- [Rhonda] Oh, yes, yes. It, yeah, this will work with any tomatoes.

- And even little cherry tomatoes?

- Yeah.

- Oh, that would be fun, wouldn't it?

- Yeah.

- And you were saying that you can freeze this for later-

- Yes!

- After it's roasted?

- After it's roasted.

- Do you puree it or anything?

- No, I don't puree it.

- Okay.

- And then a drizzle of some extra-virgin olive oil on the top. Over the tomato.

- This is pretty easy. I think-

- It's very easy.

- [Sheri] I think most people will be able to do this one, yeah.

- Oh, yeah. It's very simple and easy.

- And then what's next?

- So, next, in the oven, 200 degrees for two hours.

- So it roasts for a slow time.

- Yes.

- Makes it nice and tender.

- [Rhonda] So the sweetness of the tomatoes come out and the herbs melt, and it just makes a fabulous tomato.

- [Sheri] Oh, Rhonda, it smells so good! So good! Look at these tomatoes.

- [Rhonda] Yes, and it's been two hours of cooking time. You can go do other things, you come back, pull it out.

- Now, do you-

- And they're ready!

- Do you normally take the skin off now with them?

- Yeah! Yeah, 'cause look how easily-

- Okay, so it's just gonna peel right off.

- It'll peel right off.

- Okay.

- Right there. And you just go around all your tomatoes, peel the skin off. And then you can use them like I did in making my eggplant Parmesan.

- That smells heavenly.

- Or you can just package them away in a freezer container and pull them out when you're-

- So you could use it-

- Later on!

- In soups or make more eggplant Parmesan in the wintertime.

- Yeah, pasta sauce. You know, the list is endlessly.

- Endless.

- So, yeah, it's a great way to use those tomatoes.

- [Sheri] Well, I can't wait to see what you're gonna do with corn next.

- [Rhonda] Okay! We'll do it!

- You're gonna show us how to make basil pesto corn, is that right?

- Yes, that's right.

- Let's go! I can't wait.

- Okay!

- Okay.

- All right! Here we go, we take roughly two cups of loose basil leaves, two cloves of garlic, and have them chopped, and then three tablespoons of toasted pine nuts, and then half a cup of olive oil. And this is good because you can just add everything all at once.

- And use good olive oil.

- So, we've got this pesto made up. And at this point, we can take the pesto and you can freeze it. Before, and pesto you add Parmesan or Romano. But if you're gonna stick it in the freezer, which is good when your basil is all coming in and you need to preserve it, just go ahead and stick that in the freezer. And then when you take it out the freezer, or when you've made fresh and you're gonna use it right away, go ahead and add your cheese, which this is some freshly ground Romano and Parmesan.

- Okay.

- And if you have one without the other, that's fine. Just this is... You just mix in your cheese, and then you're ready!

- And so, you can do your corn any way, correct?

- Yeah, the corn-

- But this is cooked corn.

- Cooked corn, which cook it your favorite way. You know, boiled, roasted, grilled. And then you just take your pesto and you just brush. The sweetness of the corn and the saltiness of the pesto is just a extra special treat.

- [Sheri] And serve extra pesto on the side.

- [Rhonda] Serve extra pesto on the side. So there we go!

- [Sheri] And then what do you do? Just consume it?

- Eat it!

- [Sheri] Alright, you don't have to put it back under the-

- No!

- Okay. It's ready to go.

- Nothing else! It's ready to eat.

- Well, that is wonderful. And it's summertime! Summer's here. Herb garden's lush and growing beautifully. What to do with all them herbs? Well, guess what? We're gonna do a cocktail. And we're here today with Mike Galligan. Mike, what you got going on here?

- And we're gonna do an Irish Sour.

- Yum!

- When Rhonda and I were in Ireland about three weeks ago, I drank some of those, enjoyed them.

- Hence the Jameson.

- And then back here in Tennessee where we have a lot of herbs, we added some herbs to it, or an herb, to see how it tastes, and it did very well. So we're gonna make for you today-

- Okay.

- An Irish Sour.

- [Sheri] Okay. This is gonna be made with a thyme syrup.

- It's a thyme syrup, and it's a simple syrup, which is a half-and-half sugar and water.

- Okay.

- And I've added to that a bunch of thyme, which I then bring to a boil for about two minutes-

- Let it steep.

- And then let it steep for about 30 minutes. Put it in the refrigerator or freezer and let it chill.

- Okay!

- We use Jameson whiskey. Bushmills would do as well for those who favor that. But this was what was recommended, what I had over in Ireland, so I've kept with that. We would also put in it that thyme syrup, the lemon juice. Egg white, touch of vanilla.

- All right.

- I find that a touch, just a drop or two blends. You don't taste the vanilla, but it seems to blend the flavors a bit. And some Angostura bitters, which we'll put in it. And so we will start, when we do this, we'll have the shaker here. I have a measuring cup here, and I will first put two ounces of Jameson.

- Heavy pour two ounces, please.

- Pardon? Heavy pour. I know how to do that.

- Sure, just messing.

- And I just did it for you.

- Okay.

- Then I'll pour one ounce of the lemon juice.

- [Sheri] It's hard to see them little lines, isn't it?

- Well, the older you get, the fainter they become, right?

- Yep.

- And then I put one ounce of the thyme syrup as well. I put a dash of vanilla, a couple dashes of the bitters. Then I put a little bit of egg white. Now, I don't use the real egg white. I buy the pasteurized ones in the store.

- I was gonna ask you about that, okay.

- Because otherwise I'd have to boil the egg for 30 seconds and-

- Right.

- That's a little more work than this.

- Yes.

- And I can't tell the difference in the flavor.

- Right.

- So I'll put just about the same as it would be one egg white.

- Okay.

- Then, all I do is shake it this time for 30 seconds.

- Okay.

- Now, oops. I shake it, and sometimes I do that.

- Said after the second one.

- And I won't do it the real 30 seconds here.

- Okay.

- Then what I do is I put some ice cubes in here. And I shake it again. I'll try to shake it without spilling. I didn't get it on you though.

- [Sheri] Should I stand back?

- Shake that really good, and you should shake it a little longer than I've done it here.

- Correct, yes.

- But I think-

- We'll get the gist of it. There we go.

- And then you pour it in here. And I've got a thyme sprig, you put in it.

- For garnish. Yep.

- [Mike] And the cocktail is made.

- [Sheri] Looks delicious.

- Have you ever been bean disappointed? Excessive rainfall in June and July, which rarely occurs here in Tennessee, contributed to a bumper crop of potatoes and onions and other early crops. But beans act funny with too much rain. Everything looked fine. We dutifully hoed them out and the vines grew great, and then they began blooming. They just didn't make any beans! The same thing often happens with tomatoes. If you over-fertilize them, they make vine after vine but don't make much fruit. We have to be careful with nitrogen when we fertilize. That's why we use compost. Why do plants make seeds? To further propagate their species. Every time it rains, nitrogen is released in the soil. And if the nitrogen keeps flowing, the plants just keep growing and see no reason to make their fruit. What happened this spring is that we had all this rain. The vines looked great, they were blooming, but they just didn't make very many beans. Well, I knew from past experience that when there's too much rain in the spring, that rain soaks into our soils and allows for planting a fall crop of beans, which is what this is over here. In late July, we cleaned up the old potato field and got them all put away. And I decided I would use this field to plant the fall beans. So we made some furrows. Of course I do this with a tractor, but in the garden, we'll just use a hoe. And we simply make a furrow. And some good soil, the soil has to be in good heart, good tilth and all. And then I take the seeds and I drop them, oh, about two to every foot and step on 'em. I love to firm the seed into the soil. That way, I get a good contact and that seed will swell up because it's got the soil right up against it. Then we just simply cover 'em up a little bit with some dry soil, and then they'll sprout up and then we keep 'em hoed out. After the beans came up, we cultivated them about four times, which in a garden you would do with a hoe. And after the last pass with the cultivator, we went through it and we pulled up all these pigweeds that escaped our cultivator. The way we tell when we can plant a fall crop is we go to when the last frost date is, which around here is, on the average, about October 15th. So I know if I plant at the end of July, I have the 60 days it'll take to make the beans plus another couple of weeks that will allow us to have a good crop of beans. If it had gotten much later into August, I wouldn't have time to have planted this crop of beans. This variety is Taylor's dwarf horticultural bean. So we eat them as green beans when they're at this young stage, oh, five to six inches long. And then in about two or three weeks, they'll ripen up, and all these pods will turn yellow with red streaks and they'll be leathery. That's when we harvest them and we shell them out to get what we call shelly beans, or October beans. These I take and put into bags and put in the freezer, and that's what we have during the wintertime. You can also leave them on the vine to dry and then just have them as dry beans. We have found that they store better as dry beans just left on the vine, thrown up in the loft of the barn. One year I did that with some of them. I took some others on the porch, we shelled them out, I put 'em into jars, kept them inside, and they got buggy. So, I think that they're actually better stored just outside where it's freezing and it's cold, and that way the bugs and stuff don't seem to get into 'em so bad. Gardening is full of joys and it's also full of disappointments! I always guarantee my customers that we will have a crop failure every year. But it'll be different from year to year. Some year, it'll be tomatoes or beans or sweet corn, but there's always going to be bumper crops too. It all depends on the weather! We're gonna have a really good crop of fall cabbages. These are Chinese cabbages and bok choys, and our fall beans have not been disappointing at all.