Volunteer Gardener

(lively music) - [Narrator] Troy Marden is an avid plant collector and has lots of friends who also qualify as plant fanatics.

We get to tag along on a visit to one such friend's garden, where a particularly favorite spot is home to several tropical selections you might not expect in a Tennessee garden.

There's also a collection of miniature conifers in a hypertufa setting, a desert garden, and a border bed of junipers highlighted with pops of color.

Then we're off to Jeff Poppen's farm to get a look at the large assortment of tools he relies on to work the land.

He shares tips on how to use them efficiently and effectively.

This and more, come along.

(lively music) So many interesting plants of different sizes, forms, colors, and textures.

(energetic music) - We all have visited my garden on a couple of occasions, and you know that I am, more than anything else, a plant collector.

And I happen to have a number of friends who are also plant collectors because we all sort of tend to hang out together.

And we have a great opportunity today to visit the garden of a friend of mine, Paul Schneider, up in Portland, Tennessee, and his wife, Dot.

And I can't wait to show you around this magnificent little garden.

Well, Paul, thank you for letting us come and visit today.

And I can't wait to see the garden.

- Okay, well, this segment we're in right now, we kind of call it the tropical garden because we try to grow some really bigger things and things that one wouldn't expect to find in a Tennessee garden, necessarily.

Although this is a native right here.

- Sure.

- This is Silphium perfoliatum, so-called because its stems.

The leaves just arise directly out of the stems and you can see the water from rain captures in those leaves.

Kind of an interesting thing.

- [Troy] And its common name is cup plant.

- Cup plant, exactly.

It'll grow about eight feet tall and have really, really pretty yellow flowers.

Behind us, once again, in the yellow flower mode is Helianthus maximiliani, which is a Mexican sunflower.

And I've got them here against this arbor because they'll grow up through it and that'll help to support them, because they get eight or nine feet tall by the end of the summer.

- Sure.

- Once again with yellow flowers.

- Yeah.

We can see the hardy banana or the fiber banana.

Musa basjoo.

These stay in the ground all year round.

A lot of people are under the impression you have to take them out and put them in a crawl space in the winter or whatever.

Absolutely not.

- Yeah, not with this one, especially not this one.

Let the frost kill it back, and then cut the leaves off, and use them as a mulch.

Once again in the banana family, this is Musella lasiocarpa, the yellow-flowered banana.

And that stays out in the winter, too, with a nice dose of mulch on it.

- Sure.

Sure.

- Okay?

Datura.

Datura meteloides.

This bloom has already just gone by, but you can see it's got the big white flowers on it.

We've got a Cornus kousa here, Chinese dogwood.

We've got Eupatorium purpureum right here.

And we've got Vernonia noveboracensis, the giant purple-flower vernonia.

- Ironweed.

- Ironweed, exactly.

- Ironweed.

Yeah.

12, 14 feet tall.

- Yeah.

- It's definitely a butterfly magnet in the fall.

And the big grass behind it is Saccharum arundinaceum.

It's a hardy sugar cane.

- Okay.

- Very, very sharp-edged leaves, but an absolutely gorgeous plant.

Once again, 12, 14 feet tall at the end of the season.

We've got this great Ricinus, or castor bean.

- Castor beans.

- Called New Zealand.

- Uh-huh.

- These came from Ricinus.

- Exactly.

- It's really nice.

- These seed came from my friend Gina Pruitt over in Franklin, Tennessee.

- Uh-huh.

- It's going to get big like this and about six feet tall.

- Sure.

Wonderful, wonderful plant.

Giant elephant ears.

And back here in the back, not up where they need to be yet, is Lilium formosanum, the Formosa lily, which will also get seven or eight feet tall.

Wonderful white-scented blooms in the late season.

So this is more of a late-season garden, but it's really starting to kick in now.

And over here, on this side, we've got the needle palm, Rhapidophyllum hystrix, which is a wonderfully hardy palm for Tennessee gardens.

You can see it looks so tropical.

- Right.

- And it'll take 10 below zero - Yeah, this is fully hardy to zone six, and most people don't think that palms would be hardy here, but- - Exactly.

- This absolutely hardy.

- This one and also the Sabal minor, depending upon which cultivar you get, I'm growing all of those here, and they all do fine.

The trick is, buy as big as you can get them or as big as you can afford.

- Afford them, yeah.

- And try to watch your provenance.

If they come from Florida, they might have a couple of bad winters here.

If you can get some from, say, northern Alabama, northern Georgia, you're going to have a lot better luck with them in this garden.

- Of course.

- The rice paper plant... I can't remember the name on that one.

- Tetrapanax.

- Tetrapanax papyrifer.

Exactly.

Big, big, big, wondrous tropical leaves.

And also a great plant, but it is a spreader.

You'll be digging it out if you put a lot of it in.

One plant is fine to keep you going.

- Well, I know this is just one small section of the garden, so let's move on and, and keep going with the tour because I'm really fascinated.

- Sure.

Sure.

- [Troy] So this is a little rain garden that you've created.

- [Paul] Yeah, actually, when we bought this house, we took all the rain gutters on the south side of the house and put them all together, put them in the ground, buried them, brought them into a sump.

And now when it rains, the cellar pumps into it, and the rain gutters go into it.

And what we've put in here are things like Thalia dealbata, which is a native canna, for want of a better term.

Really neat purple flowers in the fall of the year with little tiny round balls for seeds.

We've got Carex Bowles Golden, which is a wonderful Carex from, actually, from Europe.

And almost all the iris in here are iris that appreciate water.

They're either Louisiana or versicolor iris.

So we've got Sweet Kate Tradescantia and Bilberry Ice Tradescantia over here.

And when we have really torrential rains here, this basically floods.

I mean, the gravel here is designed to lead the water away to this section over here, which is the deciduous holly, Ilex verticillata.

We have a male in the middle.

You can see the differentiation in foliage from the females.

And you can see the green berries that are on it now.

Those will be bright red in the fall, and it's an absolute bird attractor.

I mean, birds come from all over to strip the berries before we can use them for Christmas decorations.

Wonderful plant that no one seems to grow that much because it's a green bush.

- So here you have a very interesting little collection of troughs and things.

- Right, these are troughs that I have made myself using the hypertufa.

One of the real lightweight formulas that I use with Portland cement, peat moss, and perlite.

- [Paul] Uh-huh.

- [Paul] And I use them basically for small conifers.

- [Troy] Uh-huh.

- This is a Jade Pagoda ilex or- - Or Holly.

- Right, or Holly.

These guys have been in those troughs now, some of them for several years.

It makes a nice home for them.

It's easy to control the soil conditions, easy to control the moisture, and it allows you to have a place to put miniature conifers and plants that would sort of get swallowed up in the larger scope of the garden.

- In the big landscape, exactly, exactly.

- Troy, as a plant collector, one of the things that I find is almost everyone seems to have a somewhat limited budget and you want to put the most of your money where it'll do the biggest effect.

- Right.

- One of the things that we've found, my wife and I have found over the years is places like the big box stores sometimes offer things like the ground cover juniper, Juniperus procumbens Nana.

We found this wonderful Juniperus virginiana, Grey Owl, at I think, a Walmart, if I remember correctly.

- Right.

- And as we go along here, almost all these junipers, one of the reasons I collect junipers is they tend to be a little bit reasonable in price, including... (vehicle droning) Including this variegated juniper also found at one of the big box stores.

- Uh-huh.

- So for bang for our buck, it allowed us to buy, say, a Juniperus communis, Goldschatz, like this one, which was more costly.

- Right.

- [Paul] But you can see, we've covered a large area.

This is sort of in what they call the hell strip, which is just off the highway.

- Right.

- Gets a lot of, had a lot of traffic here years gone by.

(vehicle whooshing) And they last well, they don't ask for a whole lot.

They don't need to be weeded too frequently.

So they're kind of a great- - They like the sun.

They're drought tolerant.

- Absolutely.

- Perfect plant for out here.

- Perfect plant for out here.

And as a conifer collector, junipers are one of the better conifers, and they really are a great plant for the money.

- So I'm really fascinated by the dry garden here.

The more I travel and the less I'm home, the more this appeals to me of low-maintenance plants, and plants that really can handle the drought during the summer.

Tell me about building this, and how this all got started.

- [Paul] Well, one of the things that we did when we moved here, I've always been fascinated with yuccas, particularly, and also the hardy cactus.

- Uh-huh.

- Opuntias, and so on.

And we decided that we'd put a desert garden, a xeric garden, if you will, out here on the edge of our driveway.

So I had a chap bring in an 18-ton load of Cumberland River sand, which is kind of a mixed-coarse sand.

I amended it with pea gravel also from the Cumberland River.

And some really, really well, well-composted horse manure.

And basically started putting in with rocks and so on, things like the Opuntia whipplei white spines, which is this cactus right here with the wonderful spine structure on it.

- Really great all year long.

I mean, right now it's been blooming, so it's quite green, but it gets whiter and whiter as the year goes on.

We've got Agave linearifolia up here.

- [Troy] Uh-huh.

- [Paul] Which came from Tony Avent some years ago.

Struggled at first, but now it's really taken hold.

And then we've got this big agave, I'm sorry- - Yucca.

- Yucca, yeah.

Yucca flaccida, which has bloomed once, and will bloom probably one or two more times during the course of the summer.

Mixed with things like Santolina.

- Right, you got old thymes- - Some of the thymes.

- And hens and chicks.

- Hens and chicks, a couple of other agaves, and so on.

Sedums, and for a minimal amount of maintenance, we built a rock wall out of riprap.

I had somebody bring me in a big load of riprap, and we built a wall.

It's just a loose, easily-put-together stack-up wall.

- Nothing fancy.

- No mortar or whatever.

And it's just a real delight.

Opuntia imbricata, which is the more like pencil-like Opuntia.

- So one last plant before we go.

I've tried this several times and not been successful, but you've been tremendously successful here.

- Right.

This is a willow.

It's Salix eleagnos, or the Rosemary-leaved willow.

It does not have any scent like Rosemary, but the attraction is the leaf shape, which resembles Rosemary.

- [Troy] And even that kind of silvery backside to the leaf, really beautiful.

- It's wonderful.

Now it is growing close to the water garden.

So it's got its feet wet when there is water here.

All right, and it's done well.

I transplanted that, brought it from New York when we moved down here where I had a fairly large collection of the colder-climate willows in New York.

- Right.

- I've tried them here, and they all get cooked.

- Mm-hmm.

- But this one's done well.

- This one's done all right.

- It's not the easiest thing to start from cutting.

It's usually a willow you can stick it in the ground, but it's one of my favorites.

Now these palms down here are an experiment.

These are Chamaerops humilis, the European fan palm, the blue form.

And believe it or not, they were selling them at a discount at Lowe's last year for like $15 a piece.

And at that price, they're worth a try.

Once again, heavily pine straw.

Close to the house, protected from northern winds.

And they made it through the winter.

I just sprinkle pine needles over the top of them to give them a little bit of an extra push.

- Paul, I just want to say a quick thank you to you and Dot for letting us come and visit for the fascinating garden tour and the great talk about all the unique and interesting plants you have.

- Thanks, it's been my pleasure to have you folks.

- Thank you so much.

- Come-Back again anytime.

(lively music) - We're at my gardens at Red Thread Farm today.

It's a sunny November, and despite the sunny weather, we're expecting our first freezing temperatures this week.

So we'll be preparing our gardens.

Some of our crops are hardy enough that they won't be damaged by this cold.

Some of them like the cold, but they can't handle direct frost.

Tender crops like this beautiful dill, like this cilantro.

We're going to be covering tonight before dark with a frost blanket like this one.

Now this is a commercially available product.

It certainly can be used in the home garden.

You can also just use a sheet or a blanket if you have a small garden.

The goal is to keep the frost from directly touching the leaves.

Crops like these, very hardy collard greens, don't require any protection from a light frost.

So, tonight, we'll leave these alone.

And in fact, they're going to get sweeter from the frost that happens tonight.

Although broccoli is in the same plant family as collard greens, these tender heads that are not quite yet ready to harvest, these can be damaged by frost.

So we'll also be covering them with our frost blanket tonight and we'd recommend that you do the same on a frosty night.

Consult with your county agricultural extension agent or your local garden center to find out which particular crops you're growing in your garden might require protection if you're unsure.

(lively music) - Today, we're going to talk about the tools of the trade.

As a gardener and a farmer, I compare hand tools with the equipment that I use with my tractor.

For example, a shovel is like a small moldboard plow.

It does the same thing in the soil.

(birds chirping) The chisel plow that I use in my fields is like a digging fork that I use in my gardens.

(birds chirping) In a field, I use a harrow to smooth out the soil, make a fine seedbed, and check the evaporation.

Whereas in a garden, I just use a regular old rake.

When the garden gets overgrown in the fall, the tractor implement I love the best is the bush hog.

It really cleans the garden up fast.

Gardeners would use a machete.

You get this real sharp, and I've seen people in third-world countries use it for a lawnmower.

Yeah, they seem like they're born with one of these.

They're great tools, machetes.

And then, a smaller tool for cutting weeds is this one here, and it's pulled towards you.

You get this razor-sharp, and then you pull the weeds like this.

You might hold them and jerk them like that.

For example, you go like this.

(machete snips) (grass rustling) (birds chirping) These are lively lads.

They're used as lawnmowers before they had lawnmowers, and you just swing it like you would a golf club.

(birds chirping) (cutter swooshes) (grass rustling) (birds chirping) A scythe is used for cutting hay or grains like wheat.

(birds chirping) Use your whole body with a scythe, and you kind of go like this, and the traditional ones have a wooden handle, but this aluminum handle is much lighter.

It makes the job a little less laborious.

(birds chirping) I lost interest in axes once I learned about mauls.

I loved my Monster Maul until the handle bent, and so, now I'm back to using the old-fashioned mauls, but now I use them with a fiberglass handle that keeps it from breaking as much.

I like the mauls.

They are a bit heavier, but it takes a lot less swings to split the firewood.

You can take your pick of the various picks we have.

This, we call a grubbing hoe, and many of the fields on this farm have been cleared with this tool here.

It's a powerful hoe this way for whacking the soil like that, and pulling up rose bushes and small trees, and such like that.

And the other side is a dull axe, which we use for cutting roots and to further get these plants out of a field that we're trying to clear.

The picks are used for making a trench or loosening up the subsoil when we're doing some double digging.

There are various sizes of them, and some of the sizes are a little flat on one side, and some are pointed.

So you can do various things with that.

But when we want to go even deeper, I use these thrusting bars that are (grunts) either pointed or have a flat side on them.

And these are really good at getting down there into the deeper layers of soil and busting things up.

We use this one quite a bit when I'm using my Ph.D., that, of course, is my post hole digger.

All of these tools will wear you out long before they wear out.

(birds chirping) I bought a garden fork from Smith & Hawken 50 years ago, and used it a whole lot before I had tractors, and you can see how much I used it.

This fork here was every bit as long as this one.

That's a lot of digging.

(birds chirping) We use old rolls of hay for mulching, and the tool to loosen them up is this big garden fork.

We just pull off the layers of hay like that with it.

(hay rustling) Pitchforks are used to move the hay around after it's loosened off of the roll.

(hay rustling) And we just take this and put it on our garden as we mulch.

There's different kinds of pitchforks.

This one has four tines.

This one over here has five, and this one here has six.

It's got the short D handle.

We use these curved forks a lot on our farm.

There's a size for every need, and they simply use them to break up the crust after the rain compacts the soil, and you can really get in there.

You can even go right through the onions like this, and it's a great tool to just get things loosened up a little bit when it gets that crust on it.

(tool clacking) And that slick, it doesn't mess the onion up at all.

(tool clacking) This rake is used for raking leaves, which I don't do because I leave leaves underneath the trees where they fall.

Trees would much rather have the roots under a leaf, mulch than a lawn.

(birds chirping) Our hoe-ho season is not at Christmas time, but it's in the summer, and we have a lot of hoeing to do, and a lot of hoes to do it with.

My favorite is the onion hoe, also known as a Warren hoe.

It has a point on it that's really handy about getting close to our plants.

We also use it sideways and it makes kind of a flat hoe for pulling the soil around without having to change hoes.

We have several varieties of these kinds of hoes, and this one here I've had a long time.

Look how worn that one used to be that long.

Yeah, we do a lot of hoeing around the farm here.

This one is made from a mowing machine, a 501 mower has sickles on it, and that's a sickle from a mowing machine, the old-fashioned sickle bar mowers.

(mic whooshing) Flat hoes are the common hoes that most people are familiar with, and we use them.

Particularly these bigger ones are great for hilling up the plants and making a hill around your potatoes or beans.

Those are really good tools.

And this one here I like a lot because it's got the flat hoe on one side, and the other side has a little bit of a fork.

The forks can get into the soil a little deeper, you can wiggle them around, and they're good at aerating.

(hoe clattering) Even a hoe that's lost its head has a use because we can use this little point here to get real close to our plants to get those weeds out more so than a bigger hoe.

(hoe scraping) (birds chirping) This long hoe took me a while to get used to.

You don't hold it like a normal hoe and bend over, you keep your back straight and you hold it like a dance partner, and you're just moving your whole body and loosening up, and aerating that soil, checking evaporation, and killing weeds all at the same time.

(hoe scraping) I call a spade a spade, but I call it a tile spade when it's long and narrow.

This is a great tool for digging a trench or maybe digging a hole, plant a fruit tree or something like that.

(birds chirping) These other spades are handy, too, but you'll notice that they're offset a little bit.

So when we dig, if you want to go straight down, you don't keep the handle vertical, you thrust it forward and have the blade going straight down.

Scoop shovels come in various sizes.

Some have the D handle, and they're shorter.

Others have a longer handle, which gives you more leverage.

Apparently, the small ones grow up, become big scoop shovels.

I'm not going to explain how to keep your tool shed nice and neat.

Apparently, I don't know how to do that.

My tool shed is in a perpetual mess.

But I would like to share with you one other tool that I use occasionally when digging.

They're very handy, they come in pairs, and they're called shoes.

(lively music) - [Anette] Let's do a word association game.

I say honeysuckle, you think red.

I say honeysuckle, and what is this, Tim?

- This is Tecomaria capensis, or the Cape honeysuckle.

It's actually a tropical.

And one of the things that you've noticed, I really like landscaping with tropicals.

It adds a lot.

There are colors that you're not going to find here in some of the non-tropical species, so... And the other thing I like about this, as opposed to most honeysuckles that vine and get quite out of control, this is a nice compact bush-like honeysuckle.

- [Annette] And you, this is not hardy in our zones, so you, what are you going to do with this?

- [Tim] Okay, so later this month, I will cut it back, probably two thirds back, to the bare stalks, and overwinter it with the other plants that I cut back in a similar fashion.

Because I have found through experience that if I tried to take this in and overwinter it, even in my artificially lit room, the temperatures, they just don't do well.

It's going to drop all its leaves.

It's going to come out very weak, and looking bad where if I cut it back, I'm going to have nice vigorous growth over the winter and next spring when I bring it back out.

- [Annette] So you're telling me there's over three foot of growth in a season?

- Probably at least that.

Yeah, that plant from the level of the pot was about two feet high when I got it.

And then you can see I'm vertically challenged at five-six, but you can see that plant is, you know, well over six feet.

So, yeah, we had a good four feet of growth on it this year.

- [Annette] You filled us in well, and this is a wonderful addition in the summertime for that tropical look for the hummingbirds, and just pollinators in general.

- Absolutely.

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

(lively music) (energetic music)