Episode 3509

- [Announcer] Winter sowing cold-hardy perennial or native seeds is a great way to let nature do the work and save money. Julie Berbiglia is with an experienced grower who will share a space-saving way to accomplish this. You're going to love it. Then Marty DeHart is out in the herb garden at the end of the growing season to do some cleanup while keeping beneficial insects in mind. She'll discuss those things to leave behind that provide food and habitat for those pollinators that spend the winter above ground. Join us. Creating a microclimate for seeds that will germinate outdoors over the winter.

- You know, even in the winter, you don't have to give up gardening. In fact, it's the perfect time to start winter sowing. No, no, no, we're not sowing in the ground outside, and we're gonna find all about it from Bieke. So Bieke, thanks so much for working with us today.

- Oh, I'm so excited to be here.

- Yeah, so why are we winter sowing to begin with?

- I mean, the reason I winter sow is because a lot of plants need to have cold for a certain amount of time before the seeds will germinate. And this is kind of like nature doing it for you. You know, you can germinate in your fridge if you want to, but this is the easy way. So I'm very excited about taking advantage of this cold season to get all these native plants growing.

- Okay, well, I'm super excited to find out all about this. Now, I know that there is a method that you may have seen before, which is doing the winter sowing with an actual milk jug or some sort of container.

- Right.

- Now, your version you're gonna show us today is a little bit different.

- Yeah. It's a little different. So my version involves just a little Ziploc. Just a little bag, a freezer bag actually. If you get these, make sure that you get the kind that has the flat bottom so it can stand. And I get the gallon ones because, you know, those work well for the type of planting that I'm wanting to do. So basically I got, I saw this woman on YouTube and she talked about winter sowing with bags like this. And I was thinking, "Man, that seems like such a great idea in light of the fact that the milk jugs take up so much space." I mean, they take up space while they're growing and that's great, right? You can look through the hole and it's super exciting. But after you plant them somewhere else, like, then you have all these milk jugs waiting for the next year. And that takes up a lot of space. And so, this takes up very little space because I have like, you know, thousands. Actually, I grew about 1,000 plants last year and 1,000 plants fit into these little bags that I have here, just stashed in my little bucket. You need some clothespins, which I have here. I have a few extra bags. It really takes up so little space and it creates so much life, and I love that.

- All right. Well, this is fantastic because I have to say all of us gardeners always have too much stuff, I think.

- Right.

- So this is a good space saver. Okay, so the basic idea here is we're preparing plants to sit outside for the rest of the winter.

- Right.

- Okay. Let's get started with our containers.

- All right.

- I know that we never want containers to not drain.

- Right. Absolutely.

- So show me how we're preparing these for drainage.

- Okay, so basically, and I have some here from last year because I already did those. And as you can probably see, it's not an exact science. Some of them have more holes than others. I would probably start with like probably getting, you know, kind of having normal scissors or these guys and cutting just a little bit of a few triangles out. Sometimes the triangles are a little too small, but you don't want to make the hole so big that, hang on, these are not working as well, but you don't want to make the hole so big that the dirt falls out.

- Okay.

- So I kind of like go, I start small and then if I need to add a little bit of more drainage, I can do that later. So here we go. And maybe I'll do this a little corner too. So this means that whatever we're putting in here, when there's rain and snow coming in, it can all find its way out once it's done. So I said before, you know, the flat bottom is super important because we're gonna fill this whole thing up. Now, before you get into this, this is, you know, live and learn, but label. Label your plant because otherwise you're gonna try to do it on top of soil and that's not very convenient. So for this one, actually, I found several that match the seeds that I'll be talking about today, but I don't have one yet for this golden groundsel. So I'm gonna go ahead and write, and I have two different Sharpies here, Julie, because this is a regular Sharpie and this is one of those Milwaukee ones that's supposed to last longer. I tend to use these because, you know, but also these bags sit close together. So the sunlight is less likely to bleach everything out. So I'm just gonna put down, that way I'll remember what it is. And then I'm gonna put about, put about two or three inches of soil in here.

- Well, let's talk about this soil. Are you using something special? Did you dig it out of your yard? What exactly are you using?

- I mean, honestly, it's kind of easier than that. It's just potting soil. I just went to Ace Hardware and got some potting soil. And, you know, this is just a place for these seeds to be while they kind of go through their natural process of getting cold, getting hot, and so forth, and then putting out their roots. Once these guys are ready to grow, actually, once there's a, you know, those little, those first two leaves or one leaf, the cotyledons? Once they have two real leaves, you can actually take them out and plant them up. You can put them in your garden or you can pot them, you know, put them in pots and grow them. So, for this one, like, I actually already put a little bit of water in this because some of these mixes come super dry. And as I'm feeling, this feel like, look, it crumbles, right, like that. So that feels too dry to me. So I'm gonna want to add more water because we want this to be nice and wet because we want the contact between the seeds and the soil to be solid. We don't want there to be air pockets. So I'm gonna go ahead and get a little bit of water added and probably a lot of water added actually.

- [Julie] This is a crucial step because we're not going to be watering these on a regular basis. We're gonna let nature take care of that.

- That's right. Exactly. And that's what's so nice about it. It's super low maintenance. And so, one, let me see, I do think it'll need all of this because it slowly drains. But one of the things that is so cool is that the water from the rain and from the snow will find its way in this container. And then it's going to work like a tiny greenhouse. Then the water vapor will be in this and then it'll drizzle back down, so you always have kind of a nice and humid environment for the plants to do their thing.

- Oh, I love things that take care of themselves, so.

- Yes, I know.

- This does make it easier when it gets really, really cold outside.

- Yes. I think that we've got a pretty good moisture level here now. And the nice thing is you can always add more water if it feels too dry. But I'm gonna go ahead and get about two or three inches of soil in here.

- Perfect. And I think it's important for people to know also that you don't want to get the potty mix that has those moisture-retaining crystals in them because it's just going to stay too wet and possibly even mildew in there.

- [Bieke] Right. Absolutely, yeah. Just a normal plain potting soil seems to do the trick.

- I imagine this is an amazing way to save money and get beautiful plants.

- It's so fun because you can get a little pack of seeds for not that much money. Maybe like, I want to say like 3.95 is a common cost of a little seed pack. And then you can keep making them. And once you have one set of flowers going, then you harvest those seeds and you can keep going. It's a beautiful process.

- And what are we planting in this one?

- This one is the golden groundsel. It's a really great little ground cover because, you know, everyone, when they're trying to switch to native plants, people are like, "Oh, but it's so hard to keep up with the weeds." And it still is. But one way to get around that is by planting like, sort of green mulch, like, planting lots of densely-organized lower-growing plants that are also native. So the golden groundsel is one of those. And we had, we ordered them as plugs as part of our plant sale last year. And then they grew and bloomed and have seeds. So now I can plant them on my own.

- Oh, this is fantastic. And what I really like about this is not being so picky because nature isn't that picky, they just drop all the seeds like that and we're ready to go.

- Yes, we're ready to go. And the thing is like, part of, we're kind of helping nature I think in this way because we're doing it the same way, more or less. But the seeds are less likely to be eaten by little nibblers, you know, because they're in a little enclosed area and they're less likely to dry out because they're in a tiny greenhouse. So, typically, we have more success with this as opposed to like growing directly into the soil.

- Right.

- So yeah. I'm gonna just grab a few of these seeds. This is kind of a lot of them actually. And then I'm going to sprinkle them, you know, into this bag.

- [Julie] Okay. Okay. Again, very nature-like because you're not spreading them out at exact intervals.

- No, no, no. This is more fun. So I'm just sort of sprinkling them. And then, you know, we want to make sure that there's contact between the seeds and the soil. But native seeds, especially small ones, they don't need a whole lot of soil on top of them. So I'm gonna kind of press them in a little bit. And then I will use a little bit, just a tiny layer of, like, to do a tiny bit of covering. Now, some of the seeds are literally so small that covering is not what you want. You know, you really don't want to cover them too much. They need to be, they need to have light to germinate. Okay, so once we have this, I don't put a ton of pressure on it, but I just want to make sure there's contact. Once you have it like this, then we're going to get the greenhouse kind of going. So we want there to be an opening that's big enough for there to be water, snow, you name it, going in. But then also, we want it to kind of hold onto that moisture. Oh, thank you.

- [Julie] And here's your special secret.

- My special secret, yes. And these are from last year. They're a little gray, but they do the job. So I'm gonna go ahead and put this little part over here so that it opens a little bit wider. And one of the things I like to do is once they're going, in the beginning, you just don't have to mess with them. But then when we get those like spring days where it's kind of warmer than you expect, you can always give them a little more air. You know, you can always kind of like adjust, adjust. You keep more heat in if you keep it tighter. I feel like last year I planted 54 different species via this method. And only two species did not germinate. So it was a pretty high percentage, I think.

- That's great. Well, and then you don't have to worry also with this method about putting them in the fridge or freezer.

- Yes.

- And then waiting those 60 days, keeping count of it, finding them later.

- Yes.

- You've got them outside where they want to be.

- Where they want to be. Exactly. So yeah, I also have, so all of these are native plants. I also have several asters, like New England asters. I have white wood asters. I like these because there's not that many plants that like to bloom in the shade, but these white wood asters, they are happy to do so. I've got some Joe-Pye weed, which the Joe-Pye gets pretty tall and it is such a great place for pollinators to go. And so, I ordered these bamboo kind of like marshmallow roasting type sticks. Actually don't know what they're called. They're called extra long bamboo skewers. And you don't have to get the extra long, but my raised beds are kind of far away from each other. And so, what I do is I use one side of one raised bed and another side of another raised bed. And then the bags will kind of, you can slide like several of them next to each other and have them sitting there like that. So if you want to, we can do that just to kind of try it out.

- Absolutely. I think we need to get a couple more bags done.

- Okay.

- And then we can go out and see what they look like in the beds.

- Sounds great. Okay. All right. So, this is, yeah, this is the fun stuff. So you see how this like kind of works out? They will kind of bend a little bit, but that's all good. So, this one I've never pierced, like I've never used before. So I'm going to show you. Basically, I'm just gonna make a hole, you know? Get it through. Same thing on the other side so that they're kind of suspended. And hanging up, hanging out like a little bit. And then what I like to do is I like to get several of them because I want to maximize this space because I'm gonna get several other ones going. And these already have a hole, so I'm going to reuse that hole. Here we go, there we go. And can you hold onto this side, Julie? Let's see. I might just make a new one because I can't see the old one. And just for my own organization, I like to keep them with like the labels all facing one way just so it's easier to see what I've got going on. And I like to have all the openings on one side. Again, it just keeps things more organized. But that's not necessary, of course. All right. And so, you see we can have several more here and I really do try to maximize it. So I think I had about five or six bags per two skewers. And that really allows you to do a lot with just a few skewers and a few bags.

- Love this.

- You'll start checking to see what's going on. And once you start seeing green happening, then you just wait for those first true leaves to come. And once you have those first true leaves in a lot of the bag, then it's time to separate, and that's fun.

- This is fantastic. And now, I guess critters are not going to be able to get in here, which is another-

- I want to say -ish. So I definitely have had like some slugs. Like, when it's been wet, some slugs might crawl in through the little holes, but I haven't had them destroy things. So like this one, when I'm pulling the roots apart very gently as part of potting up, I just put them back in the yard. So yeah, it's pretty easy. Pretty fun.

- So after all your hard work winter sowing, what are you going to get? You're going to get these. So these now are 10 months from the time they were a seed, put in the ground, and nature allowed to care for them. So what do we have here that you may have spent a lot of money otherwise buying plants this size? Well, we have this beautiful white wood aster. And we also have these lovely penstomons. They're going to look so good when they start to bloom next year. We have Monarda. Talk about great plant to share with others. We have a couple of types of goldenrod, one of our wonderful keystone species. So we have our aromatic goldenrod. And then we have this lovely blue-stemmed goldenrod. Look at that color there. Now, what else are we going to have? Well, for our pollinators, we have this absolutely amazing anise hyssop. You can see a tiny one back there growing in. And one of my personal favorites is this wonderful Joe-Pye weed. So it's got those beautiful purple blossoms you see all summer. So look at this bounty of plants. Winter sowing. It works.

- It's a beautiful early fall afternoon. We're at the Franklin First United Methodist Church's Giving Garden. This is the herb garden portion of it. And today, we're talking about how to put your garden to bed and we're speaking with an expert. This is Rita Venable, butterfly connoisseur and knower of all things about butterflies, but also pollinators in general. And we're gonna talk about how to, just what great plants to have and how to take care and think of wildlife and pollinators over the winter.

- We are.

- And let's just get started talking about these.

- [Rita] Okay, let's start with hyssop.

- [Marty] Okay.

- Now you might think right now, this looks very dead. Let's just jerk it up. But about a month ago, it was just teeming with bees, butterflies, all kinds of beneficial insects. And this in the winter, as you know, will provide seed for the birds.

- Oh. So it's a double-duty plant.

- It is. And you've probably seen, and I have too, many a goldfinch come and land on this and just feast. And it's really one of the things I look most forward to in the fall.

- [Marty] Agastache is the botanical name. And you can see a few remnant little flowers. These were these beautiful lavender blue spires.

- Yes.

- Earlier. And it's really quite a showy garden plant. I mean-

- It is. Over here. This, I have no idea who planted this, but these are garlic chives. And right now, you can still see a few things flying around that, like, this is a huge pollinator attractor.

- And once again, you can see a few late flower heads there with the starry white flowers.

- Yes. The white's so pretty. And I counted 100 soldier beetles on this.

- Oh my gosh.

- Just a few weeks ago. It's tremendous. And it is so hardy. We haven't planted this in years. It just keeps coming up.

- You can't kill this stuff really.

- And you can also, when this turns brown, you can save the seed, which I intend to do. And we're gonna put it maybe in pots, different places. It does spread, so, you know.

- It self-sows pretty aggressively. However, it's not hard to control. I mean, it's not like Johnson grass or something.

- No, no, no. It's not. You don't really think of herbs as pollinator plants, but this is a great, this is garlic chives, so.

- Okay. Well, Rita, there's a huge mass of late season marigolds over there.

- Yes. And you might think, let's just take it all out because it's not gonna last that much longer. But not only would you be depriving bees and butterflies of some of their nectarine material, but also the other things that eat the seeds too. So we wanna leave this. We wanna just leave it as is. Now, if you want to tidy up, you can clip it back and to make it look neat. But leave some of it in the middle though.

- Okay, so we're talking about little native pollinator bees.

- Little native pollinator bees. There's 3,700 in the whole country.

- Oh my gosh.

- And 90% are solitary. 30% nest above ground. So we're talking about making habitat for that 30% right here in our garden cleanup.

- Everybody thinks about honeybees, but they don't realize how much work our native pollinators do.

- That's right. That's right.

- How important it is for us to keep them, give them homes and keep them going.

- Yes. Yes.

- [Marty] Let's talk about this guy right in the middle here.

- Love that plant.

- I do too.

- [Rita] Love that autumn sage. Provides, it comes on in spring and fall. And there really is no cleanup for this. You don't have to clean this up at all. This is the first year for this. I love it because it blooms when other things aren't.

- Right. And it's a shrub. So like you say, you don't cut it back. It's not a perennial that dies back to the ground.

- Right. It's a woody shrub. And hummingbirds love it, like you said.

- Yeah, it's a hummingbird magnet.

- And they just love it.

- [Marty] This is a spectacular group bunch of fennel here. It's just so thick and lush.

- [Rita] You got a, oh, we got a caterpillar here.

- We got a caterpillar.

- And a bumblebee over there.

- Oh my gosh.

- Oh my gosh. And then she, a female just laid an egg right in here and she went over here and laid another one.

- This is black swallowtail country.

- It is. Not only that, but a lot of pollinators love this flower head. And so, they're still reproducing. You know, the old paradigm of butterflies are gone by here and they're finished by, it's all up in the air now. I mean, things are-

- Well, the climate changing.

- Lasting longer into the season. Exactly. So we're seeing things, I had a monarch caterpillar just the other day and that's usually they're migrating to Mexico by now. So by November, you know, after we've had a first hard frost, yeah, everything turns brown, including the chrysalis. And so, you think, "Oh, I'm just gonna jerk it all out." Well, there goes your chrysalis for next year.

- [Marty] Because you don't see it because it blends in so well.

- That's right. And they may or may not pupate right on this. I mean, they may go to the butterfly bush or something around here. But the thing about leaving everything, even if you cut it, you leave the stems about this high for the bees. And you leave this litter-

- Down around the base of the plant.

- Because you don't know what's in there.

- [Marty] You don't know. This next year's butterflies.

- [Rita] It is. Exactly.

- [Marty] Okay, so we're looking at a plant that most people regard in the US as a horrific weed, is here in Tennessee for sure. Which is pokeweed, also known as poke sallet. Tell me, but you left it here.

- Well, yes. And because it's smaller, and as you and I talked about, you know-

- They can get huge, yeah.

- I've seen them seven or eight feet tall. So a lot of people think this should be cleaned out just immediately. Like, okay, this is the first thing to go. But, number one, the birds love the berries.

- Yeah, they do.

- Two, it is a native plant. Although it does grow aggressively. If you cut it back at some point after it's wilted and everything, you will have a new pokeweed in the spring.

- [Marty] Yeah, they are perennial. And lots of moths, little moth critters like it. And birds love it, and pollinators visit the flowers.

- [Rita] Yes. So, that's a good plant.

- Yeah, well, this is certainly a popular, popular native plant.

- [Rita] Yes, it is.

- [Marty] Echinacea, purple coneflower.

- Most popular recommended plant for butterflies for the last 20 years, probably.

- Well, it is a butterfly magnet. There goes a little skipper that just landed on it. And this is, obviously, it's got a long bloom cycle because we've got flowers coming on, plus we've got ripe seed heads right behind it.

- Yes. Yes.

- Echinacea means spiny, and you can see why, these seed heads are so spiny.

- [Rita] Yes.

- But so it's a wonderful pollinator magnet, butterflies in particular.

- And bees as well.

- Bees. Okay.

- Bees love the pollen from purple coneflowers.

- [Marty] So all the seed's gone. You can see this one's all done, it's all shed its everything. It's all flower. We've had a hard frost. Everything's brownish black. These turn almost black when they freeze. What do you do with this plant to over winter it?

- In a formal setting, I would have deadheaded all summer and then you would still this coming on in the fall.

- And leave that to do its thing.

- Then I would leave a few out there.

- Okay.

- In my backyard, however, or out here, we can leave these up all winter for the birds for the-

- Because they'll come snack on them at will.

- They'll come snack on them and we'll allow that to happen. And then in the spring, we may cut them back, but probably leave a stem up.

- [Marty] Once again, we're leaving that stem because it's hollow inside.

- Yes.

- And they like the little-

- Yes. And one very important thing about leaving these stems, and we've talked about several species. If it's over 3/4 of an inch, it's not helping the bees.

- In diameter?

- Yes.

- [Marty] So you're talking about only little narrow ones.

- You're talking about less than 3/4 of an inch. So you don't want a great big like this stem-

- [Marty] The sunflowers. Yeah.

- [Rita] Is not necessarily gonna help the pollinators. This is Joe-Pye weed. This was recommended by Heather Holm.

- Okay.

- If you do not want the stems up in your yard all day.

- Standing in your yard.

- Standing in your yard, you make a teepee, which I did. I cut all of these off of the Joe-Pye about like that.

- Okay. So that's what's left. And this is the tops.

- And very quickly in the spring, those will be covered over by new growth because it's perennial. But you can also take this, and I have seen things go in these little holes. Little bees going in there, and they will make nests in there in these hollow stems.

- So you just make like this bundle of this and just stand it out in your yard?

- You can put it anywhere. You can put it in your front yard or in your backyard. You can put it beside your house. I put mine beside.

- Okay. Okay.

- And they'll find it. And I moved it even a time or two. And you can see, you know, the little hollow stems right there and how small they are.

- Oh, I see, yeah.

- Because we want to provide for those little bitty bee. There are specialist bees, we don't even know what they do, Marty.

- Yeah, we're just learning about this stuff.

- We're just learning about all these associations. And I thought I had the butterflies down pat, like all the host plants, all the things they nectared on. I was like, yes, but now here come the bees.

- Yeah. The butterflies are only a little bit of it.

- And there are these specialist bees and it's like, oh, they only pollinate this. Or some are generalists. And so, we don't really, and until we know more about all this, we just need to provide for everybody and just let them have at it. We've all heard about the bees and we just need to get on board with providing for them too as well.

- They need us to take care of them, but we need them to live.

- Things we grow here.

- Yeah.

- [Rita] Exactly.

- [Marty] Do we like food? Yes, we do. Well, then we need bees.

- [Rita] I think we all like to eat the last I checked.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Okay.

- Well, thank you so very much for sharing your-

- Thank you for having me.

- The wealth of your knowledge with us today.

- I've enjoyed it. Thank you.