Episode 3403

- [Narrator] Peaches, sweet and juicy, picked from the tree, that's summertime at Jackson's Orchard. Jeff Poppen visits the family operation where proper site selection, soil prep, pest management, and dependable varieties make for a plentiful harvest. Then, Troy Marden is in an awe-inspiring home landscape of an accomplished garden designer. We get insight into elements of this plant palette and considerations for how to combine those various forms and textures into memorable scenes. Come along. At Jackson's Orchard, the work is year round to reach the goal of harvesting quality peaches at peak ripeness.

- Today, we're visiting Jackson's Orchard up in Bowling Green. They grow a lot of peaches here. We're gonna learn how to grow peaches from Jonathan. Thank you so much for having us out here today.

- Hey, Bud; glad for you to be here.

- Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the orchard here. When you get ready to plant a peach orchard, what are the first things you do?

- So, buying trees from a nursery has become more of a plan ahead than in years past.

- [Jeff] You have to give them plenty of notice.

- That's correct. So I, as of today, I'm thinking about 2026, 2027 plantings. and trying to get those trees on order: varieties, root stalks, what have you.

- Do you grow cover crops or do anything to the soil ahead of time?

- Yes, absolutely. Kind of rotate between cover crops. Still trying to learn and figure out what works best. Peaches much prefer a well-drained deep soil, 6, 7 pH. Not too difficult to achieve there. But again, taking soil samples, getting pH, mineral elements in the right balance of-

- So you use lime, of course-

- Exactly, exactly. It's a big part. It's a lot easier to make site prep before putting a tree in the ground rather than trying to come back and-

- Once a tree's in the ground, you can't till it or anything.

- Right, right.

- That's right, yeah. So do you use subsoil and try to dig it like deep?

- Sooo-

- Depends on the site.

- Yes, depends on the site. Not as much with peaches. Peaches are fairly shallow rooted as far as tree fruit are concerned.

- [Jeff] So when you get ready to plant your trees, you dig a hole and set the tree. Describe how you set the trees out.

- So we will set a block of trees in a square. These trees are 18 by 24 foot. So go in and mark every 18 foot in a row. And then I've got an auger on the front of the Bobcat. That's a 24 inch auger.

- Okay, so you make a big-

- Popping holes in the ground and then come back. And when we get trees from the nursery, they're generally 2-year-old trees. So they may be four or five feet tall. We strip 'em down of all the limbs, cut 'em off about waist high, set 'em in the ground with the graft union where the root stock and the variety meet. Try and get that about an inch above the soil line.

- Gotcha. And the reason you chopped them at waist high would be because that's where you want the first branches. Is that right?

- Yes. It's done a lot of different ways.

- [Jeff] I'm sure.

- But what has worked best for us is going through and you get done settin' a block of peaches. My wife finds a lot of humor in the fact that it looks like a bunch of sticks stuck in the ground.

- It doesn't really look like much, does it?

- No, no. But with that, you know, transplant shock.

- [Jeff] That's a good reason to prune too.

- [Jonathan] Stripping all those limbs off, one, for the transplant shock of it; two, like you said, controlling where that first layer of scaffold limbs comes from. And in any kind of pruning, as you're cutting, you're stimulating growth.

- Absolutely. Deer are a big problem on our farm. Do you have to protect the trees when you plant 'em?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- How do you do that?

- So we have settled, for the time being anyway, on we take field fence, cut it into sections and build cages and set 'em around the trees.

- About how wide?

- So a full length is 27 feet. So when it's wrapped up and caged together, it's-

- Nine feet or so, eight or nine feet.

- Yeah; seven, eight feet.

- Gotcha.

- [Jonathan] If you leave it on there too long, the tree ends up looking like a mushroom.

- It grows like this.

- Exactly.

- [Jeff] You have to get that off there before a tree starts spreading.

- That's right. Two or three years, and generally a tree is large enough that the deer tend to leave it alone. Now, they may come by a tree like this and browse it a little. It's not gonna affect anything.

- It's those young trees that they can misshape.

- That's correct.

- By taking a bite out of a newer branch that you want. So then, as the trees are growing then every year, do you have to fertilize and, of course, keep the grass out?

- Yes, so peach trees, the first three, four years really depending on growth have a regular fertilizer program. Whether that's a triple 19, about 34% nitrogen, it really depends on-

- How the trees are growing.

- How the trees are growing, exactly.

- I would think so, yeah.

- [Jonathan] Now they get to this size, and again, it's, does it need fertilizer, does it not?

- Well, it sure doesn't look like it needs anything. Those peaches are beautiful, Jonathan. I mean to tell ya. What variety do we have here?

- These are Encore.

- Encore. I know, I think I've heard of that one.

- Great peach. It gets some red color, but has a really nice yellow blend in that color that's very pretty. Nice peach, low fuzz.

- So you grow a wide variety of peaches so that you have peaches coming in for a long period of time. They ripen at different seasons.

- That's correct. So we'll start peaches around the 15th of June, pick a variety for about 10 days to two weeks, and then start a new variety. And that lasts, hopefully, until the last week of August, Labor Day timeframe.

- [Jeff] Okay, I've had trouble growing peaches because of the plum curculio.

- Sure.

- How do you deal with that? Do you use IPM, Integrated Pest Management?

- Absolutely.

- So tell us about that.

- So we trap, I trap, use disease prediction models. Two of the biggest issues with peaches that we face is brown rot and then stink bugs.

- Oh, the stink bugs.

- But when a peach is small, ping pong ball size, very tender, a stink bug comes in there and bites it, deforms it. A stink bug is part of the cat-facing insect family.

- It makes cat-facing, yeah.

- So it makes for a rough or ugly piece of fruit.

- Right, you can't sell it for number one anymore.

- That's right.

- Yeah. Well, it's a big farm here on the Barren River. How many acres do you have? And like how many acres are in production here?

- So there's about 100 acres in production.

- Oh my goodness.

- And that varies year to year. Constantly taking out older trees and putting in new.

- Putting in new. And what else do you grow besides peaches here?

- So we've got about 40 acres of peaches, about 40 acres of apples, pumpkins, between 10 to 12, plums, cherries, sweet corn. But really, the mainstays are apples and peaches for sure.

- I noticed a lot of people here when we pulled up. The public is welcome to come out here, aren't they?

- Absolutely, yes.

- It's just a few miles out of Bowling Green.

- That's right. So this time of year, being May through August, we're open Monday through Saturday, nine to five. And then starting September and October, we're open seven days a week: Monday through Saturday, nine to five; Sunday, one to five. So come out. And I hope everybody enjoys themselves.

- Well, this has been fabulous to come and see this. I am very, very impressed, Jonathan. Thank you so much for having us out here at Jackson's Orchard in Bowling Green.

- Yes, sir; thank you.

- Thank you.

- I have the pleasure of being in Knoxville, Tennessee this morning with a young and very dynamic garden designer, Jack McCoy. And Jack has welcomed us to his garden and is gonna tell us a little bit about how the garden came to be. How did all of this that's surrounding us happen?

- Well, it's been a kind of a 15 or so year journey that's kind of aligned with my journey and training as a gardener/garden designer. And through my experiences, really my dad and I are kind of the duo in charge here. And so, he is really who got me, even if it was subconsciously as a kid, kind of got me into gardening. And so, it's been kind of the past 10 years, you know, since being in England and back, I had the good fortune of training at Great Dixter which is arguably the best, you know, horticultural training garden in the world. And so, you know, combined with, you know, training at Chanticleer Garden in Philadelphia which, again, is kind of America's, you know, sister garden with that same ethos in education and training. And I think it was a wonderful kind of happening that before delving into, you know, plants and becoming completely infatuated with plants, I studied landscape designing and construction at UT before going and getting a postgraduate degree at Inchbald School of Design. And so I think that the combination of being a plant lover and a designer really kind of make for a more broad picture. And instead of looking at plants as a collector, it's kind of looking at plants and how I can combine them to create scenes, to create moments. My dad started gardening to create spaces to kind of enjoy at different times of the day at different times of the year. And that was, you know, all good and well, but really in the past 10 years, we've kind of said, "Okay, we've made this into, you know, a proper garden."

- [Troy] How do we expand? How do we grow?

- [Jack] Exactly, exactly, responsibly, knowing that we're in a suburban residential area with about a little over two acres? And the site is actually quite wonderful in that it's got topography to work with: create those spaces, those scenes, those moments. Gardening and garden design is the most dynamic form of art in that you're painting with living things. And so, you know, to have a plan and set it down and expect that, you know, a landscape is gonna stay that way and not ebb and flow and not, you know, be improved on is not such a sensible way of going about it. You get a certain sense of dynamism from having an owner's spirit in the garden.

- So you mentioned a couple of really iconic gardens that I wanna go back to just for a minute. You have had the good fortune of training here in the U.S. at Chanticleer which is up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, which I agree, arguably, is one of the finest smaller gardens probably anywhere. And then Great Dixter, which we share a passion for. I love that place. And I think both of those gardens to me when I'm visiting there, there's one thing that they do so... There are many things they do so well, but one thing in particular is the layering of plants in those gardens so that you have interest in the garden. We're here in the middle of September. So it's toward the end of the season. But I've also been here in July. And I know that if we were here in April or May, it would also be just as beautiful because you've worked so hard to layer these plants in. So talk a little bit about designing that way.

- I think one of the magic things about Great Dixter and the famous gardener that made Dixter famous, Christopher Lloyd, is his emphasis on not having just perennials which would lack structure and using all types of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals in a border.

- Truly a mixed border.

- A mixed planting. Through that, you get this wonderful combination of impact and beauty and moments, but also that structure that kind of makes those moments even that much more impressive.

- [Troy] And it carries the garden through every season.

- Through every season.

- [Troy] Even when all of this lush greenness that's surrounding us now is gone, even in this hillside although they're hard to see, you have things like Taxus, the yews, that are planted in here. That, you know, when all of this lush greenery is down in the wintertime, you still have-

- Those yews. This border was previously a lawn slope. And so I started mowing it at a slightly higher level to kind of juxtapose the lawn that we stand atop. And it was like, "That's a lovely shape. "We're gonna take it a step further "and put in a planted border." And so we essentially started much more perennial prone and mostly via plugs from creek nurseries and new moon nurseries and so on, and, you know, loved it, you know, for a season or two. But I think, again, gardening and garden design being, you know, that dynamic, it gives you the opportunity to say, "Well, that was lovely "and we had, you know, a wonderful time with that."

- But how do we push it?

- [Jack] In reality, the ideas are invaluable. And I think that is an important part of gardening is to visit gardens and to get inspiration and to look at catalogs and look at books. But I think that kind of looking at it as a dynamic space and manipulating those ideas that you see at gardens to suit your garden.

- So throughout the seasons, obviously, there is a great deal of interest in this garden, but the thing that I like about being here now kind of early fall going into sort of the main fall season is that this garden still looks great. Because you have late season plants. You've got the cannas that are in bloom. Tell me a little bit about your planning process and the plants that you have used to get this late season interest.

- You know, looking at the border and having impact, you know, throughout the year can be done in a number of ways. Cannas, for instance, I got, you know, a number of 'em from Plant Delights where I was lucky enough to work. And I thought, "Well, the border gets a bit tired "and a bit loose for my liking "come end of August, September. "How can I add a bit of freshness "and a bit of foliar structure "that I find important at this time of year?" Well, all of a sudden it was like, well, try and combine Anemone Honorine Jobert with Canna Stuttgart, for instance, and see if they kind of react. And it's really been quite a happy accident. And without the large chartreusey leaves of the cannas, Hedychium, bananas, et cetera, it's a rather more tired and kind of- fuzzy, fuzzy look.

- And kind of fuzzy.

- And so I think that, you know, having this big expansive lawn and then quite a prairie-esque planting to me just isn't quite interesting.

- [Troy] It needs something to break it up just a little bit.

- [Jack] Exactly, and so looking at kind of plant shapes, and this is what I'm working on for this autumn is cherishing those plants that have flower impact at 36 inches or less. So we'll talk, you know, Eupatorium coelestinum, the lovely mauvey purple of it this time of year, is to me much more valuable than Rudbeckia Herbstonne. Which don't get me wrong, in the right situation where it can be six to nine feet tall, it's wonderful and it flowers for ages. It's a clean clean yellow. But for me, I like how the plantings kind of ebb and flow. And by using shrubs and even small trees, you can achieve that. As much as it looks like you must have five gardeners, we could take a weed eater and cut it all back even leaving the clippings. As bad as that would look for all of the winter, it essentially takes care of itself. And so, by planting densely via the plugs in the first year, it pretty well knitted together. And now, it allows for those kind of edits to come in.

- And you used a term a little while ago while we were talking off camera that I wanna come back to, because I had not heard it before and I think it's really brilliant. And you said something about using braintenance over maintenance, high braintenance over high maintenance.

- Exactly, and I think that-

- So you're thinking about what you're combining and what it's gonna do and how it's going to act and gardening smart.

- Absolutely. And I think it's beyond just filling the space. It's thinking of the longevity of certain plants. The yews, for instance, those will be here forever. And while there might be certain things that change and are edited by planting the right plants in the right densities and the right sizing, all of a sudden, it pretty well takes care of itself.

- Gardens that are much less heavily planted than this actually require sometimes much more maintenance than having what you have here. You do have some plants in here, like the anemones and the monardas and even some of the salvias, that do require probably some management, I would think, over periods of time.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- [Troy] So how does that happen here? I mean, do you go in in the spring and decide, "Okay, we're gonna take this back "to a certain size," or?

- [Jack] Well, we kind of observe and watch it throughout the season, two seasons, three seasons, and say, "Well, as much as we love Anemone Honorine Jobert, "it's got broad shoulders." So we have to take that with a grain of salt and say, "Okay, this spring, we're gonna come in "and we're gonna edit and half that." So that's a bit of gardening work.

- But it happens once or twice a year. You make decisions on the front end. You do what needs to be done and then you let the garden evolve.

- Yeah, and that's where the braintenance and the thinking is as impactful as the going to nurseries and saying, "Oh wow, that's a lovely plant. "I'm gonna get 50 of 'em." Get three or get five, and see how they do in a season, see how they do in two seasons.

- [Troy] Yeah, do they thrive for you or is it a failure? It's much better to have a three-plant failure than a 50-plant failure.

- Exactly. We have certain plants that are a bit tougher to grow, if you will. And then certain plants that really, we have to check every now and then.

- [Troy] Right, because they're happy. And that's what you really want. You want most of your plants to be happy. You can grow the one off, specialty things and go, "Oh, here's this moment right here. "Look at my whatever it is." But everything else has to be, at least to my estimation, something that you know is going to thrive.

- [Jack] Yeah, Pycnanthemum muticum, for instance. That's a wonderful, wonderful plant that flowers from midsummer all the way till frost. It can almost fight it out with the anemone, and knowing that they're gonna come to a standstill. But being delicate and not bassive enough or intrusive enough, that Phlox Jeana which has just gone over, you know, can flower up and through and combine with the Pycnanthemum. So, you know, and knowing that Phlox Jeana is quite a good doer, that's something that we promote.

- What are the plants that are going to thrive here? And what thrives here may not thrive in my garden in Middle Tennessee or somebody's garden in West Tennessee. It is about experimenting and finding that list of plants that works really well for you, and then combining them in interesting and intriguing ways, I think.

- [Jack] Exactly, and that's where horticulture, and American horticulture in general, the literature is almost quite restricting in that it's this rule. You have to do this at this time of year. No, that plant won't ever grow. Garden, do what pleases you, because that will end up in a much more dynamic, interesting garden or planting that has a bit of your heart in it. And that just kind of creates the magic.

- [Troy] Exactly, gardening is a happy thing. So whatever you do in your garden should be the thing that pleases you. Whether it follows the quote unquote rules or anything else, it should be a happy place for you.

- [Jack] And there is obviously science behind it. But it's like these canna groups, they should be lifted or cut back and mulched heavily. Well, they just get cut back the same as all the other perennials. Well, we've had wonderful success with them. Even the more choice ones like flaming kebab here, all of the Canna x generalis, the hybrids in this border are extremely perennial. It's making those mental or physical notes.

- [Troy] Physical notes in a notebook, yeah.

- [Jack] That was the first thing that we did at Great Dixter was Fergus, you know, gave me a notebook and said, "Write down plant names. "Write down ideas. "Write down techniques." It is important to observe and to say, "Okay, that was a great success." And then move forward and continue on that success.

- [Troy] There are a few plants in here that I wanna point out that are a little unusual. Tetrapanax down at the far end which is a great textural plant, one that probably does need a little management from time to time, I'm guessing.

- [Jack] Yeah, absolutely.

- [Troy] And then you've got some great cannas in here. And I know the variegated one is kind of hard to find and sometimes a little temperamental as cannas go. I mean, most cannas are pretty foolproof.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- But Stuttgart.

- [Jack] Yeah, Stuttgart's wonderful, wonderful.

- And then over here, you've got Hedychium coronarium flowering.

- Coronarium.

- And there's one really nice fresh flower on it this morning.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

- [Troy] Which is the one they also call butterfly ginger so they've got those large white flowers. And they're incredibly fragrant in the evening so that's a really nice garden addition.

- [Jack] Absolutely, and it's a clean, clean white, you know, atop chartreuse, lovely, strappy foliage that, again, catches the light.

- Well, Jack, I wanna thank you for all of your tips and tidbits and your obviously vast knowledge of gardening in general, but also inspiring people here in Tennessee to really think about gardening differently. We really appreciate you letting us come and see the garden.

- Absolutely, and I think that's kind of the magic of the industry is that 99% of people in gardening are wonderful people. And I think that it comes a lot from the health and happiness benefit of gardening. And whether that's having a few pots on your front porch or expansive flower-filled garden, I think that there's something subconscious and now even scientifically somewhat proven that gardening and getting one's hands dirty is an emotional benefit.

- [Troy] Thank you for sharing this little place of your happiness with us. We really appreciate it.

- Absolutely, any time.

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