Episode 3411

- [Narrator] There is delight in every part of this home garden where the assortment of colorful blooms have a variety of heights, textures, and form. Sheri Gramer gets insight on how to grow such strong plants without using synthetic inputs. Next, one goal in a vegetable garden is to get the maximum production per plant. Jeff Poppen has recommendations on proper plant spacing for tomatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and winter squash. And Marty DeHart delights in the gardening activities at a senior living community. Come along. Dahlias are a particular favorite in this garden and there are roses that are simply gorgeous.

- Spring Hill, Tennessee. We got a treat for you today. We have raised bed gardening, no chemicals, all natural from seed. We're gonna show you some perennials, some vegetables, and I think you're gonna really enjoy it. Blue Victoria salvia, Jessica Herning, this is wonderful. One of my favorite annuals. The color blue is pretty. Tell me something about your flower bed here.

- Well, I do a lot of mixtures of flowers with vegetables because companion planting is important, especially if you're not using pesticides. So I mix a lot of flowers with my vegetables, a lot of marigolds, basil, things that they emit a nice odor that bad bugs don't like and attract good bugs.

- So you said it's all natural, no pesticides. What do you mend your soil with in the spring? Compost.

- Compost.

- So I do about a two inch layer of compost and I feel like that my beds really like it. I don't have to do any sort of fertilizer afterwards. It's just compost.

- [Sheri] Well, they're very happy. That's for sure. I love the pink lantana in front of the blue and then the zinnias behind there and you have lots of basil. Do you use all this basil?

- [Jessica] I do actually at the end of the season. I'll use it throughout the season and then at the end, I'll do a big harvest before we have a freeze and I'll make pesto with it and then I freeze the pesto and I have it for all winter long.

- [Sheri] Do you do the pesto in ice cube trays or how do you do it?

- No, I do it in little jars and then I freeze the jars in portions that are big enough for our family. We love to have chicken pesto pasta. That's like a mainstay. So by spring when it's time to plant, I've nearly run out.

- This area is beautiful. Tell me how this evolved. What do you have planted here? Over my head, there's so much to look at. Tell me about it.

- Yeah, so six years ago, actually right before COVID, my husband and I built this little walled garden and it's 30 by 50. It started out mostly vegetables and some herbs and within a couple years, we honed in on what my family eats and then I only started growing that. So I had a lot of room for flowers. They bring so much joy, so mostly flowers. There's tons of trial and error. I had a lot of failures but I had a lot of wins. So I think that's for me, it's been a growing experience where I just, I worked with what worked and I kept growing that and then I would add a few things and sometimes they'd work and sometimes they didn't but I didn't give up.

- Well, this area is beautiful.

- [Jessica] Thank you.

- [Sheri] What's going on over our heads here?

- This is wisteria. I planted it six years ago. They were really tiny plants and I trained them to grow up and around. This variety, I didn't realize, was the type that takes several years to bloom. So this was the first year it bloomed and I nearly cried because I was so excited to finally have some purple.

- It's gorgeous and then you have some pretty climbing roses over here with some more yarrow.

- I do. I do. The climbing roses, unfortunately, they're not blooming here but this spring it was magnificent. I had hundreds and hundreds of roses that were light pink and white going across the arbor.

- [Sheri] Nice. I love your dahlias. Tell me how this all evolved. I mean, we're surrounded by dahlias so you must really like them. Do you like cut flowers then, obviously?

- I do. I make a lot of cut flower bouquets for myself, for friends, and then I even sell some. I have over a hundred dahlias in this garden alone. They're easy to grow. They don't require a lot of water. Usually, just with what rainfall we have, that's enough. That's part of the reason why I love them so much.

- [Sheri] Are you digging them up in the fall?

- [Jessica] You know, I don't. I leave them in the ground and so I usually have a 20 to 30% loss but I like to buy new varieties so every year I'll buy some new varieties just to see how they turn out.

- [Sheri] I wanna talk about how you contain your dahlias. Can you tell me, explain that to me, how this came to be?

- Yes. Dahlias really need to be staked and with over a hundred it can be time consuming for sure to stake them. I was looking for solutions online and I saw that someone had used cattle panel and cattle panel is really rigid so they made it into this u-shape and they did so by using a two by four to bend it and to make it that shape. I bought a bunch of cattle panel and then my husband and I had to use a lot of brute force but we got it the way we wanted. Bent it and it's actually working so well for my dahlias here. I won't have to stake any of these in here so they just grow right up and through it and yeah I'm so pleased.

- [Sheri] I love this solution. I see you've incorporated your genius for your zinnias as well.

- Yes, zinnias, they also can sometimes need to be staked especially when they get tall and here in this bed we get tons of sun and so they'll reach heights that are a couple of feet above the fence so I think this cattle panel will do really well in keeping them stabilized so this is the first year we'll see but so far so good I think.

- And then we have a real pretty yarrow here.

- Yes, I love yarrow. It's a perennial and so it comes back so when you plant it it'll come back and it'll spread and it makes beautiful cut flowers for an arrangement. They're beautiful filler flowers so-

- [Sheri] It dries well.

- [Jessica] It does dry well and I believe it's medicinal.

- [Sheri] It is. I can't believe it. I see a calla lily in the middle of everything else. How did that come to be?

- That was part of a few of them that I planted several years ago and I mean even though it's perennial you never know what's gonna come back so sometimes I'll have little surprises here and there in the garden.

- That one's pretty. I like that kind of bloody purple I guess. I don't know what color you call that. It's gorgeous. And then right here in front of me is?

- This is hibiscus, Rose of Sharon. So this was actually one of the things I planted the first year, so it's six years old now. I had no idea how big it'd get but I do love it. It's a showstopper and I have it in both corners of the garden.

- [Sheri] And the bees love it?

- [Jessica] They do.

- [Sheri] I noticed this beautiful rose. Tell me why you like it and how much you love it.

- So this rose I chose, it was just one of the many that I chose on a trip to the store one day. As it blooms it goes it fades from this orange to a light pink and it's quickly become actually my favorite flower in the garden which I'm not an orange person. I don't love it but I think sometimes when you plant things, even things out of your comfort zone, that's a good idea because it can become your favorite.

- I wanna talk a little bit about your raised beds.

- Yeah.

- Is there a reason why you chose this height and what approximately is the height?

- It's around 24 inches high and to be honest when I was looking at garden plans I just happened to see these a lot. I have this height and then I have the shorter more like six inch height out there and these are definitely much more easy to garden in because there's not as much bending over. The only con is that it requires a lot of soil to fill it up but once that's done I still amend it about the same as the other about two inches a year. So yeah, I love it for what it does.

- [Sheri] I notice more wisteria tell me about these. Well I learned my lesson with the other variety that I planted in the garden and so I wanted these doors and this greenhouse to be framed in this wisteria and so I found one that blooms first year. So this wisteria here is two years old but it's given me bloom since the very beginning, and yeah I love it.

- You've got a beautiful structure in your garden can we talk about that? Yes let's go see it. So tell me where we're standing what is this dwelling?

- Well this is a it's sort of like a greenhouse but it's not technically but I use this space my husband and my kids we use it as a place to hang out. We have dinners out here we'll have parties out here and we always have our morning coffee here.

- And so how did it transpire, tell me about the building material you used for this.

- There was a lady on Facebook who had windows for two dollars each and I collected them as I went and drew out how big I wanted it and then once we had all the windows we started building it.

- And I wanna talk a little bit about your checkerboard floor here.

- Okay.

- Tell me about that.

- So we first started with pea gravel and the whole floor but as you know pea gravel it shifts a lot so I found myself with a little bit of an uneven floor most of the time. I looked on Pinterest and I saw that people had done these concrete blocks with pea gravel so we went and got some concrete blocks we kind of shifted the pea gravel around and then made this checkerboard floor. And then to keep the pea gravel in place we used a mulch glue so you just spray it on and it dries pretty solid and I'd say about maybe it lasts about 18 months or so and then things start to kind of-

- I was gonna ask if there was trouble with heaving and stuff in the winter time.

- No, it I think that it's just not meant to be permanent so about every 18 months or so I'll come and I'll do another like coat on top with a little pump sprayer and it it's super fast it takes 30 minutes to do the whole greenhouse.

- And we've got a beautiful display of your garden flowers here don't we?

- Yes I picked all of those this morning.

- [Sheri] Well thank you for letting us enjoy them and it's gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. Alright tell me about your raspberries away from everything else.

- [Jessica] So I planted these raspberries kind of far away from my roses and dahlias because raspberries can be a trap crop. They're really attractive to a lot of you know bad pests that love flowers. So if you plant raspberries kind of away from your garden they'll attract those pests and so they're considered a trap crop. I don't use pesticides and so I like to try and plant plants that will deter the bad insects.

- [Sheri] I love this blue.

- [Jessica] Veronica?

- Yes. And so you like you like blues, pinks, you like every color.

- I do, I do. My garden has about every color you can have.

- Jessica I want to tell you thank you very much for sharing your gardens and your love of gardening to our viewers. Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- Plants need a little elbow room so they can fully express themselves. Let's not plant our gardens too tightly. Today we're gonna walk through the gardens and talk about spacing out the vegetables so they can grow easily and healthily and not be touching each other at full maturity. We'll start with everyone's favorite vegetable the tomato. Now many people plant their tomatoes pretty close together in a small garden two feet apart or so and then they have to scrupulously prune them up and sucker them and tie them to a stake or a twine that goes straight up, but that's not the nature of tomato growth. Tomatoes really like to sprawl so the way we do it is we just make a tomato cage and then stake it with a a wooden stake but they're four feet apart in rows four feet apart. So even as they mature there's all this space around them, so there's air flow and sunlight can come in here and this helps to keep the moisture off and the dew from settling which helps to prevent rots and diseases and blights. This watermelon patch is planted in rows eight feet apart. I'm growing a row of beans. These are October beans, pinto beans that will harvest just as the watermelons are taking them over. The beans are already you know making their pods and this way the watermelons have a lot of space to get the sunlight that they need to ripen their fruits. Sweet corn loves to grow in a block so it pollinates well. This patch here was not thinned like I thought I was going to get to do but you know things get busy on a farm so instead of being 10 or 12 inches apart like I would like there's many in here that are too close of course there's places where they're too far. When a plant is grown too close together it just simply makes smaller fruits. We use this fruiting tendency in winter squash to help keep the fruits a manageable size. When I plant winter squash at eight foot centers like I do the watermelons the fruits get so big that it's really more than a meal for most people. So this is delicata squash that was planted on four foot rows. At first though we've seeded them at six inches apart even though I want them farther apart. The reason I do that is because it's much easier to hoe out a squash plant than it is if it grows up with the pigweeds and the grasses. During the second hoeing we might take another every other one out eventually spacing them out at about two foot apart. By being tight like this it'll keep the fruits a manageable size. The spaghetti squash did not get thinned this year and consequently it's pretty tight and you can tell by the pale color in there that it has suffered a little bit from my neglect but we're still gonna get plenty of these yellow spaghetti squashes out of the field. This is the field of butternut. We had planted this one on four foot centers again wanting that tight spacing but again the wet year kept me from getting up here and doing the proper hoeing and management and it just became a mess. It was pigweed this tall with the squash barely visible underneath it. I came up here one day to just plow the whole thing up. I thought I'd replant it but it was really too late to plant butternuts which I really wanted to have a lot of. So I thought to myself well maybe I could fit the bush hog in between the rows and I went ahead and mowed every other row. So instead of the daunting 14 rows to hoe we only had to hoe out seven rows and we got them pretty clean as you can tell and again these butternuts are like those watermelons. They can be planted far apart and they just crawl in there and fill the space up. I inter-sowed it just with a little bit of crimson clover and I'm just gonna let it go and see what happens. I imagine we'll get a lot of butternuts maybe not as many as I would have got and we'll probably get some pretty big ones. Sweet potatoes too need to have the proper spacing. We plant ours at 16 inches apart. If we plant them farther than that they'll get big some of the size of footballs and that's just not a marketable sweet potato. If we plant them too close though they won't size up enough or of course if they get too weedy. So we put them about 16 inches apart. They're little plants that we set on hills and then we keep them hoed out until they get to about this stage where there's not much we can do in here and just let the field go. Peppers go in about three feet apart. I want the plants when fully mature to not be touching each other. Good air flow around them and they be open enough and a lot of room for their roots to expand out into soil without any competition. It took me years well actually decades to not plant things too close. When you put the tiny plants out and you're putting them so far apart it just looks like you know you're wasting space. But I've learned to picture the garden when it's fully mature and that way I can put my plants far enough so they can reach for the sky and their true potential.

- I'm here today at Park Place Retirement Community a lovely facility in Hendersonville northeast of Nashville. It's been here since 1984 and for a long time the Sumner County Master Gardeners have been building a courtyard garden here that has so enriched the lives of the residents. I'm here with Sue Martin who with her husband are the co-chairs of this beautiful project at Park Place and Sue I'm so happy to be here with you today.

- Thank you, thank you.

- And how long has this garden been in the making? I mean it looks very well established.

- It is. It was started in 1999.

- [ Marty] Wow that's 20 years ago-

- Yes, yes and it is an ongoing project. We're always adding new things, adding new beds and everyone has different ideas and so on. So we bring everything new and fresh each year. The residents love this garden.

- [Marty] Oh, I bet they do. And this is exciting there is a National Wildlife Federation habitat sign. They don't just give those out to anybody.

- [Sue] Correct and actually this facility was one of the first retirement communities that was able to get registered with the National Wildlife.

- [Marty] That's great and I see you've got a really lovely water feature over there.

- [Sue] Thank you, yes.

- [Marty] That's beautiful.

- [Sue] Thank you.

- [Marty] Another thing I'm seeing is a lot of flowers that it looks like you've planned this for continuous something always in color.

- [Sue] Correct we have bloom from early spring. We have new things coming out of the ground, surprises all year long.

- [Marty] That's so much fun.

- [Sue] Yes.

- [Marty] And with the annuals you can change things up every year.

- [Sue] Correct, we do bring in annuals to throw in extra color.

- [Marty] That's so much fun. That is a raised bed loaded with veggies. Man tell me about that.

- [Sue] Well we started that a few years ago for the residents and as it turned out they just absolutely loved it. They couldn't wait to get out here and plant tomatoes and radishes and cucumbers and peppers. It was a huge hit and so we went ahead and added these upright containers. They enjoy both the flowers and the vegetables.

- So do I, I mix them all the time.

- Right, right.

- [Marty] And you've told me you have another new section you wanna show off. It's so beautiful.

- Yes.

- Let's go take a look.

- [Sue] Alright.

- This is charming. I love this big very interestingly shaped mulberry that sort of anchors this garden.

- It adds a lot of character to this new garden. We just added this garden a month ago and there were about 25 of us master gardeners in the heat of June actually and we completely took everything out of here. Two truckloads of items and trash and things.

- [Marty] It was just kind of a neglected area.

- [Sue] They actually come out here now and do their art classes.

- [Marty] Oh, what fun.

- [Sue] And they come out and drink coffee and you know just a place to read books.

- [Marty] And that hosta that you have is just so beautiful.

- [Sue] Thank you.

- [Marty] It's like my favorite hosta of all. It's called stained glass.

- [Sue] Stained glass.

- [Marty] Yes and it's a spectacularly performing. It seems like it's doing really well for you.

- We were trying to go with the chartreuse green and the pinks and things to sort of-

- And sort of bronzy purple too.

- Right.

- Love the contrast.

- Yeah to keep the color scheme going throughout the garden.

- This is one of my favorite flocks and I love this border you've got here that really features this plant. This is Jeana I believe phlox.

- Aha.

- One of the things I love about this phlox is it doesn't get mildew. Unlike a lot of summer flocks. Look how clean the foliage is and it sure blooms its head off doesn't it?

- Yes it does. It's a beautiful, beautiful surprise at the end of the summer. It just comes out with a vengeance.

- It's lovely and a long bloom period too.

- [Sue] Yes lovely.

- [Marty] I don't know whether you know this. This is just my plant trivia kicking in. But this was this is a locally discovered phlox. It was discovered near the Harpeth River.

- [Sue] Really? I did not know that. That's interesting.

- [Marty] Yeah, but now it's everywhere that people grow phlox 'cause it's such a good variety. I'm here with Amy Raines, General Manager of Park Place Retirement Community. What sort of impact this wonderful garden has had on the community here?

- Our residents love it. They're able to come out and read. My activity director uses a space for exercise, lemonade socials out here.

- Oh, how nice.

- They grow tomatoes and peppers and just absolutely love it. And even in October we use the space we do a bonfire and we do ghost stories for Halloween out here and roast s'mores. And so we never mind grilling on the fourth of July. It's just an amazing extension to our community.

- [Marty] It's really a social gathering place.

- [Amy] Yeah it's fantastic. It's so beautiful and serene out here and gives our residents an opportunity to still get in the dirt and grow and do things that they were enjoying in their homes and they can do it here with us and with their community. So it's fantastic.

- [Marty] That's lovely and certainly a lot of joint effort has made this possible.

- [Amy] Yeah, we're so grateful. We've been blessed for almost 20 years now with the Master Gardeners and they work so hard week in and out. They're out here making this place beautiful and they do it just kind of as a ministry I guess and volunteer their time and they're they're immense talents and we're so fortunate to have them.

- [Marty] It's just a lovely thing. It has a lovely atmosphere here.

- [Amy] Yeah, we're very lucky.

- Thank you so much.

- You heard both Amy and Sue talk about the group of people that make this happen and I got to tell you I know from personal experience how much work it is to make a beautiful garden stay beautiful all the time. I want their faces on camera. They deserve the credit. These are the people who make it happen. Sumner County Master Gardeners.

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