Episode 3220

- [Narrator] On the plaza just outside the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, beneficial insects are finding what they need to thrive. Planted throughout this pollinator pathway are colorful blooms and dependable perennials and shrubs. Each was chosen for its ability to attract a particular pollinator, helping them become more abundant. Marty DeHart shows us a residential, cool weather composting system that turns garden waste and veggie scraps into a great soil amendment. And Matt Kerske shares the story of Nashville Grown, a nonprofit connecting local farmers to restaurants, grocers and consumers. Join us. These native perennials provide habitat as well as nectar.

- We are here in Chattanooga at a Tennessee Aquarium, and most of you probably think about the tropical life in the sea, but don't forget about the plants. Jenna Paler, nice to see you.

- Nice to see you, as well.

- And you are the maintenance supervisor for all the outside things.

- Yes.

- I love that. So, you have created a beautiful native plant area for people to experience along with the inside experience that they have. So, let's talk about what you've done here.

- Okay. Before, when I first started this bed, it had a lot of, and a lot of people might be familiar with it. It's heavenly bamboo, it's a nandina shrub. They're non-native, and it doesn't really do anything for our native pollinators. So, I removed all of those and we've planted a lot of different types of perennials that are native. And you'll see a variety of colors, shapes, textures. Each one is honed into attract a different pollinator. So, a variety of plants, a variety of pollinators.

- And you've got all sun lovers here.

- Yes.

- Obviously. So, let's talk about some specifics that perhaps our viewers could utilize in their own gardens.

- Okay. This purple one right here, this is purple coneflower. This one is easily found in garden centers, and you might even find a few different colors of it. I think sometimes they come in red or yellow. This black-eyed Susan mingled with it is also readily available. I like mixing plants together.

- [Tammy] Yeah.

- [Jenna] I like it to kind of be a colorful chaos.

- [Tammy] Well, it breaks your eye.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] Up a little bit, you know.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] Instead of one big sea of yellow.

- [Jenna] Yes, and they're full sun, partial shade. They tolerate dry when they're established, and they're great for any gardener.

- [Tammy] And behind you, you've got one of my favorite plants of all time.

- [Jenna] Butterfly weed.

- [Tammy] I love it. I love it.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] And this one, again, it tolerates the same types of water conditions.

- [Jenna] Actually, even drier. You can let this one get pretty dry.

- [Tammy] Nice.

- [Jenna] I find it on the roadsides.

- [Tammy] In order to facilitate even more pollinators, tell me about the house you've got here.

- [Jenna] This is a pollinator house that one of our technicians made. It's got perfectly drilled holes in it to represent that of a carpenter bee that use wood as their nesting sites.

- [Tammy] And you've got it right here in your garden. And do you see it working?

- [Jenna] You know, part of putting this in was to deter them from going into our benches. I can't say I've seen anything yet, but it hasn't been up here for more than a month.

- Got it. Let's talk about our light yellow friend here that you've got that's kind of spindly and fun.

- It's not as showy as your other plants, but it's a great native. It was recommended to me by one of our other horticulturists, and it's always attracting something. I see a little bumble bee on it now. You know, if there's nothing else on anything in here, it's on that.

- [Tammy] And what is that?

- [Jenna] It's mountain diervilla. It's a type of honeysuckle. It's in the lonicera family.

- [Tammy] Interesting, 'cause it doesn't look like honeysuckle to me.

- [Jenna] I, you know, the flowers are a little bit similar. You'd have to look pretty close, but they kind of have like this cone shape.

- [Tammy] I like it.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] I like it.

- [Jenna] It's pretty. I believe they smell really good, too.

- [Tammy] And behind it, you've got what, little pin cushions?

- Yes. That's a rattlesnake master. And the flowers are, there's actually thousands of 'em. They're really tiny, and they go around that cone and they'll stay like that all winter. It adds a really cool, interesting aspect to your garden. These are kind of flopped over, but you know, when they stand tall, they're just really cool plants.

- Does it reseed from that?

- Yes, I have little babies coming up around it in some areas.

- And what color are the flowers when it's blooming?

- They're white, whiteish green. They're not very showy. I mean, your main thing is just these fun pokey little balls on 'em.

- Got it. Yeah, that's why I call 'em pin cushions, right?

- And this one likes really dry soil.

- Got it. Okay, now talk to me about the blooming wonder here.

- Yes, that's a rough blazing star. The first year I had it, it was just one stalk, but now it's kind of got two coming up, and that one right there is actually blooming. That's another fun flower. When you compare that to the first ones we talked about, it just adds such a different element to your garden.

- You don't have just one pollinator garden. You've got several. So this, we're in yet another area that's got beautiful pollinating plants all over the place. So Jenna, tell me about what we've got going on here that's really a beautiful sight from the street.

- Yes, so this is a rain garden. If you look in the lawn area, it's the lowest part of this. This is something that a lot of homeowners can utilize because it requires far less watering.

- [Tammy] Nice.

- We have things like gaura in here. We also see some more black-eyed Susans and our purple coneflower.

- And then this purple back here-

- Yes.

- That seems to be a delicious tree.

- [Jenna] The bumblebees are loving it. That is a salvia.

- [Tammy] They love that, and I like how it's kind of wispy and just kind of all over the place.

- [Jenna] And it spreads really well. I have one up there that I actually divided from this area.

- [Tammy] Nice. So, they just work the whole thing, and then you put your lavender here. Purple seems to be the delicious thing of the moment right now.

- [Jenna] I've noticed that with bumblebees, they love purple. Anything purple and tall, they really are attracted to.

- [Tammy] And tell me about this milkweed, because you hear lots about milkweed and that that's an attractant but you've got something that's just kind of interesting.

- [Jenna] That is common milkweed. Milkweed is a really important plant right now with news of the monarch butterfly becoming endangered. Milkweed is part of the Asclepias family. So there's about 13 to 15 species that are native to Tennessee, and they will only utilize that plant for food for their caterpillars.

- [Tammy] And speaking of butterflies, one of the things that you said that's very important is to have a shrub.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] So tell me about why that's important in a pollinator garden.

- So, in the case of the monarch, they'll use the milkweed plants to lay their eggs and their caterpillars will hatch on them and eat the foliage. But after, when they go to pupate and they make the chrysalis, they wanna go to somewhere farther away from that, safer, so if you have a tree nearby or a shrub. In the case of this garden, we have a coral honeysuckle and a trellis back there that they're able to go and pupate on.

- [Tammy] Got it. So just something that's a little hiding place.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- [Tammy] And it needs some depth to it so it's not too close to where they, but it's far enough away-

- [Jenna] Right.

- [Tammy] That they feel like they're traveling a little bit.

- [Jenna] And even ornamental grasses are a good one, too. If you don't wanna commit to like a bigger woody shrub, you can always just do a grass.

- [Tammy] So how often does this get watered?

- [Jenna] Right now-

- [Tammy] 'Cause you say it's so low.

- [Jenna] Right. Right now, we're getting rain every day, so I haven't manually watered it for a while. Rain gardens, once they're established, you shouldn't really have a need to water them at all.

- [Tammy] Nice.

- [Jenna] Unless maybe during very unusual dry periods, but if you're putting, the key is the right plant in the right spot. Pay attention to your plant labels, you'll be good. The master gardeners actually maintain this area. I mean, we help each other out, but-

- [Tammy] Right, right, partners.

- [Jenna] Yeah, we're very lucky to have them volunteer and do this for the city.

- [Tammy] It's beautiful. In addition to the trellising that you've got, you've also got this wonderful hydrangea. Talk to me about it.

- [Jenna] This is oak leaf hydrangea, hydrangea quercifolia. It's a native hydrangea to Tennessee. It's got the white flowers, white panicle flowers in the spring and early summer. And then in the fall, the leaves will turn all sorts of colors, pink, red, yellow.

- [Tammy] Nice, and so it just keeps attracting them even after the blooms are gone?

- [Jenna] Yes. It's got a lot of interest to it because it blooms in the spring and then you get that nice fall foliage come October.

- [Tammy] Is that one plant?

- [Jenna] You know, that's a good question. It likes to reseed itself, so if I lifted up those bottom ones, you'd probably see 50 underneath there.

- [Tammy] Got it.

- [Jenna] So, they're like a multi stem shrub. So coming up from the ground, you might have up to six main branches that kind of spur off into different directions.

- [Tammy] So give it some room.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- Flowers are everywhere, even at your sign, so you've even got pollinators welcoming people to the aquarium, Jenna. Tell us about what you've got here at the entrance.

- We have the purple flower, which is Stokes' aster, the one behind it, the yellow threadleaf coreopsis, and then this one directly in front of us here. This is Tennessee coneflower. It's echinacea tennesseensis. This is actually an endemic species that's only found in Tennessee. It has some slight variations to the purple coneflower that we saw earlier. You'll notice that the petals are a little bit more reflexed and they're a little bit skinnier. The foliage, too, is kind of hairy and rough and thinner, as well.

- [Tammy] And the stem feels different, too.

- [Jenna] Yes.

- So, interesting. So, there's plenty of educational opportunities and pollinator opportunities all over the area. We really appreciate, Jenna, that you have beautified this downtown area and that it's not so concrete. Thank you for doing that. You've done a lovely job and it's really welcoming to the Tennessee Aquarium.

- [Jenna] You are very welcome. It is my passion to do so.

- [Tammy] Love it.

- As you probably know, your plants are only as good as the soil that they're grown in. And compost is one of the best things that you can add to your soil and you can create it for free on your own property. I wanted to show you this really cool residential system here with three bins. It's compact. It's easy to work, which is really great and it's not terrible looking. I wanted to sort of describe to you how it works. There's one bin has mostly finished stuff, and then two bins, they add fresh green and brown material to, and those work. They turn this every couple of weeks, every few weeks, over the course of the warm season, they turn. They'll use some of the finished and incorporate it back into the cooking ones. This is a cold system. There are sort of two sorts of ways to compost, hot and cool. Hot is when you make a pile and the bacteria heat it up so much that you can actually turn it and steam comes out of it. That's a very rapid system. Cool systems don't heat up that much. It's a slower rotting system. It's tends to be more humus-y because humus burns up in the hot temperatures of a hot system more, so there are advocates of both. This is a cool system, which means that it can take over the winter or some months for a bin to finish, but there's always stuff that's nearly finished or finished because of the way this is run. And I did wanna show you how this is built. Four by fours, obviously, sunk into the ground, framed. They put tar on the top so the rain doesn't rot the four by four. And this, you can see that it's made so that you can access this. These slats on one side is the access. So you can both get in there to shovel it out into a wheelbarrow or get in there to turn it. All three of these on this one side remove for easy access. And it's just with little door latches. You can see how easy it is, and a hole drilled into the post so that none of this is super high tech. It's just all very, very thoughtfully done and it works like crazy. You can see the slats aren't solid, so there's always air getting in there, into the piles. And what goes in here is garden waste, but nothing, no weeds with seeds. Because this is a cool system, you don't want weed seeds in there because the seeds won't get killed by like a hot system, composting system would kill those weed seeds. This will not, so you don't want those in there. But anything else. You can see there's garden trash in here. Here's old tomato vine, here's some daylily stuff and various leaves. This will all get forked over and turned in. And there's lawn clippings. All of this is really great stuff to put in and turn. Also in the autumn, a lot of leaves go in here. This property has a lot of oaks, a lot of oak leaves, which are pretty tough, but they break down over the winter and that's a really great carbon source for compost are the leaves in the fall. The green is a nitrogen source, so it's a wonderful system, not hard to build. This is all available at any hardware store or big box store. And it just takes up not much space. Really great system.

- As the city of Nashville grows, so, too, does its need for locally produced agriculture. I'm really excited today because we get to go behind the scenes at a local nonprofit that sort of acts as a food hub connecting farmers and chefs and supermarket owners, making sure that this slow food movement continues to grow in our city. And I'm here with founder Alan Powell of Nashville Grown. Alan, this space is pretty incredible. A lot of stuff going on, flurry of activity, especially at this time of the year. You have shipments coming and going and all. And tell me a little bit about the kind of the founding moments of Nashville Grown and how all this came to be.

- Well, 12 or so years ago, I was working for a farmer that a lot of people know because he is featured on this show so often, Jeff Poppen, the Barefoot Farmer. I was working directly for him and helping him distribute vegetables in his CSA program.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And through that process, I started making connections with farmers and chefs both. And so, when Jeff encouraged me to get out and try and make inroads to sell some more of his product out into the world, I started calling the chefs I knew. And it was a very natural process. It started with Jeff's stuff and a couple of restaurants. And then I took on another farm. And then the next year after that, another one, and then this girl came into town, talking about this concept called a food hub, which I hadn't heard of at the time. But she said, "Essentially, it's what you're already doing." It's making food more available from the local farms into either the consumer or restaurant scene. Now, my business happens to be all wholesale, but that was just because that's what was lacking here in our market.

- [Matt] Right.

- But it is a very nice little way for chefs to get access to a hundred different farms worth of products on a single website. And that, of course, means one delivery-

- Yep.

- One invoice and one check cut.

- Right.

- And then we take care of all the legwork on the other side. We move everything around, but we also redistribute the money so that everybody else, farmers can farm, chefs can cook, and we do all of the crazy in between.

- So, you're kind of like the lubrication that keeps all this real time food reaching from the farms locally to the chefs and the supermarkets that wanna work with you in a sense. And business is good?

- [Alan] Business has been very good. We've been growing in leaps and bounds. Last year, our growth was about 150%.

- [Matt] Wow, huge.

- [Alan] Which is substantial. And so, we are anticipating continued growth along those lines. It is a really important business. The US government now has managed to recognize how beneficial these food hubs are around the country to the local economies of all of these different places.

- [Matt] Kind of helping with legislation that kind of helps foster-

- [Alan] Well, the legislation-

- [Matt] Nonprofits like this?

- Well, the legislation is helpful, too. I mean, fortunately, farmers are considered a very respect-worthy group in this community.

- Right.

- So, it wasn't as hard to work with the legislature here, but it is true that there are a lot of things that still need to be done, paving the road. Like, if you remember the chicken thing-

- Yes.

- A few years ago when when-

- Policies, yeah.

- Yeah, I mean we had, so, here we are, nobody is able to raise chickens and everybody says, "We wanna raise our backyard chickens." While the Food Policy Council, at the time I was on that council, but we were writing white papers to do just those kinds of things. It's very much up the alley of what Nashville Grown wants to do, continue to pave the road for a more lucrative and viable farming business community. And if we can create a nice, robust local food system, we have created a great kind of shield against economic shock, right? So the stronger our local food economy, the better we fare if both national or international economy nose dives like it did in 2008. I mean, we're running what's called a consignment model for food hubs. And there's lots of different models of food hubs out there in the world. And the reason we're a consignment model is that we actually warehouse very little. Right? The stuff that's in there now came in today and it'll be gone tomorrow.

- [Matt] Wow.

- Right, there's no real length of time that we're holding onto anything. So, farmers are listing products on order days. Restaurants order. The next day would be aggregation day. That's the day where either the farm brings it to me or I go out and get it from them.

- [Matt] Yep.

- And then the third day would be delivery day. And so, we have these two periods twice a week. We have an order day followed by an aggregation day, followed by delivery day-

- Wow.

- And then we do it again.

- Wow.

- And we do that twice every week. And that allows things to move very quickly, but the beauty, really, I mean, when you're talking about trying to maintain freshness, if you place an order on Sunday and Monday morning it gets harvested, picked up and delivered to me, and by Tuesday morning it's in your hands, there is no fresher produce-

- That's right.

- Hitting any market anywhere.

- That's incredible to be able to move that much mass, that much weight of produce all in such a short amount of time. And so, some of it comes into the cooler. Does some of it go directly from the farm to the restaurateurs? It always pass through here first?

- Well, there's definitely a series of possible exceptions. I mean, we do have sometimes farms that would like to make the delivery themselves, but most farmers wanna stay on the farm and do their thing.

- [Matt] That's right.

- And so if they want to, if they're trying to, you know, make sure that they put a face to their farm name and make a connection with the chef, because there's a lot of things that are born out of this direct communication, and we tried very hard when we designed our business to allow chefs and farmers to communicate without Nashville Grown getting in the way, but still utilizing all of our services so that everybody can have their time best spent where it's best spent.

- That's right.

- You know?

- Keeping everybody doing what they do best.

- Exactly.

- Mass producing the most, but yet allowing everybody just to kind of get it done at the end of the day in a very quick fashion.

- Yes.

- Nice, nice, nice. Alan, talk to me a little bit about some of these challenges that you might have with the end users being the chefs of some of these nicer restaurants or any of the restaurants here in Nashville and how the seasonality and the menu changing has an effect on your business here.

- Well, because our business is relying entirely on locally grown food, there are definitely limits that we tend to refer to as seasonality. So, you don't expect to get a head of lettuce in the middle of July or August.

- [Matt] Right.

- Grown outdoors. Most people would say that's just not gonna happen. It's gonna burn up and try and bolt or grow to seed. And so, what ends up happening is you get people who are filling niches. They're experimenting with season extension, using hoop houses and things like that. And then you have hydroponic growers, which have become really popular lately. And with the hydro growers, they are filling a lot of gaps that previously were just empty. You know, so I can now sell tomatoes in the middle of the winter time.

- [Matt] Expanding your offerings, essentially.

- Right, so we can, so yeah, we're now expanding our offerings, which broaden out seasonality, but seasonality is a rather interesting concept for a lot of people in America because we have all been raised with this idea that we should have access to anything all the time when we want it. And a chef who grows up with that mindset and has worked in a restaurant kitchen using that mindset, when they try and switch to a business like ours for, you know, food procurement-

- [Matt] Yep.

- What they find is that they run into things that they are asking for in the wrong season.

- [Matt] In the wrong season.

- And they just have to be mostly educated in that we have to kind of like remind ourselves that when it's 90 degrees outside, really tender things are not likely to grow.

- Right.

- On the other hand, when it's really cold outside, you have the same kind of problem in reverse. And what we have now is we have people saying, "Well, how do I extend the season of something that kind of," so at least it's cutting down on how few months or how many months it's just not available.

- Right.

- And so, now we're getting to this point where I have a lot of products that I didn't think would ever be available off season, but they are now.

- [Matt] Starting to open up.

- Yeah.

- And you're seeing chefs being able to work with you and open up their palette and their menu to being more able to change with the seasons a little bit better and chefs are starting to appreciate that it is local, but it does have a seasonal availability?

- Yeah, and, I mean, the chefs that really like that kind of cooking are really into it. I mean, they find that, well, one, the freshness and the flavor and nutrient density of the food is all at its peak.

- [Matt] Right.

- So they love that because all they wanna do, they want, most chefs want two things. They wanna be known as producing food that just wows people and they wanna be known as doing something different than the other chefs. So, if you provide them with unique product-

- [Matt] Yeah.

- And fresh product, then chefs are really happy. In fact, it's kind of funny to see a chef swoon over vegetables, but it happens all the time.

- Right.

- And you know, you think, wow, it's just a vegetable, but I mean this is their life.

- But then it gets appreciated by the very end consumer, which is us, which are the drivers of this commerce all to begin with.

- Yeah, when you go to a restaurant and put something in your mouth and it really does make you go, wow-

- Wow.

- That's what they're looking for.

- Good. I'll be back.

- And I am trying to increase the likelihood that that's gonna happen because there is no better flavor that comes from fresh picked produce. I mean, that's where it all is right there.

- Right, right. Well, I'm excited to take a look around a little bit more and go see what kind of shipments that you have going out for tomorrow.

- Yeah. That's all for tomorrow.

- All right. So, we got a just a bunch of collections for the day shipments that are coming in and-

- Right, so you can see that I've got them organized by delivery location in here. And that way, tomorrow morning, I'll do one final redundant check just to make sure that nothing got omitted and everything's where it needs to be before it gets loaded onto two trucks and heads out into the world.

- Well, Alan, I can tell you're a really busy man nowadays in the season. I just really wanna say thank you for letting us see inside of your world. And I just wanna say you're doing a great job keeping everybody connected in the local food scene.

- Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardner.org and find us on these platforms.