Episode 3321

- [Announcer] You are sure to be impressed and perhaps inspired by a couple of motivated growers who have found their niche. First, Annette Shrader is awed by this long terraced backyard border and the cohesive foundation plantings accomplished by a couple who gained plant knowledge through the University of Tennessee Master Gardener program. Beautiful. Then Julie Berbiglia visits with a self-taught market farmer who uses sustainable agriculture methods to grow high quality vegetables and herbs. Plus he boosts transplants in no-waste soil pods. Really cool. Join us. First, learning about plants and growing techniques to elevate the home landscape.

- Isn't it wonderful in life when something comes along and makes us aware that there's other things other than our home and maybe a space to entertain? Suddenly the plant life comes to life in our eyes and with mentors around us. That is what has happened here in Columbia, Tennessee. Sue Harris, it's beautiful here. But you didn't always see the world with plants in it, did you?

- Not at this level, no.

- Someone mentored you and introduced you to a way to garden, didn't they?

- Mm hmm.

- Tell us about that journey.

- Young, my mother and grandmother gardened. But as we saw the backyard, we wanted to do more and things interest us. We went to garden shows and things like that and we got involved in the Maury County Master Gardener program.

- That's an excellent learning tool, isn't it?

- Mm-hmm, it is.

- [Annette] Behind us, you have a magnificent water feature. Why don't you tell us how Rick started this.

- [Sue] In our Master Gardener program, there was a waterscape guy and Rick asked him a million questions and got really interested in building the water features and the waterfall wasn't the only one, he kept going. So he's really enjoyed building those.

- [Annette] And it is interesting, that the fact that it is hot-

- Yes.

- But the sound of that water and the coolness that you're thinking about, it does its trick, doesn't it?

- It does. And we were both in the medical field and it was just relaxing to come here in the afternoon and sit in the swing and listen to the water.

- Well, tell us about your bananas.

- They have kind of taken over. They are hardy bananas. So they grow that big from the ground every year. We just cut 'em off when frost comes and mulch over 'em and they come back next year. So, they make it look a little tropical. People always talk about it, "I feel like I'm on an island."

- Well, that's what you want and that's the water. That's such a great combination. And I noticed that in this array of plants that you've got in here, you do have some annuals, you do have perennials. I do notice that your roses, are these the Knock Out roses?

- [Sue] They are not. They are Oso Easy Proven Winners and they grow. I mean, I cut them way back in the winter too, and that's as big as they get, so.

- [Annette] You believe in your pruners, don't you?

- [Sue] I do. I work all with those a lot, so-

- [Annette] And I can't help but notice the foliage over there that looks to be like an amaryllis.

- [Sue] It is. And that was one of my Christmas amaryllises that I bought at a local big box store and put 'em in the ground and they've multiplied through the years.

- So, how deep did you plant them?

- Six inches. The bulb has to be six inches and they come back every year.

- So we don't really have to baby them, do we?

- No.

- [Annette] And I do note that you have herbs growing. This is a great border for things to spill over and it's very aesthetically pleasing. You do have some interesting annuals in here, Sue, and a particular, the Gomphrena you have. That is a beautiful purple. Mine are pink. But I have to say, that radiates in this sun, doesn't it?

- It does. Everybody that sees it is just so infatuated with it.

- [Annette] This Spiraea has given me an inspiration.

- [Sue] It is, we love those. They're Candy Corn Spiraea, and as the fall comes, the red and orange, it turns from the chartreuse color to the reds and oranges and just puts you in the fall mood. We have several dotted through the landscape and we just love them.

- [Annette] And underneath, I see that you also have two different varieties of Ajuga. Tell me about these.

- [Sue] Yes. One is a Mahogany Splendor and the other was just a give-me. My sister-in-law shared with me some, so I like ground cover. It saves you from picking so many weeds.

- It does. This looks like the chocolate one, but I love that little miniature one. Okay, let's keep on strolling. No border is complete without a Japanese maple, is it?

- [Sue] Exactly.

- [Annette] Tell me about this one.

- This is a waterfall Japanese maple. It's been here about 20 years and it's just that nice, cool, crisp color green and it likes Tennessee weather.

- And this one is extremely large and nice. In its younger days, it would begin to have that layering of the waterfalls, but it's complicated to keep them trimmed that way.

- It is,

- That is just beautiful. Craig Myrtle, we all want them, don't we?

- We do.

- [Annette] So you are keeping that at a certain size, aren't you?

- We are, because it's so close to the house. It would naturally get much bigger than it is, but we want to keep it in a certain place. The law of crepe myrtles is to prune them correctly. Yes, not crepe murder.

- Yes, yes.

- Yes, I agree. Now this is something I covet, I think.

- Yes.

- You're Mexican Petunia.

- Mm-hmm.

- Strange name, isn't it?

- It is.

- [Annette] Now tell me about this.

- [Sue] This was a giveaway from a friend and it loves its life right here. If it loves its life, it gets really tall and if it's in shade a little bit, it will not get as big. But the kind of neat thing about it is it drops its blooms every evening, and then-

- Oh, these are fresh every day?

- Every day. And it will bloom again in the morning with different blooms.

- [Annette] I did not know that. Oh, and I see the potentials for new day dawning.

- It will do it all summer long.

- Sue, you've done the right thing here. You've put this white beautiful limelight. What do you do to maintain the limelight hydrangea?

- You prune them the end of the winter, early spring, a third of the way.

- Yes. Your goal is to make your stem strong so they don't fall over. And the plan with this border was to have that difference in the dark foliage and the red blooms and the white blooms of the hydrangea. And this year especially, it did it exactly like I wanted it to.

- Don't you love that?

- Yes.

- [Annette] And then the star of the show right now is your hibiscus.

- The perennial hibiscus. It's a Proven Winner Summerific series. It's the holy grail and it's a showstopper. People stop on the street and ask what it is and how do they get one and-

- [Annette] You just never know who you might introduce to gardening that way, you know?

- It's true and that affected me too. When you see something pretty, you wanna know about it.

- Absolutely. I'm sorry, but this right here always pulls me in, this color.

- A sunshine ligustrum.

- This one is a spotlight.

- Yes.

- Yes.

- It loves the sun.

- [Annette] And I can tell that you have another Spiraea right here too.

- Yap and that Candy Corn's starting to have a little more color than the other one 'cause it's in full sun. So, it will soon be all red and orange.

- And I can tell again all of that. This just unifies all colors together is why I like it. And then, I noticed that you have flanked your doorways with Altheas. Do you have any issues with those?

- [Sue] Not really. Early in the spring, sometimes the bugs like to find them early and just a little spray of, I'll use Captain Jack's Deadbug and they're done.

- Yes, that's good.

- That is a good... It's a-

- Organic. Trying to save the bees and all the pollinators.

- Well, I wanna look, let's look around and make sure we haven't missed anything. Okay?

- All right.

- One of the things I enjoy about your garden is that you've got some elevation into some of your planting areas. And we do know that's user friendly the older we get. I'm not ashamed to say that.

- Me either.

- And I do like this stacking stone and that's easy to do in a circle, isn't it?

- Mm-hmm.

- Well, and I see what your theory is now with how you select your plants. You want 'em to be here today, next winter and next spring. So, right here.

- This is a Veronica that comes back every year. It flushes in the spring and bloom's really pretty and then kind of takes a rest. And then, as it cools off, they pop bloom again. Lemon coral sedum.

- Yes, that's very good.

- It couldn't be easier. It loves the sun and does great. The alocasias were from a friend's garden and she shared and you just keep spreading them around.

- And you don't have to dig that in the winter.

- No, it dies back and we just cut it off and it's good.

- [Annette] Well, this is the creme de la cream. Let's say this Bear's breeches. blooming right here.

- [Sue] It is. And the bloom lasts so long. It's so fun.

- And you know, I can see that this is a bee catcher. Look how that is made. It's somewhat like a snapdragon. Any kind of a blossom that has that little thing that they can crawl into.

- And hide out, yes.

- And collect their pollen.

- [Sue] Yap.

- It is quite obvious that you had a plan, and then later as you began to use your home, that you wanted to add more entertainment. And then Rick is wonderful to what he can do for you in establishing this garden and it's a wonderful place. And I think you shared it with me earlier, you share it with people and that is the most important thing of all. Thank you and Rick, because this is a wonderful place to come and I've learned a lot from you and I thank you for the time you've taken to allow the "Volunteer Gardener" to be here.

- You're welcome. We enjoyed having you.

- Thank you.

- Nashville's a huge city growing all the time, but we are also preserving our precious bottom land in a unique way. And today we're visiting Cooper Creek Farms, really next to the Cumberland River in this wonderful bottom land. This beautiful rose of carrots and it is now late March and they are ready to be harvested and go sit on some consumers' lucky, lucky plates. So Alex, you've got this beautiful two acres here and I see you already have been harvesting some lovely baby carrots. So, when did you get these in the ground?

- I sewed these in October and it was kind of an experiment to see if they would over winter. I wasn't sure if they would bolt or what, but they've started making some nice little carrots and we are selling the first ones of these to some chefs this week.

- Oh, and certainly a little bit of gourmet action.

- Yeah, they're very gourmet. I mean, they're not all this small, but this is like true baby carrots .

- I love these. And I see you have some areas that are tarped. So are you growing carrots under there?

- Yeah, that's what we do to germinate the carrots. They take a very long time, especially this time of year to germinate. Like this bed that we're standing right next to took a full month to germinate. I sewed them I think February 9th and they came up about March 9th. And what we do to make sure that the soil stays moist that entire time is typically I'll cover it with a silage tarp with the white side up so it doesn't get too hot and water it really well or let it get rained on and then cover it. And that holds the moisture in generally long enough for them to germinate. And you just have to check on 'em every once in a while and make sure they're not germinating under the tarp and getting leggy.

- [Julie] Alex, this is a beautiful crop of garlic that you have here.

- Thank you.

- So tell us some of the secrets of growing garlic.

- Well, you plant it in the fall. So, this is planted around Halloween more or less. And you just take your garlic that you grew the previous year and break it up into individual cloves and you plant them with the pointy side up. And I like to mulch it. I get leaves from landscapers, they just drop 'em for free and that makes a pretty nice mulch. Last year I made the mistake of putting too thick of a layer of mulch and some of the garlic struggled to come up through it and some of the garlic rotted 'cause there was just too much moisture being held in. But I think about a two, three inch layer of leaves or straw does a nice job of suppressing weeds and holding in moisture through the summer or through the early part of the summer when it needs it. And then, it's usually ready to harvest around early July or late June sometimes. And it's just kind of a nice plant-it-and-forget-it kind of crop.

- Okay, this is my kind of crop. Well, we know that you're not supposed to leave the soil just bare throughout the winter. And to some people, this might look like, oh, no, I have a lot of work to do, but tell us about this great cover crop you have.

- Yeah, so these were beans growing on these trellises in the fall. Well, in the summer and they ended up in the fall. I think we harvested our last beans sometime in October. And once they were done, these were new beds last year and I didn't have much compost. So the soil in these beds was a little bit sad, a little low organic matter. And so, after the beans were done around Halloween, about the same time we planted our garlic, I seeded this cover crop and it's a mix of mostly rye with some peas and some vetch and a couple brassica components. And it kind of just looked about like that tall through most of the winter. And in the last few weeks, it just shot up and it looks really lush. And pretty soon, in about a couple weeks, we're gonna mow it and then we'll use the power harrow on the BCS to incorporate it and we're gonna get some things planted on the sides of the beds and then we'll grow cucumbers up the trellises this year.

- Okay, so cover crops in this case have been a wonderful way to keep the weeds down and now you're building the soil. So, there's a lot of challenges of course. Just starting in a new place. You've been here, what, a year now?

- One year, yap.

- Okay, well, I know you have this other technique you're using because the area is low land, and so it can be a little soggy in the spring. We've all experienced that. So, I'm curious to see how you're managing to get into the soil early in the year when it's still moist.

- Yeah. This was kind of just a flat area. Last year we didn't have these beds raised 'cause I got into this area a bit later. It was probably late April by the time I was prepping these beds. And so, I didn't have much compost at that point. I didn't have much time, so I didn't bother raising them at that point. We grew a great crop of okra in here and ginger. But this spring, we had a dry enough spell in February that I was able to come through with the rotary plow on the two-wheel tractor and kind of throw a lot of the soil out of the pathways onto the beds and raise them up really tall. Then we're gonna fill in these kind of trenches, the pathways with wood chips and that'll serve a lot of functions. For one, it avoids muddy boots. You can walk around comfortably and it helps soak up the rain, like the rain's gonna drain from the beds into the pathways and the chips will kind of soak it up and keep it from eroding anything. And the beds will dry out faster because they're up high and the water's able to drain out of them. So, it'll enable us to work them sooner than we could if it was just a flat piece of ground.

- Well, there's a lot of planning and technique that goes into doing these market gardens and I noticed that you have a place where you're growing a lot of things in the same area and that has got to be a huge benefit.

- Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we try to pack it in, so we can look at that bed next.

- So, tell me what all you are plugging away at here.

- Yeah, so we're inter-cropping on this bed here. So, we have the trellis. This whole section's gonna have kind of permanent trellises and the beds are kind of a no-till bed. So, we won't have to be running a tractor, BCS through here anymore now that we've got them built. And so, we can play with all sorts of inter-cropping. So on that side of the bed, there's three rows of radishes that I just sewed yesterday. And then on this side, we have a row of collard greens and a row of Napa cabbage. And then, once it warms up a little more, we'll plant long beans down the center and they'll climb up the trellis and the collards might kind of help 'em reach the trellis, give them a little support. I don't know, we'll see about that. But yeah, the idea here is just trying to get more than just one crop out of each bed and kind of using crops that have sort of complimentary heights and shapes and root systems even. A good intercrop is like lettuce heads with green onions planted in between them 'cause the green onions are kind of a long spindly thing. They're not gonna shade the lettuce and the lettuce kind of shading the bases of the green onions will give you a longer white shank. It makes 'em a little more desirable at the market maybe. And then, you're getting two crops out of the same space that you would normally get one.

- Well, and I think this is so important as we start to think about farming, changing, and farming in our urban counties like Davidson County here, turning into more urban farming like this. So being able to grow a lot in a smaller area really makes a lot of sense for the grower and the consumer as well.

- Yeah, totally.

- Now you have some other tricks and techniques you've been using here to help protect the farm itself, but also to help protect the river. So, I wanna take a look at those.

- Sure, yeah.

- I noticed, Alex, that you have this set of rows that are running along with the slope of the land and then you have the rows where we are that are running a different way,

- The wrong way .

- Oh, no. Well, tell me about the wrong way.

- Well, so running the beds across the slope I thought would be a good thing to kind of catch water and reduce the amount we have to irrigate in the summer. And that is true, but when we get a big rain event like Hurricane Helene, it can be too much water and it keeps it from being able to exit fast enough. And so, what I've had to do is kind of grade the pathways and put in this sort of drainage ditch here to kind of let the water escape. And that's working pretty well now. And also adding wood chips and things to the pathways, that kind of helps slow it down and soak it up. But we do have some runoff that happens during big rains. And so, to avoid that going into the natural area over there, the wetland, I am planting like a buffer hedgerow down here at the bottom of the field that's gonna have a bunch of willow trees and elderberry trees and some other things. And we're kind of curving the ditch around to direct the water along that to kind of slow it down and catch any sort of sediment or any sort of excess nutrients that might be heading downhill from our growing area.

- Well, and you always have to work with water, you can't work against it. And so, I love the idea of having something that's gonna help soak it up, and of course protecting the wetlands.

- Yeah, we are a certified river-friendly farm by the Cumberland River Compact. They have come out and kind of looked at the practices that we're implementing, including mulching, cover crops, buffer zones. They determined that we are a river-friendly farm. So, we're proud of that and we do all that we can to keep anything bad from going into our local waterways. Like we don't use any sort of chemical fertilizers or pesticides or anything that could create an issue. We could be certified organic if we wanted to deal with all of the paperwork, but we're not yet... We may go that route at some point.

- Well, one of the keys to being an urban farmer seems to be doing a little bit of everything and also catering to a lot of different markets. So, I just love the fact that you also have these plant sales that you do so that people can buy food from you, but also start their own.

- Yeah.

- [Julie] It's ready to go into the ground in this really neat soil ball configuration.

- Yeah, so this is a technique that I learned from Jesse Frost, a farmer in Kentucky who has a great YouTube channel and podcast. And this is how he boosts all of his transplants on his farm. We start everything in soil blocks. These are like mini soil blocks and then rather than... They sell a large soil blocker that does a single block, but it's pretty expensive and it's not really any faster than this. So, these are hand-formed soil blocks and you just take a scoop of this kind of wet potting mix in one hand and you put the plant in the middle and you take another scoop and sandwich it, and then you kind of squeeze and spin, squeeze the water out, and then you get this little pear-shaped soil ball. And the plants do great in them. The roots kind of reach the outside and they pause, it's called air pruning, and it leads to a plant that it's never gonna become pot bound. And it just has very little transplant shock because all those roots are just kind of poised, ready to shoot out in a nice, healthy pattern. So, we do this for our longer season crops on the farm that we need to boost up from the smaller soil blocks. And then, we also do it for our plant sales and we sell them completely plastic-free. We display them in little muffin tens and then people can take them home in little french fry bags or these pulp coffee drink carriers. So, it's a nice way to get some really healthy plants for your garden and not have to deal with any plastic at the end.

- Well, this is really great and I really want to encourage everyone to think about all of the work that goes into farming and especially in the small farming markets. You will certainly learn a lot of great tips that you can use at home.

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