Episode 3410

- [Lauren] The complete flower head of a titan arum is the largest in the entire plant kingdom, reaching up to 12 feet tall. Phillipe Chadwick is at Austin Peay State University, where there's lots of excitement surrounding the first bloom of this remarkable plant. Jeremy Tolley shares growing tips for broccoli, kohlrabi and sugar snap peas, crops that perform best in the colder shoulder seasons. And Annette Shrader has tips for rejuvenating an annual bed. Join us. Native to Sumatra's rainforest, this rare tropical plant has several unique traits, including a distinctive and powerful odor.

- I'm super excited today. We're here at Austin Peay State University, and we're gonna talk about one of the largest flowers in the world. I'm here with Dr. Amy Thompson. So tell me a little bit about this flower.

- So this is Athena. Athena is a titan arum, also known as a corpse flower, and Athena is 10 years old.

- Wow.

- [Amy] And this is the first time over, just on Thursday, that Athena bloomed after 10 years-

- Wow.

- Of storing up energy to get ready for this blooming event.

- [Phillipe] Uh-huh, and I know with this family of flowers, they don't smell sweet, they smell bad, and that's kind of their form of attraction.

- [Amy] Yeah, it's an elaborate trick that these flowers put on. So they produce, they have chemicals that produce a really smelly or stinky odor. I've been saying like a hot dumpster, it's kind of the way I would describe it. A very strong odor. These chemicals, not only does the plant produce chemicals, but the plant also is going to produce heat, so the heat is gonna help dissipate the chemicals.

- Wow.

- So out in the wild, you're looking at the chemicals getting dissipated about a half a mile. Here at Austin Peay, what we see is the odor getting dissipated around the area, sometimes up into the building, out into the parking lot. This interesting thing about Athena that was a little different from our other titan arum. We have two titan arums. The other titan arum is Zeus, bloomed for the first time three years ago, and then again last year. And with Zeus, Zeus produced an odor that was really strong and dissipated a long, long distance all the way up to the third floor.

- Wow.

- Athena's odor was a little bit shorter lived, and maybe a little less strong.

- [Phillipe] Yeah.

- [Amy] But still stinky as can be.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, and the reasoning for the bad fragrance is that for the pollinators, to attract specific pollinators.

- Yeah, yeah, so it's a trick, as I said. It's a elaborate trick, so it puts off this really strong, stinky odor, and then these pollinators, it's not gonna be, you're not gonna get your bees and your butterflies are attracted to a wonderful smell. You're instead of gonna get beetles and flies, like flesh flies that are attracted to something that is dead. And so those are your insects that are gonna come for decomposition activities, and so they're gonna be attracted. They think that they're coming to something that's dead. You have this dark color, so when the flower blooms, the flower is a very dark purple. Sometimes the spadix also can get a really dark purple color. And so these pollinators come thinking they're coming to something dead. They recognize the scent as being something dead, and then they get here and they're tricked. And so the idea is hopefully that they will pick up pollen and take it to another blooming flower, or they will bring pollen from another blooming flower and pollinate the flower.

- [Phillipe] So on the back of the flower, y'all have this cut section that we can really see the male and female parts of the flower in there. Tell me about this.

- [Amy] Yeah, absolutely. So this area down here is where the female flowers are. The female flowers are going to first be receptive to pollen. So when Athena bloomed, we would have the female flowers down here being receptive to pollen. So if you had pollinators that came in, they would come in and they would pollinate the female flowers.

- [Phillipe] Okay.

- [Amy] And then after a period of time, the female flowers quit being receptive to pollen, and then the male flowers, which are in this area, will produce pollen. We do not have any pollen to pollinate Athena's female flowers, but we did wanna collect Athena's pollen. So when we cut into Athena at 24 hours, what we found is that Athena had not yet produced pollen.

- [Phillipe] Okay.

- [Amy] So overnight, Friday night into Saturday morning, Athena produced pollen. And you can see in here this kind of stringy stuff right in there. When it first drops, it kind of looks like spaghetti or kind of a stringy material. And then you can see we've created these little troughs with paraffin, which is just kind of a waxy plastic material. We put that in there and you can see that the pollen is falling down into those troughs. So we're gonna collect the pollen. We will freeze the pollen, and then if there are other places that have titan arums that are blooming, we'll ask them if they would like some of their pollen.

- Right. So do you know how long this pollen is viable for?

- So we're gonna collect the pollen and then we will put it in a minus 80 degrees Celsius freezer.

- Wow.

- So super, super cold temperature, so the hope is that that would be viable for some time.

- Right.

- And then we would be able to share that pollen with other institutions that have a titan arum that's blooming.

- Yeah. Very cool. Just the intricate details and the coloration are quite spectacular on their own.

- [Amy] Absolutely. And we're, you know, we're, Athena is now in the, you know, end of our flowering. You can see that the spadix has fallen over. So this part is the spadix, and you can feel it. It looks like it has some kind of like dusty material or something on it, but it actually doesn't. It's just kind of a rough material. This part would feel kind of like a gourd.

- [Phillipe] Oh, wow. It's very stiff. It's like drywall.

- [Amy] Yes, well, you would think that this is gonna be like a very fragile flower.

- [Phillipe] Right, right.

- [Amy] But if you feel like the spathe, which is here, this kind of feels like a watermelon rind, and this part right here, when we cut this section out, it's actually pretty easy to cut into. I would say even easier than cutting into a watermelon.

- [Phillipe] Okay.

- [Amy] But it's very, very sturdy. The flower as a whole is very sturdy. The only fragile part I would say, especially noticed when we were cutting into it, is it's pretty top heavy because it just has this small stalk that's holding it. So it's top heavy, but you know, a very, very strong flower.

- Right. We've witnessed this spectacular display. What is the life cycle from this point on?

- So what we're gonna say, you can see the spadix has already fallen over, so you can imagine when it's blooming that that is sticking up, the flower is fully open. Now everything is dried and is falling over, and it will be kind of sad. It's kind of like, you know, after a big event, it's kind of things, you know, sad after. It's gonna continue to fall over and decompose. And then eventually what will happen is you won't see it anymore. It'll all be happening under the soil. So in about four months, it will likely put up a leaf structure.

- Okay.

- The leaf structure looks like a tree, and so that'll put up the leaf structure. It is that leaf structure that is gonna be doing photosynthesis. So photosynthesis is where we're harnessing that light energy. We're gonna be storing lots of energy beneath the soil, so that tuber or corm that's beneath the soil is gonna just grow and grow and grow. They can get up to be even, you know, 70, 80, 90 pounds.

- Wow.

- So they can get really, really big.

- Yeah.

- And it will do that leaf structure, and then that will die back, and it'll do it again and it'll die back. And it's just trying to get enough energy to be able to bloom. So think about it for Athena, Athena took 10 years. So it's having to put up those leaf structures, harnessing that energy, and then dying back, doing it again over and over to get to this point to bloom. After the first time, however, what we typically find is it's about two to five years after the first blooming before it blooms again.

- [Phillipe] And this is a tropic, a very, very deeply tropical plant. So like it's not set on our 12 month cycle as far as like seasonal?

- Yeah, so it's from Indonesia. There's an island called Sumatra in Indonesia, that's the only place you're gonna find 'em in the world, except for in captivity. They are in danger. There're about 800. And you know, you have to think about where it's at. It's kind of a very small area in the world where you're gonna find it, and then with climate change and with loss of its habitat, that's where you're gonna see the reduction in the numbers of these plants. Thankfully a lot of different organizations have titan arums in captivity, and we're just trying to figure out the best way to grow them and keep them happy, create the environment most like what you would see in the wild. So, you know, keeping it humid. It worked out that it was pretty humid in Tennessee during the time when leading up to Athena blooming. So, although probably most people weren't very happy about that, Athena was very happy.

- Right.

- Although at that point before Athena bloomed, we didn't call her Athena. They only get their name after the first time they bloom, so.

- Oh, that's so cool.

- Athena did not become Athena until Thursday at four o'clock. So Thursday at four o'clock, we had Athena. But we knew that we were gonna name it Athena because, and I need to talk about this for sure.

- Sure.

- Dr. Carol Baskauf, our botanist, who has since retired.

- [Phillipe] Okay.

- [Amy] But she was the one who got Zeus and Athena as seeds-

- Wow.

- Grew them, and then they became what we have today. So she's the one who gets all the credit for getting these at Austin Peay, and allowing for all of us to experience this wonderful plant.

- Oh, that's so fun. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this information. I feel so lucky to get to witness this. I mean, this is literally a once in a lifetime kind of thing to witness in person. It's such a cool thing.

- [Amy] Absolutely. We're so glad for you to come. We had over 2000 people come to visit Athena-

- [Phillipe] That's awesome.

- [Amy] So we're really excited to be able to share this with the greater community.

- That's so cool. Well, there's always something interesting day to day, year to year, century to century happening in the garden. Always look for something cool. There's always something around the corner to discover.

- Absolutely.

- Welcome to my garden at Red Thread Farm in Franklin. I'm excited to share with you some of my favorite vegetables to grow in the shoulder season. Now, the shoulder season in Tennessee is gonna be the period right before the main growing season in early spring, and the period right after that in the fall season. When we think about growing vegetables in the state, we typically think about tomatoes, and peppers, and beans and all those things that grow during the warm season. But you can actually grow in Tennessee up to 10 months, maybe even more out of the year. So let's talk about extending our garden today with some really interesting shoulder season vegetables. We're gonna start with broccoli. Broccoli, everybody knows this plant, right? Now, whether or not everybody likes it is another thing. But I think once you've had broccoli grown in your garden, in the cool season, you're gonna be a convert to broccoli, for sure. Broccoli loves cool weather. It'll grow a little bit in the summer, but in Tennessee with our scorching heat, you wanna make sure you get this in the ground early, and that's key. You wanna start your broccoli indoors about four weeks before you put it in the ground, and that's gonna be for our season about March. And then you're gonna want to get it started early in the summer as well, sometime around July to get it started or to buy it from a nursery, to get it in the ground by August. Broccoli like this takes about 60 days to mature to this head. Let's take a look at it. So we know broccoli for this big head, this big leafy. It's actually a floret of flowers that happens here. And this is the part we typically eat. There's actually two other products that you're gonna get from this one broccoli plant. Another's gonna be the side shoots, so tiny shoots are gonna come out from the side. So leave this plant intact after you cut the head and you're gonna get more smaller heads of broccoli that will grow. And the thing that I'm most interested in telling you about besides the head are these leaves. Broccoli leaves are delicious. They taste like broccoli. They can be cooked like a southern green, or you can even eat them raw. The most interesting thing that I found to do with broccoli is to julienne the leaves, to cut them up small and to put them with cheddar cheese and sour cream, maybe a little mayonnaise and some onions, and create a raw broccoli salad. It's delicious. There's another plant in the same family as broccoli that I think you're gonna love, which you might not have heard about. Let's go take a look. This little vegetable that looks like an alien is actually a vegetable called kohlrabi. If you're in Eastern Europe, then you would recognize this vegetable 'cause it's very popular there. But in Tennessee, not so much. It's in the same family as broccoli, and it has a very similar taste, and it actually can be used in some similar ways. It just looks and grows totally different. And if broccoli is a little difficult, then kohlrabi is much easier to grow. So this plant is actually not a bulb, it's the base that forms that the leaves come out of, and then the roots come out at the bottom. So kohlrabi matures directly from seed in your garden in about 40 to 50 days. So it takes less time. It also requires a little bit less fertility than broccoli. Broccoli requires loamy, rich soil, and you're gonna wanna fertilize it with, you know, some kind of really good organic compost and organic fertilizers. And you'll need to do that a little bit with kohlrabi but not quite so much. So kohlrabi is really easy to grow. It tastes great. There's really no reason that you shouldn't grow it. The only pest issue that you might have with kohlrabi and with broccoli as well might be caterpillars. Caterpillars, you'll start to see little holes that are being chewed in the leaves. And if you have just a few plants, it's just as easy to pick those off. But you also could use a product like Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a naturally occurring bacteria. We call it Bt. Easily found at your nursery or online, and you can spray that and it's not harmful to any beneficial insects, but it actually will kill the caterpillars on your broccoli and your kohlrabi. In addition to, you know, eating the leaves, you can also cube up kohlrabi, peel this and it makes a great vegetable to add to your vegetable tray. If you visit the UK, those beautiful villages and towns in Scotland and England, one vegetable that you'll see consistently growing in almost every cottage garden is leeks. Leeks are quite unusual to find in our state, but in Tennessee, they grow really well in our shoulder seasons. These beautiful leeks taste like onions, but they have a milder, richer flavor and they really enhance your cooking. Leeks are actually fairly easy to grow. The timing is the important part of it, making sure that you start them early enough for an early spring crop, or if you make sure you start them early enough in the summer so that you can ensure that you have a nice fall crop before there's a hard freeze. There are many different varieties of leeks, some that grow really well in the shoulder seasons, and some that grow better in the freezing cold of winter. This particular variety is called King Richard. King Richard tends to grow really well in the shoulder seasons and into the summer. Other varieties can be planted that will over winter in our area. In order to get these beautiful long stalks of leeks like I have here, you have to do a couple of things. One is to ensure that you have really nice loamy, fertile soil like this. So similar to some of the other crops we've talked about today, you wanna make sure that you use a really high quality mulch, a really high quality compost and some fertilizer. But the biggest tip in order to get these long stems is to use a tool similar to this. Anything that you have that will poke a nice hole in the ground will do. But simply take that in your soil, in your well-prepared soil, put some holes in there. When you start leeks indoors, you're gonna plant them in a peat pot like this about eight weeks before you're ready to plant them. Put some high quality potting soil in there, sprinkle some seeds on the top and then cover them up. Keep them in sunlight and keep them moist. After about eight weeks, you're gonna end up with leek seedlings that look like this, and it's as simple as popping one of these seedlings in each of your holes. Those deep holes don't need to be covered in. You're simply gonna water this the way that it is, and as the water fills in, it will bring the soil in there, and then over time the leeks will start to grow, and you're gonna have a leek stem that's as deep as you can get that hole. To harvest the leek, you simply dig it up, cut these roots off at the bottom, and then cut the tops off, and they make a really beautiful addition to your refrigerator. Everybody loves sugar snap peas, and it's one of my favorite vegetables to in the shoulder seasons here in Tennessee. Peas are actually relatively easy to grow, but like with many of the vegetables we've talked about, timing is really key to make sure you get them in the ground and harvestable size before it gets really hot, or before we have a hard frost if you're growing in the fall season. So peas take about 60 days. Look at the packet that you're growing and make sure you understand the timing for the cultivar that you're growing. They require a trellis, something like this for the tall standard varieties of sugar snap peas. You can even find dwarf varieties if you're growing in a container or if you're growing in a raised bed or a smaller space. So be sure to check the packet for the seeds that you buy for that cultivar to make sure that you find out what the growing length of time is, and what type of space that they require. They don't require much in the way of soil preparation. You want some decent quality soil, but even if your soil is not up to par, you may have success growing sugar snap peas. Now, sugar snap peas can be eaten delicious just raw. You simply snap the top off and peel the string off, and they're crunchy, can be added to salads, can be eaten raw. You can put 'em on a vegetable tray, and of course they can be cooked as well. One other thing that we enjoy about sugar snap peas are pea tendrils. That's these really soft parts at the tops of the stems. So you don't wanna do this too much because you'll stop the growth of your plant if you cut off all the tops. But these delicious flowers and soft tendrils are wonderful in a salad, and we really enjoy eating them raw or cooked as well. This is bulb fennel, and not only is it beautiful, but it's a delicious crop that's fairly easy to grow in the shoulder seasons here in Tennessee. Fennel has an anise flavor, a little bit of a licorice kind of flavor. And if you enjoy that, you're gonna love the way this tastes roasted and caramelized in your oven. There's really just nothing like it. And it's actually fairly expensive to buy fennel in the grocery store, so you also get really good value by growing this crop at home. And it's pretty enough to actually grow in your home garden just as an ornamental as well. Fennel isn't very particular about growing, however you wanna start it directly from seed in the soil and not from a transplant, since it can be kind of finicky if you try to transplant it. It takes about 60 days from seeding in order to get a small bulb of fennel, a baby bulb, and it takes about 90 days to get a full-sized bulb like this one. Your fertility in the soil needs to be quite, you know, consistent with nitrogen. Try to mulch your a fennel as well to make sure that you can suppress weed growth, because it doesn't like to compete with weeds. But it's a great crop. It's easy, it tastes good. I think you should try it in your home garden. If you're a beginner gardener and this is your first year growing, these shoulder season vegetables are probably not the place you're gonna start. But if you have a couple of years under your belt, or maybe you're an experienced grower, then trying some of these shoulder season vegetables is a really great way to mix things up and to create something new and exciting in your garden, and to extend your growing season. So I highly encourage you to give these things a try. Be experimental.

- [Annette] I always admire the planted annual beds and, you know, sooner or later they have to go. There are things you can do to enhance the soil, and I'm gonna talk with Karla King.

- Well, we're wanting to amend our soil, so that's the first thing you need to concentrate on is putting some organic matter in the soil. And we've got our Black Kow and we're gonna dig that in. We wanna work with the parent soil. You don't wanna try to take out all this soil and bring in something new. You wanna work with what you've got.

- Karla has some recommendations that will help you to make that soil do far better next spring. So what are you gonna start out with?

- Okay, well, you're starting here with your parent soil. One thing that a lot of people think is that they can pull out the parent soil and just bring in some more. No, we don't wanna do that.

- A native soil.

- You're gonna work, you're gonna stay with your native soil that you've got, and you're gonna amend it with organic matter. And so we've got a little bit of the Black Kow. There are other organic sources or sources of compost and organic matter that you can use. Worm castings would be another. Just well rotted compost and such like that. Dig that into the top, about six inches of your soil. And you've got some nice soil here.

- I try.

- So we're just gonna, you know, we just dig that in, and as we go along, we're mixing that in with our parent soil. So I don't see a lot of red clay. You've already got a good start here. But all this is going to break down over the winter months and make your soil richer and thicker next year, and it just makes a happy place for the roots of the plants to grow.

- Okay, if it's sort of like you see the farmers plow the field and leave them plowed under during the winter time.

- Exactly. Exactly.

- And so once they've done this, is it all right to like if they're gonna plant pansies, or is it better to leave it dormant?

- Well, if you're trying to improve your soil structure, I would plant something in the way of the farmers like a cover crop. And even in a small area, you can do that. Your radishes, your turnips-

- Oh, I just happened to have some.

- That you have there. You can plant those, even if you don't plan on eating them, plan on digging them under, after we get the first hard freeze and they start to die back. But the root crops will actually help to break up your clay soil, and then you turn 'em over and this adds to the organic matter, and it just builds up that overall structure, and you've got a better soil structure and a better place for the plant roots to live.

- It keeps it from compacting.

- Keeps it from compacting, and it keeps it from washing away if you've got erosion problems. So like I said, I take a lot of my old seed packets, you know, I usually buy a lot up in the spring and then have 'em left over, and so a lot of times, that's how I get rid of my extra seeds. I will just go ahead and plant them in my beds and be ready to turn them over, and I do it in the garden also.

- So if we had a nice supply of say mulched up leaves, once the leaves have fallen.

- Yes.

- And then, how deep can they be and not have them decompose? Is there a certain level of it or just pile 'em on?

- I would work them into the soil, because you do want them to break down. I mean, you might leave a couple inch layer on the top as a mulch. Is that what you were meaning?

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Okay. But if you're improving soil structure, again, you want to get your compost matter down in the soil, so it can be working, and there's good bacteria and fungi and things that are gonna work to help that composting process go on, so.

- So if we were to have that, say what they call the January thaw, and we wanted to garden and we had done all of this, and it's a good time that we could go out and could we go ahead and turn this soil and have it more ready to plant?

- Yes.

- Because when it gets wet again, it's hard to dig.

- Yes, yes. And it also depends on what you're planting. I mean, if you would wanna start now, we're in the middle of September, and developing this bed, six weeks down the road, if you wanted to go ahead and plant your pansies, your ornamental cabbage, kale, things like that, you could go ahead and put that in here too. Or if you're wanting to plant bulbs, you know, things that are gonna come up in the spring, that you really want to have a show in the spring, you could do that also. But if you're just wanting to improve the soil structure, just, you know, throw out some greens and different mix of seeds and till, you know, plan on tilling them in, turning them under.

- Yeah, and we shouldn't have to worry that it's not always got something flowering, do we?

- Right, right. Now this would be, you know, it's not gonna be real pretty, but it is gonna help your soil in the long run.

- It'll cut down on the need of-

- Of fertilizer.

- Liquid fertilizer.

- The need to water, 'cause it helps hold the water in place. Your compost, your organic matter helps hold that water in place. So, yeah.

- Well, you've encouraged me. Once it gets a little cooler, I might find that love of gardening again.

- And there you go, there you go.

- Thank you, Karla.

- All right.

- Good tips.

- Thanks.

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