Great Gardens; Great Gardens in the High Plains

All right all right so let's look at our measures go ahead and do as we did before with the name and follow that okay I'm Alice Hill I live Southwest of Atwood along the Beaver Creek Ranch and whoops mess that up I am Alice Hill from Atwood Kansas we live about 15 miles southwest along the Beaver Creek I was introduced to gardening by my grandmother who gave me a handful of great northern beans out of a plastic sack and encouraged me to go put them in the earth they it wasn't a very successful first gardening experience they sprouted rapidly flooded out and then dried up blue way but I was hooked on the gardening bug and I think most most people who are happy gardeners were taught by somebody who cared about them and who introduced them to it. We started our first major gardening operation several years ago as a community supported agriculture program people in our community bought membership into the garden and we delivered vegetables to them twice a week throughout the growing season.

We were able to provide to them fresh fruits and and jams and jellies and eggs and chicken and just a wide variety of foods and what I realized from all of that is that this area is so rich we're able to nearly feed ourselves everything that we need from the garden. Gardening in Kansas is a challenge is anybody who has a garden nose you've got the extremes of weather you've got the wind hail grasshoppers wide variety of bugs. This year we had our last frost was June 12 which was nearly six weeks later than normal. We've had wonderful rain this year though so everything has come out of that pretty well.

These were frozen ready for the freezer I was able to find a processing plant that provided a very nice clean product. I knew that the chickens that we were raising were they weren't actually free range chickens our predators are greater than our guns out here. We were not able to do free range but the chickens were grown on pure corn there were no additives no chemicals added to their feed. And there's absolutely no comparison is with with everything that you raise yourself that the fresh clean quality was beyond compare and I truly had more customers than I could provide food for. And then when the girls grew up and left. My work force were my two daughters but as they got to college age and moved away I realized that I could not sustain that kind of gardening that expansive garden myself.

And we opened up the Aberdeen steakhouse that's in the historic Shirley Opera House. And I was able to downsize considerably the garden space and go from seed to table. We're able to provide people during the growing season with fresh vegetables from first part of June clear through usually till the end of October. So and I take so much pride in knowing that the food we're putting on on people's plates is as fresh as possible. It's it's healthy. It's harvested that morning and served that evening. And you're able to pretty much take care of all of the needs of the restaurant during the growing season. We are we're able to go from from from the early things that they let us the spinach radishes clear to the end with winter squash. So other than supplementing a little bit during the very hottest season with our lettuce other than that we provide everything right from the garden.

It's a grilled summer squash. Yes, there's there's five different varieties of summer squash in that blend. And we put a marinade on it and then grill it. And it's it's even people who say I don't like squash. They like the grilled stuff. Oh, yeah, especially the good spices. So then let's talk a little bit, you know, walking through the garden and starting with your seed hut. I have a nursery shed that was it used to just be a little chicken house. And we insulated it built some adjustable shelving. And I use fluorescent lights that were just the fixtures at the courthouse. And when they remodeled the courthouse we salvaged those fixtures. They're the four foot long fluorescent four tube fixtures. And I alternate cool and warm bulbs. But I don't spend a lot of money on fancy grow bulbs. You don't really have to do that.

And I found that the jiffy seven, the little expanded peat pellets seem to work best under my set of circumstances. And I use capillary matting to provide bottom watering so that I don't have to watch it all the time. It provides a nice even moisture level for the baby plants. The top of the fluorescent light fixtures act as the heat source when the seeds are germinating. And then I can move them right underneath the lighting. And then as the plants grow, just drop it lower and lower. I also run an oscillating fan periodically. Actually have everything set up on timers. And that helps to strengthen the little plants so that when you're ready to transfer them to the garden, they've already been hardened off. Tough and tough. Tough and tough. Yes. Yes. Have a couple of greenhouses. One is a, it's called a prism greenhouse. And it's a solid molded piece. So there's no pockets for the wind capture it and tear it apart. And it also diffuses the sunlight so that even on a very, very hot day outside, the ambient temperature inside is several degrees cooler.

And I grow directly into the ground in my greenhouses. I don't have pots or containers. I just plant right into the soil. I typically rotate cucumbers and air conditioning. Typically rotate cucumbers and tomatoes back and forth so that there's not the same plant growing in one spot every year. And with that, even though it's not a, with that, even though it's not a true greenhouse, it does extend the season and it protects the plants so that they have a better chance of growing to their full potential. The cucumbers, one of the things that I've found to be a good trick in order to extend the season even further, are excess cucumbers. We create a cucumber salad dressing by pulverizing the cucumbers into just a slurry in a food processor, add herbs, olive oil, vinegar. And then you can just freeze the whole works into a little container and in the middle of December have a fresh cucumber dressing that tastes just like you just cut those cucumbers into pieces.

Do you do canning as well? If you do canning limited basis, I do, I still love to do jams and jellies. It's such a great way to preserve fruits. And there again, the quality, you can buy the most expensive jam at the grocery store and it has nothing but a flavor of sweetness. When you can yourself, there's the true quality of the product coming through. We do a lot of jalapeno jelly, give those away as gifts to our, to different people. And jalapeno jelly is a fabulous flavor combination. And then we freeze peppers so that we make a portabella grill sandwich at the restaurant and use the grilled peppers that, that flavor is just awesome. And then we talked about the grasshoppers. You talked about your asparagus garden.

You have a great success with one thing and the next year you'll have a terrible failure with that same item. The asparagus bed will take at least a couple of years to begin before we can start harvesting. And it is fairly small, but it's coming along well. The grasshoppers this year have been a real issue. They are so thick this year that when you walk, you can hear them moving in front of you. They sort of clatter ahead of you. And there are certain things that this year they're just going to take. I've given up on them. The things that are very leafy and green, the grasshoppers have won the battle. But I'm using a product called NoloBate. It is a natural bacteria that once it infects the grasshopper population, it just spreads from grasshopper to grasshopper and creates almost a plague in their, in their species. But it doesn't affect the beneficial insects, the bumblebees and the, and the ladybugs and that type of thing.

So once that gets rolling, I'm hoping to see a decline in the grasshopper population. So when did you apply that? Just yesterday. It came a little later than it was supposed to. It's hard to find organic supplies in our small communities. It's just, it's one of the things you basically just have to shop online in order to find. And if you're not on top of things, things get away from you. Has any gardener knows? A lot of prevention. Yes, very important to do that. Mulching is very, very important when you're gardening, especially on the high plains where the baking sun can turn our ground into concrete in just a few days. But if you've got a nice blanket of mulch that ground stays moist and soft, the microorganisms can do their job. From what I understand, a healthy plant is much more insect resistant just by the, by its very nature of health. As stressed plant gives off signals that insects can taste in the air and it will draw insect populations to them.

So if you can keep your plants from being stressed, you'll have fewer problems. Yeah, that's a good idea. Sing to those little plants. And then I'll talk about the water wall in your modified water. Oh, this year I tried something new. I had quite a few old walls of water, the water filled plastic cylinders that make a ring around the plants. Several of them had sprung leaks over the years and so I cut them into a long piece rather than a circle and then connected those together using steel posts and set up a true wall rather than just a circle. And so it's essentially an extended rectangle of protection and I planted pepper plants in there. I put a thermometer that would do an interior and exterior range to see how many degrees difference there were. And there was, it was a significant amount of difference sometimes as much as 10 degrees difference if there was a brisk wind blowing or not.

I think it gave it not only wind protection but again moderating the temperatures and the good thing about the wall of water is that with the water in there, it was more stable. So many of the products that are used or sold by garden catalogs, the first big wind and they're gone. The row fabric, very hard to keep in place, plastic closures blown away. So many of the things won't stand up to wind but the walls of water seem to be very stable just by their inherent use of water. And they seem flexible, the way you have them cut because they're in the smaller segments, it seemed like they were more flexible. Like instead of having a rod, now you have all these little segments and so we can bend. Yes, yes, there's some flexibility. You could, you could make it any shape you wanted if you wanted to do large squares, you could do that. I think there's some development potential with this idea. I'm hoping to work on it a little bit more next year with a little more fourth thought.

I must just be reading our hands. So we, you were saying that, and you already talked about mulch, even though it feels like you did enough mulch is still not mulch. There's really never enough mulch. And what we use on the farm, we're fortunate to have access to some rotten hay bales that I know are weed-free. That's another important thing with organic products. You want to make sure you're not creating more problems than you're fixing. But even moving a big bail in with a tractor, it still boils down to pitchforks and muscle. And by the time you've pitched about a thousand pounds of mulch, you feel like you've done your share. But there's never enough. You can always use more.

Our good mulch that I would recommend for people are cotton seed holes. They lay flat. They act like a nice woolen blanket for your plants. If you reach up underneath them, that ground is just as cool and moist. And they don't blow or wash away. And you can buy those in pretty large amounts at garden centers. We use those near the house because I heard people say, to her mind, it's really like cotton seed. Mostly it was around my landscaping areas like my flower beds more because it makes a nice finish. But I had not ever heard that. So that's a good tip. That's a good warning. Not heard that. If I had my absolute preference and had the time and the ability to do it, I would like to leave no bare ground. I would like to pull up all of the waste products until if needed. But cover it with something.

Either a live manure plant, green manure plant, of some type, or a nice layer of mulch over it and let it winter that way. Anytime you've got ground exposed, your microbial bacterial things have stopped. And that would be ideal. I've never quite succeeded in that. It's always great plans and winter comes fast. But it's just a matter of cleanup. Just tidying up. Keeping good records is very important so that you have a proper rotation system so that you don't plant something where something was planted even two years before because the insect and disease will be harbored in that soil for a while. So I try and have a three way rotation at least.

I try to group my plants so that there's plant families, the tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes are all one family, the night shaped family. So I try to somewhat group those so that I can, when I rotate that bed, I know that that bed is the same all the way around. Good job. Good job. Well, that's all right. I think. Think with all the things we talked about. Okay, so we were just talking about being careful with what you're dealing with. Do you want to talk about the fertilizer that you use? Yes, I use a variety of different things trying to match what the soil needs with the product. And I do. I do.

Is there a home kit that you use? Or you send off? What do you do? I bought a little meter and it's very simple. It's very non-scientific. It just says, this is what you need. This is what you have. And it also gives the pH level, which in the high plains, pH is very, very important. Many parts of the country is too acidic and we're very alkaline. And if you're below a certain level and alkalinity, then plants can't absorb the nutrients that are already there. So just adding more nutrients won't help adjusting the pH can help. And one of the best things to adjust pH is organic matter or mulch. As it breaks down, the microbes neutralize the soil and just create some more neutral environment for the plants. Seaweed, the kelp. kelp is one of the things I use quite a lot of. And is that something that you have brought in or you use whatever grows in the lake? No, it's true sea kelp. It's ocean kelp. And I buy it in a liquid form so that I can foliar feed rather than granular. It cuts back on weight and shipping costs. It's much more concentrated.

I just mix it up batch by batch and do individual plants. And it little goes a long way. Sometimes I'll get it with a combination of fishy mulch and kelp. There's a lot of different types of things, but the plant can absorb what it needs and it's slow acting versus those very fast acting synthetic chemicals that give it a sudden burst like a sugar high. And then it's suddenly gone and the plant goes back into a stress level. You do want to watch that you're not putting out too much nitrogen because then you lose your blooming and your fruiting capabilities. Mostly nature is pretty forgiving. You can just not mess up too badly and it will do all right. Another product that I use and have used in the past is called green sand. And green sand is a natural mineral that is mined and it's just a supplement to the soil.

It's useful for a lot of things and helps to break up the soil. Gypsum is another native or not native, but naturally mined product that helps to loosen the soil and it has a slight acidifying factor to it as well. It helps to release some of the nutrients to the plants. What else do I use? Earthworms? Anytime you're making your earthworms happy, you're making your plants happy. So if you can, again mulch, keeps those earthworms happy, this year I tried something different. I ordered and planted some earthworm cocoons, their little egg cases. And supposedly if they do as they're supposed to, one egg hatches into, I don't know, a thousand worms, five hundred. I'm not sure exactly numbers, but it's a wonderfully generous system. And I planted those in the greenhouse thinking, well, it's a perfect environment for them, much less likely to dry out.

Temperatures should be more stable for them. So we'll see with how things go. I've been tempted to dig them back up several times to see what's happening down there, but I've resisted the urge. That was about three weeks ago. And they say it takes about three weeks for the eggs to start waking up and and hatching. So what I'm looking for to tell me that their active are the little worm holes that when they come up to the surface to gather a little organic matter and drop back down, that's what I'm looking for, those little pock marks in the soil. And then if they do well, then they should migrate out and reproduce and just continually spread. So what's the little experiment? It does. I really love to order one of those earthworm beds, the multi-layer earthworm boxes. Then I can't quite give up that hundred and some dollars yet to do that. I'll let them stay in the soil for now.

For the very first year we were married. I ordered a beehive and did not know enough to even keep it alive the first full year. But my goal is when I'm not working as a school nurse and doing a few less things that will have bees again. I'd love to do it, I'd love to. I'm in the research stage again on that. Are there very many, I know that there are some pockets of beekeepers on the high plains. There are not very many anymore. There was a gentleman who lived east of that, who had an extensive apiary, I believe they're called. And his health, he had some health issues and had to shut down a lot of his beehives. The other issue are the spraying, the chemicals that are sprayed. If you have your beehives set up and they come along and spray for alpha weevils, you've just lost everything. And it's hard to communicate that seriousness to growers who are trying to make every dollar count on a farm.

Where are you declared? We are, we are no spray zone now, that should help us. And again, the generosity of nature, there's no need to have 100 beehives. One hive, two hives, three at the most, and you'd have a surplus of honey that you could share with friends and family all year long. I think one of the things that impresses me so much about gardening is it's very generosity. You take one bean seed and from one bean seed you get oodles and oodles of beans. From one tomato seed that's so tiny, you know, you can just have this, a lot of tomatoes. There's enough for everybody. And I really admire the generosity of nature. It's just, it wants to feed us. It really does. Do you order your seeds from Cadillac? Do you keep seeds from someone plant?

I don't keep seed. And I try to order seed from companies that are supportive of, what do I want to say? The non hybridization, like the seed savers exchange I've ordered from them, the company seeds of change out of New Mexico. There's a company out of Arkansas Bakers seeds, I think, it's the name of them. But one year I had ordered some from a variety of the standard catalogs. And almost every single packet, the source of origin was overseas. And I was bothered greatly by that. I didn't know if that meant we didn't have any in America anymore. If it was cheaper for them to outsource, but whatever the reason, I didn't like the concept. So I became more aware and more noticeable about who I order my seeds from. But I don't say seed. That's another specialty that I probably don't have the background to know what to do exactly.

Anyway, it's more fun to look through the catalogs. What are some of the things that, I mean, obviously, you've started your sparingest bed and a sparingest wasn't meant to grow in high plains. It's a crazy thing that we do. But what are some of the things that you would like to put in the garden, whether you're working on it, or I don't see how I can do it, but I'd like to do it. Well, let me think. There really isn't very much that I haven't tried. I've tried artichokes. And they say there's a way to fool them into believing that they are a perennial crop in one year. And I actually did get a tiny little artichoke bed. But as far as replacing the California industry, it's not going to happen here. I would like to expand into more fruits. I've always wanted a true orchard that really, really gave you what you would expect from an orchard.

But our weather patterns have changed to the point where I'm not sure what happens as anyone who grows around her nose, it will turn 95 degrees for several weeks and everything blooms and then you get a killing frost and there's your fruit crop. I have an idea of a way to help minimize that, but until I can be at home more, it's not going to happen. I don't know as far as trying something. No, I've probably tried just about everything there is. Talk a little bit about the changes. That's one of the things when we bought our house, we took a tree senator and we were going to plant a tree and we moved in August and we wanted to plant a tree in the fall. I don't know what's supposed to be here. The guy who came to the seminar said, you will find, for example, Lemosa's in Garden City. But you won't find Lemosa, that's younger than 10 years old.

Because they won't live now. The adult trees will survive, but you can't get a young one to survive anymore. And I found that just a month, so I'll get up and go. Yeah. Talk a little bit about in the 20 years or so. I can talk back to when I was a little person growing up and spending my summers in Kansas. There was an apricot tree in my grandmother's yard and you didn't get apricots every year, but you got apricots about every third year. I do not believe that there's been an apricot. Well, for one thing, all of those old apricot trees are completely gone now. There's not a living apricot tree in Atwood. They were a Russian apricot tree that were brought in by the immigrants and the late frosts killed them, the droughts have killed them, whatever variety. And of course trees, like anything else, have an age limit and eventually just die of natural causes. But to be able to get an apricot crop, they were amongst the very earliest blooming fruit trees.

And you can't have that late frost come. A June 12th frost can truly kill trees if it's severe enough. So I've seen that. Of course, the Elm trees are all gone or the majority of them are. The locust trees in this drought and locust trees are very hardy trees and they're natural legumes so they fertilize themselves. We had a beautiful grove of locust trees. They just nearly all died out because of the drought. It's more than one factor involved. Climate change, precipitation changes, insect issues. There's evidently a pine disease that's starting in and is going to maybe decimate the or worse, the pine tree populations. Essentially what we have to remember is that these are the treeless plains. They really weren't meant to be forested. And whatever we do, we just have to accept the fact that it's not conducive to great groves of trees.

The changes as far as weather, the humidity level, it's funny. Even during the drought, we've had more humidity than I remember as a small person. The hot, dry, baking winds were so invigorating to me as a child. As an adult, I don't care for them quite so much. But we just have a lot more humidity, a lot more fogs, a lot more dew on the ground in the morning. For whatever reasons, don't know. See what the next 10 years brings us. It's been a very cool pleasant summer this year, goodness, the nicest ones ever. No, I probably talked with. I guess I guess the only main thing and I don't know if this will fit in at all.

We need to recognize that this is a very, very rich area. But what we have been doing for a long time now is buying into the belief that nothing good can come from here. It all has to be shipped out and shipped back in as a packaged product. Other than the tropical things, coffee, pineapple, oysters, those types of things, we can be very self-sufficient here. And I get angry when I hear the word subsistence because when you're feeding yourself right out of your own piece of property, that's the pinnacle of existence. It's not the bottom. We should be bottling our own milk to drink in our own communities. We should be grinding our own flour, baking our own bread.

There's no reason for us to be supporting all of the major food companies when we've got it already here. And I hope someday that we can return to that sense of belief that we can support ourselves very, very well, much, much better than what we're doing now, not shipping it out and hauling it back. You You

This is track five and I'm with Leon Church. And exactly where are we? Is this a part of the Texas A&M extension or? Our title is the Texas Agor Life Extension Service, part of the Texas A&M University System. Okay, and actually I think if I just leave this in the middle, that's fine. I'm good. We can hear both of us at the same time maybe. So I had a chance to hear about the Earth Kind project. Could you tell me a little bit about that? Well, the Earth Kind program is something that Texas Agor Life Extension has started. It's becoming pretty well accepted in lots of places in the country. The whole idea is utilizing appropriate plants, utilizing a process of developing or preparing the soil, soil amendments so that really it's environmentally safe.

We're trying to develop roses, especially that have the title of Earth Kind that take no additional pesticides and no additional fertilization. But they do very, very well. Each Earth Kind rose that is, gets that designation, is tested throughout the state. And if it passes about a three-year trial program, then it becomes designated as Earth Kind Rose. Dr. Steve George, a Horticulturist with the Texas Agor Life Extension Service, is actually the father of this program. It's somewhat similar to the zerscape process, but in Texas we have climates here that aren't just dry. And so this process does the same thing, but it also doesn't have to have just dry landscapes.

I mean, we can use plants that are best adapted for your area, whether that's in East Texas where we have high humanities and a lot more rainfall or if it's in the dry or west Texas area. Okay. If I wanted to buy one of these roses and put it in my garden, are they available? Can you go out and find them and buy them? Right now, especially in our area, the two that are most available are the rose called knockout. Okay. There's several knockouts. There's a red knockout. There's a blushing knockout. And those roses are available in most places. Another one that's fairly available is called Blinda's Dream. And it is, it's a pink rose. It's real pretty rose. A lot of the, it has more of a multiple petal like the rose that you'd expect. It's a hybrid tea rose. It's not a hybrid tea, but it's, it looks more like one. Most of the earth kind roses are single petals. They look more like the old antique roses.

And a lot of them have history from that, from the antique rose. Where they were developed and started is that we could, we have a group called Rose Russellers. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's a group of people that I go out and look at old homesteads, cemeteries, and try to locate roses that are just growing and doing. Can I close that door and we'll pick back up. It's okay as long as I can't understand what you're saying. Right. And this is really interesting to me about the rose wrestlers. Let's just pick it back up with, if you might tell me about the group of called Rose Russellers.

Well, the rose wrestlers are just a group of people who are interested in maintaining or finding old roses. And one of the knock or numb, one of the earth kind roses is Katie wrote pink, which was found on Katie wrote down by Houston. It's, it's other name is, I don't know why I'm in the middle of it. But anyway, it's really a pretty rose. It's a pink rose. And it is our carefree beauty is what the earth kind name for, for that rose. It was a wild rose that was found down on Katie wrote around Houston. But it's, we have a research bed here in the back. That's all that is earth kind roses. And that's our chick. The Katie wrote pink or the carefree beauty is, is the chick.

And so the other ones were just trying to test see if they'll survive up here. And you were saying that the rose wrestlers go out into cemeteries and old, old homesteads and things to find old rose bushes and bring a man or bring pieces of a man. Right. And what they do and what all of our earth kind roses are, a lot of them are the base for our earth kind roses because they have survived our conditions over the years with very little care. And so all of the earth kind roses are on their own rootstock. There's not a graft. So you have, if it say would freeze down or something, whatever comes back is going to be the same roses that was there. Which is most of the other roses we buy have, have been grafted on the rootstock. And are they kind of like a shrub rose? I mean, I have some shrub roses that have that single paddle and they're real tough. Well, they're both. We have most of them are shrub roses. We have smaller shrubs. There's a, there's a earth kind rose called fairy that's just really small. That only gets about two to two and a half feet tall.

Most of them are about three to four feet tall and wide. And then we also have a few climbers that are designated as earth kind. So it can be both or all of the above, you know, really. Is it possible to go look at your test plot? Absolutely. Okay, let's go do that. Well, when you said knockout rose, there, I've seen those in a lot of places. We have five, five different varieties replicated three times here. And of course, I mentioned already that the carefree beauty was our Czech rose. Because their research, we can't, we don't deadhead.

We're trying to see if they'll just keep coming back and blooming without deadhead. That's the other thing about an earth kind rose is that you're not supposed to do and have to do any work. There's no pesticides, no fertilizers. Well, all we've done to this bed is, and this was from construction. That was the soil we started with, there's whatever's left here from construction. We added four inches of compost, till that, at least a foot deep. And then we put three inches of mulch on top. And that's all we've done. And then we planted, we planted these a year ago in April. And this, of course, this one here is a blushing knockout, which is, it's not yet designated as a earth kind. It's still on the brigade list. It's moving up towards being designated.

So that's one of the five. And this particular rose is called Chuckles. It's got an amazing pink flower, I think. It's really like a hot pink. Yeah, when that cluster bursts with, well, here's one, that's kind of... Yeah, it looks like they've got like 20 or 30 blooms on one, on the end of one stem. It's just like a bouquet. It looks like a bridal bouquet. Absolutely. And it's an interesting thing about this. It lays down. Yeah. It doesn't get tall. It's a spreader. Well, this one's starting to look better. It's called Dublin Bay Rose. It is a bright red rose. It's really a beautiful. But yet did not do well this spring. We had a lot of thrips and aphids. We didn't treat it. But it's starting to come back.

This is a climbing rose. But it's looking so much better than it did earlier. I didn't think it was going to make it all. But it's doing pretty well. April Moon is a... It kind of, when the bud first comes out, it has a real light yellow color. It kind of gets... but it's spent real quickly. So I don't know if I like that rose so well, but it's doing well. So far my favorite is that hot pink one down there. It just really seems to be thriving. Yeah. It seems to be thriving. Now this is that Carefree Beauty or Katie Road Pink. And this is one that's already designated as Earth kind. It is our Czech rose. It's the one that we compare the rest of them to. But it has a real pretty pink flower. Yeah. It's nice. And it has quite a few petals on it too.

This is another. This is April Moon again. Here you can see the yellow a little better. The buds are kind of pretty, but they get spent. And then that white... look more white. It doesn't look very good. Just kind of fades and gets brownish. Yeah. And it's a funny plant. It's starting to come out here. I don't know what causes it to be ill looking like that. Listen, another blushing knockout, which I think is going to make. It has a real, when they're new, they're real pretty delicate pink. Another Dublin Bay. Carefree Beauty. Again, it's getting ready to bloom again. It's interesting in the way that it just puts out new growth.

And then that's where the bloom's coming. Rose hips on it too, looks like. Here's my favorite. And that thing, Joey? Yeah. Chuckles Rose. Now is this... this one isn't available yet to buy, right? If you can buy it, we've bought these roses through Chambles Nursery down in Tyler, Texas. So they do have them available, but they're not designated yet as an Earth kind, but they are available. Well, that's the only place I know that they're available. I'll watch for Chuckles. Okay, yeah. Again, Dublin Bay. Now that one looks nice. That climb right there. He looks lots better. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Beautiful red. I really like that red. Or bright red, I should say. There's your Chuckles again. There's my Chuckles. I've had people drive by and stop in and ask what it is, because I just love it. Yeah, yeah.

It's really bright. I love that. That's spreading quality. Yeah. It's almost like it becomes a blooming ground cover. Right. Of course, this is a blushing knockout again. And then our final one is the Katie Road, or Carefree Beauty. Well, thank you so much for showing me these wonderful roses. You're welcome. I hope we can. Now, this is a different kind of rose over here. All what they call buck roses. Uh-huh. If you've heard of buck roses. Well, Bob showed me his. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't blooming. But it was doing okay. It was. Yeah. Now, this is their second set of blooms. It's already bloomed once. We've deadheaded. Now, it's. He said that they were like the earth kind of roses. Yeah. So, because Dr. Buck and Iowa State. He just took these roses and planted them out in cornfields or wherever.

And if they survived, then he started breeding them. And so, that's where they're. They're coming from. A lot of the buck roses will be coming in part of our this program. And become earth kind roses. So, basically, the earth kind is from Texas and the buck is from Iowa. At this point, yes. Okay. But there's. The buck family and Dr. George are really working closely together. Yeah. To, uh, to try to designate these earth kind as well. Okay. The other part of, of, uh, earth kind gardening is what you do with the solar. And, uh, this, this garden here. Uh, it was really, we brought in a soil to build this up. And it was very clay. So, we put in a expanded shale. Had he talked to you about expanded shale?

Yeah. Yeah. We put about three inches of expanded shale on this. Tilt that into the top eight inches or more of the soil. And then, uh, three inches of organic matter. And then, of course, the mulch. And we try to keep three inches of mulch on at all times. And, uh, what the expanded shale does is just opens up this clay soil. So that, uh, we can get water to go through it, uh, the organic matter to work well. And it's just unbelievable. When you dig into this stuff, it's just so full of life. No pesticides. Very little, um, fertilizer or anything's been used on this. Of course, we use our native mulch from our chipping sites here in town. Yeah. And that stuff just decays and goes back in the soil. So, it's a great, I'm convinced this is the way to garden. I think so too.

I mean, look at, look at these day lilies and the size of the blooms and the colors. Yeah. They're just gorgeous. This, this bed is, um, let's see. This is about, it's fourth summer. So it's really doing well. And that's a knockout. And that's, that's just with the mulch, the mulching and you have a group. Compose mulch and drip. Yeah. And so no food, no fertilizer. We're just trying to get this natural process of this oil and mulch composting and, you know, decaying. And it's getting turned back into soil. But there are so many earthworms and things underneath there that it's just fantastic. Now, what is this? This is a hardy hibiscus. Okay. Well, the bloom, the color and the size and, oh, I see a one-arty open. Yeah. I thought that looks like a hibiscus, but the leaves look different. Yeah.

This has been, we've had a very windy spring and the leaves don't look as good as they usually do. Yeah. It's looking better. Well, these are beautiful. This is one of my favorite plants in the whole garden, but this is a Texas superstar plant. So as this hibiscus, a Texas superstars are another program of A&M that designates certain plants as a superstar for Texas. Well, this looks like a flock. It is. It's a John Fannock flocks, beautiful. And this whole thing gets covered with those blossoms. It's just wonderful. That is. Hmm. Talk about hot pink. Yeah. Yeah. And this, of course, these are the knockout roses here. Oh, and those are big. Yeah. Six. Six of those, right? Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Well, thank you very much for showing me. Thank you.

I appreciate it. That's nice. And we've got a great day here for doing this. Yeah, it's cool. And cloudy. Yeah. So. Okay. Well, I think I got everything I came in with. Okay. So I'll look. You didn't leave anything in there. I don't think, but maybe I should go back in and look. Just think. Yeah. Yeah. That's my garden dog. Did you hear?

I just heard a dog. Yeah. Yeah. When she was a puppy, she used to love being outside with me when I garden, but now she's gotten older and decided that gardening is not her thing anymore. Okay. This is Track 4, and I'm in Amarillo, and let me hear you say your name. Bob Hatton. We're going to look at Bob Hatton's gardens here. And beautiful home. Beautiful home. Oh, thank you very much. Nice, beautiful lawn and entryway and everything. And how long have you lived here, Bob? We moved in in 2001 in May. And what I would say from a gardening perspective is that when we moved in while it's a little bit of an overstatement, there was almost nothing here except grass. So everything that you're seeing with exception of a few foundation plantings is something that I have beds that I have dug and plants that I have planted. Why don't we stop here and go back to the cottage garden right here? Oh, that was behind me. I didn't see it. It snuck up on me.

It's beautiful, gorgeous. I see Hadescus right there, and Crate Myrtle. I call this the cottage garden, and it's not necessarily a water-wise garden, but I heavily mulch things. So I use far less water than most people believe. And what are you using for your mulch? Well, in Amarillo we have three, I believe, chipping sites where people take trees and limbs and such as that, and the city chips it up. And this is free city mulch. Many people are afraid of it because they think that there are diseases or pathogens or whatever in the mulch. But when I moved here, I found out that the master gardeners have been using it for years and years, and I started using it. And I've never had one single problem, nor do I know of anybody who's had a problem. I like to keep about three to four inches of mulch on everything, and I'm not there quite yet this year because I've been neglecting it some. Well, as President of the Board of Directors of the Amarillo Botanical Gardens, I understand you've been spending quite a bit of time over there this year.

I and other volunteers have been spending a lot of time on new gardens there. Well, this is wonderful. This has lots of varieties of blooms and color and textures, and it's just looking really good here, and all fenced in with some nice neat little fences and gates. It's a satisfying place. It's also tough because it's on the southwest corner of the property. So that's the reason that I put up the fence and backed it with the low-dance privates because I wanted to break the wind. Yeah, I have a really thick edge here. And all of this island that grass out here, I absolutely abhor, but that's a future project that will one day be turned almost completely, if not completely into plants, perennials. I'm thinking of lots of grasses and salveas because again, it's western exposures, very harsh afternoon sun, and so we're going to put water-wise plants in there. And you have a large bed over here to the side.

So they're rather a ziric bed over here. As I said, I basically had nothing but grass when I moved in here, and so the whole yard is sprinklered. Well, I have turned off many, many, many of the heads because I don't need them and whatnot. As you can see, much of this is very low water use, the Russian sage, Petroskia at Triplicafolia, and the Stypa tenuesima, and the Maidengrass, and Jupiter's beer is low water use. These are main night salveas that you can see I've cut back after their initial bloom, and they're beginning to come back here. These mums over here are not necessarily low water use, but I'm not sure where they came from. They stole their way in here with something some years ago, and they've done quite well, not received. Of course, they're on the edge, and they do get some water when I water the lawn. I just put this rose in, actually only less than a week ago. It's a buck rose. I don't know if you are familiar with buck rose or not, but Dr. Buck is now deceased pioneer who didn't do this when he was teaching, but he did it as a hobby.

I was from Iowa State University, I believe, if I remember correctly, and he did a lot of research on roses and cultivating roses that require no maintenance whatsoever. Much like earth kind roses, if you've heard of those, which are the Texas A&M version. Buck roses are kind of like earth kind roses, and I bought that buck rose, the spring and headed in the back, and wanted some color in this, a little more color in this bed, and needed to move it from where I had it, so I transplanted it. So it's not looking very good because it's been hot, but it'll survive. It will do well. And now we're going to go back toward the back here, and I see some sculpted trees. Which I have never liked in this year, I decided to let them grow out because I don't really care for that.

I'm going to eventually take them out. They were here when I moved in, and now I'm just going to let them grow out, so I don't have to keep pruning them. You're not an average scissor hand. No, I don't care for that. Oh, Nandina. I have one of these. They're not in our zone, but I wrote a story about it. Yeah, I have it very strategically placed where it doesn't get any hard wind, and it's very protected, and it's just going to tell. Well, this one was actually a mistake. I, you may or may not have noticed that when I moved in there, there were a bunch of Nandina's planted in amongst the hedge in front, and several died, and I purchased one or two at some point to replace them, only to find that they weren't the dwarf ones. So I read about them, found out what they were, found out how large they get, and I needed something to kind of screen and hide the views when you came into this garden from this gate, so they're working very well there. I like them, and they always have the red berries, and they're very pleasant.

White blues, and they're... I was all year long. And a peach tree? Yes, I have two peach trees. I had, I actually had taken out two plus a pear tree since I've moved here, because people had too many of them planted in here. And again, this backyard was essentially nothing but grass. Well, it is absolutely gorgeous, huge planted beds on the sides, and lots of nice, swoopy curves, and some very beautiful grass. And then you have a gazebo out here, that looks like it. We live outside. I was going to say it looks like this thing. We love the porch, we love the gazebo. And what is this, now is this a golf course that it looks out on? Yes, this is overlooking out over the Tascosa Country Club. So I get the borrow of their view as I say in gardening terms, and I don't have to worry about neighbors behind me. I'm still in the process of developing this, however. This bed that you can see has almost nothing planted in it, is a brand new bed this year. I plan to create a bed going out from this lace bark elm, and out that way, and I'm going to do at least one more bed out in this large grassy area in the future.

As time permits. And this tree over here. That's a Chinese pistachio. Okay. As is the one on the other side. Great trees for this area. Yeah, I don't have any of those, and I think they grow where we live. They're very nice trees. I'd like to put some in. The cedar alms are great trees, they're relatively fast growing, they're very pretty shaped. My favorite tree, however, is my little red bud right there. Yeah. I put in several years ago when about four feet tall, it's just a little stick, and I've been able to sculpt it the way I want. And there's a little history there when my parents had a wonderful old red bud off of the patio in the house where I grew up here in Amarillo years ago. And I have several places in the yard where I've planted things that are reminiscent of my childhood and my parents and that red bud is one of them. It's my favorite plant in the whole garden.

Now you have a little house back here. And that's exactly what we call it. We call it the little house. We've lived over about 35 to 40 years of marriage. We've lived in places where we've had basements. And so we've accumulated a lot of junk and tools and things. We've moved to Amarillo. You don't have basements here by and large. So that's my above the ground basement that I had built when we bought this house. It's basically a shop and a storage side with exercise equipment in it. Well, it looks like a little bear, I say, mother-in-law cottage. But it doesn't have a bathroom in it. So she would have to come into the house. It's got air and heat and water, but we didn't put in sewer to land. And that's sound that we're hearing right now is the spray sprinklers that are missing that area over there. Probably it takes me two rounds of my sprinkler system to apply the proper amount of water to the yard to get it soaked in.

I water my grass based upon using a soil probe. When a soil probe tells me it needs to get watered, it needs to get watered. And this morning I tested it and it needed it. It's a calm day. I don't water in the wind, even if it needs it. It's a calm day. And so this is the end of the second round. And it's almost finished watering. And that will be done for probably four or five days at least. We've got some buddies here, Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes. Yeah. And you have a sunroom here and lots of container gardens. Yeah, since we bought the house, we've added this and I modified the porch. Because this was nothing but a flat thing with grass running up to the edge of it. Well, tell me how you got into gardening. Were you raised with it as a child? No. Is it new to you or? My mother was a gardener. She wasn't an avid gardener, but she liked pretty gardens and flowers and such. And I wasn't much into it in those days.

I actually got into it when I got out of the army and went to work in the corporate world. I went to work for Southwestern Bell in Dallas. And I subsequently was transferred to the home office in St. Louis. And in St. Louis, my wife and I discovered the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which are just wonderful, wonderful gardens. We joined and we went out there year around about once a week. That's a bit of an overstatement, but we enjoyed them that much. And that's when I started getting interested in gardening and started gardening there. And it's just developed from that. I've made it kind of my retirement work to try to help the Ameral Botanical Garden become a first class botanical garden. I want to walk over here and see, oh, it's a statue. I couldn't tell. That's St. Viacra. St. Viacra is the gardener's statue, the taxi cab statue. He's a kind of an all-purpose saint. I'm not Catholic, but I've done some reading on him.

And he serves a number of purposes, one of which is gardening. Well, he's standing here overlooking a whole series of colorful farms. Color for any of them. You can see one of the problems is, many of my things are about the same height. I've taken out and you see these cedars that are down here. The people who have this place before me planted a cedar here and here and here and here. And I'm slowly taking them out and replacing them with some other things. I've got a brand new great Myrtle back here and a lilac that I've just put in this spring, which in the future will give me some height. It looks like there's kind of a rough area here for the golf course. That's exactly what it is. It has yucca. And I have yucca coming up in my lawn and in my gardens, like most people have dandelions, as a result of those yucca out there. See, I went out and bought an expensive one to put at my house. I have no love for yucca.

So, you know, one man's weed is... That's exactly right. One man's trash is another man's treasure and one man's weeds and another man's prize possession. Right, right. Well, this is a wonderful place. Thank you very much for the walkthrough. I appreciate it. It's a source of great enjoyment for my wife and I don't necessarily enjoy the work so much, but I enjoy the work enough to do it for the end result. That's what you're looking for as the end result. Well, thank you.