Growing on the High Plains; Great Gardens

Hello there, this is Skitman Sini. Winter weather is here, so come inside. I've got hot chocolate on the stove and some things to tell you about growing on the high plains. If you're a frequent listener to growing on the high plains, then you've probably heard me use the term talking gardens, because visiting with people about their horticultural experiences is one of my favorite pastimes. Today I'd like to give you a preview of a special project that started last April, when I asked listeners to give me a call at the station if they wanted their efforts to be included on a great gardens tour. The original idea was to title a project June and January, and to record my visits at the height of the growing season in June, then broadcast them in January when all about us was cold and dreary.

Well the response I got was most gratifying, and the January dates filled quickly, so we decided to add June and February to the schedule in order to accommodate most of the folks who invited me to come and see what they're up to. And to those who aren't a part of this series, please don't close the garden gate on me, as you'll be the first ones I contact when I do more site visits this coming summer. But for now, starting next week, we'll be visiting with eight gardeners who practice their art and craft at various sites in our broadcast area. And thanks to technology, we'll not only be talking gardens, but taking a look at them as well via our HPPR website. We'll go to Atwood and Amarillo, Colby and Canyon, and other points in between. We'll talk to people who've been gardening since childhood, and to some who've developed the passion to produce green things later in life. One of our subjects makes her living from her garden, serving up the produce in a family

restaurant. Others have found time and retirement to develop some of their botanical dreams. One of our gardens is laid out on a canyon rim, and another overlooks a herd of buffalo. Vegetables say it all to some of our great eight gardeners, while others look at tomatoes as a patio accent, and a container garden layout. Masses of blooms were on display at several stops, but other gardeners were proudest of having taken on the challenge of growing trees on the treeless high plains. And some gardens grew more than plants, as they featured metal sculptures, mazes, and colorful chotch geese that added art to the outdoor environment. As I traveled from one prized place to another, I was amazed at the individuality of each garden, and how that space mirrored the individuality of each gardener. No two places are people were alike, but when I returned to the High Plains Public Radio studios, and began, with the help of my technical producer Mark Anthony, to create the individual

stories, I was struck by the similarities they shared. Everyone spoke of the importance of the soil, of creating good earth and then tending it with care. They also addressed the need for conservation of resources, especially water. And we all commiserated about the difficulty of growing things in a climate that sometimes seems to deliberately undo our efforts. But the strongest common thread in our long-distance tapestry had to be the obvious commitment, or should I say, addiction, that we felt for this heart's desire called gardening. I hope you'll be able to join me each week for a series of great garden interviews, either on air or on the web. And if you'd like to reserve a spot to showcase your own efforts during the next growing season, let me know. You can always reach me at the station, 1-800-678-7444, or on the web at hppr.org. Today we'll step into a time machine and travel back to summer 2008 for the first stop on

our great garden tour. Today I'm in Hayes, Kansas, and I'm talking with Don Butcher. Don, when did you get into gardening? How long have you been doing this? I'm 78th grade. And you're not going to say how long that was. No, I'm 75 years old. We're walking into your backyard here, and I see things like rain barrels and a wonderful shaded area. I planted most of the trees in 1984. I'll tell you right now what I see here. You're a vegetable garden man. No. I don't see an awful lot of flowers. I'm seeing things that you can eat, not only vegetable plants here, but in the trees that you have planted, almost everyone I'm misproducing something for you. I see their nuts are fruit one or the other. Yeah. Lots of vegetables. I permute the onions. That's all I ever grow. They don't get very big, but they get awfully sweet. And I plant lettuce and spinach together for the rabbits, and that keeps them off of

mostly the other things. And I always raise lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers, and trying something new this year I planted sweet corn, hoping that the cucumbers will grow up the corn, and we'll see what happens. The Native Americans used to plant corn and beans in the same area, and the bean vines were supposed to grow up the corn stalk. So I don't want to work with cucumbers too. I hope so. Now this is the Cambodian beans. Right. They get about 20 feet tall, and the beans get as much as 32 inches long. I have had them 32 inches long, but they're best eaten when they're about 8 to 10 inches. Oh, you've got grape vines. I planted grape vines for the first time this year. So let's go over and take a look at yours, Don, and see if you can give me some pointers. It seems like they could be kind of complicated. I've read about trimming and braining and training, and all this kind of stuff that you need to do with grape vines. Monks way back when had the sheep or goats get into their grape vines and eat off a lot

of the plant, and the next year the production was about twice as much as it was before. So from then on, people have pruned their grapes in the fall to get more new growth and new growth is where the grapes occur. You said that you built a birdcage to cage the grapes. Right. I use bird netting and build it out of two by two, so it's nice and light, light and pick it up and carry it out and set it down over the grapes, and the robins come and land on it and wish they could get to the grapes, but they can't. And you know what's amazing to me about grape vines is they look dead. I mean, the vine itself just looks deader than a door nail, but there's all this green stuff coming out from it, producing all these grapes. There are other major vines that are 27, 28 years old. And what kind of grapes are they? They're called pink reliance. They're dessert grape, more than anything else, have very tender skin and very, very sweet. Now I see things around when we first came in and I was looking in the front yard.

There were very interesting, rusted iron pieces in your garden in the front. And now I'm seeing some others, this looks like a piece of a machine that's sticking up here. Well, look up here on the side of the shed. Oh, yeah. It's the old sister buckets and the sister is right here behind us. There are farm implements, parts of drill bits, part of broken drill stem from an oil well drilling equipment. I've always sort of wanted to have a groundwater museum in my backyard. When I look around here, it's a combination of garden and antiques. Yes. Evidently, the drilling stuff maybe comes from your background as a geologist. Yes. And all these things become a part of your garden. Yes. Yes. It makes it personal, makes it your place. I think that's what I'm going to find with my great garden tour is that everybody's garden is a little piece of themselves, too.

It's a mirror, you know. A hot day toward the end of June brought me to the Amarillo Garden of Angie Hanna. She's an avid gardener who in addition to keeping her own yard and garden in tip-top shape often volunteers her skills at the Amarillo Botanical Gardens. We began our visit with a conversation about a term Angie Coyne called extreme gardening. I'm not a Texas panhandle native, but as they say in Texas, I got here as quick as I could. Moving here from Wisconsin, I found that gardening was quite a bit different and a lot more difficult. I called it extreme because our weather has so much more shifts and changes than the weather patterns and let's say Wisconsin where I grew up. All of these changes got me to thinking that our weather here is extreme. And as I researched it and started to grow plants and studied it more, I actually came

up with a different idea that the Texas panhandle is in a transition zone between three weather systems, between the hot humid southern climate and between the southwest, arid and dry climate and the Midwestern more of cold in the winter with moisture and then hot and humid in the summertime. So we're faced constantly with shifts, never knowing ahead what faces us. What might seem insurmountable odds to some would-be gardeners became an exciting challenge to Angie, who set out on a path that included enrolling in a master gardener program, followed by a self-determined course of study. A voracious reader and researcher, she delved into zero-scaping and organic gardening. She also searched for writings on gardening and other extreme climates, including Colorado,

New Mexico and Arizona. What evolved was a firm belief in using native plants and working with a changeable climate rather than against it. If you do things in harmony with nature and that's really what I talk about these days, how to garden in harmony with nature, it's more than just zero-scape or just organic gardening. It's a whole ball of wax. And once you start on that track, you know, nature just takes over. You get to enjoy the beauty and it does the work for you. We walked through the backyard, shaded by a magnificent American sycamore tree, one of a few non-native residents. With the succulents, native grasses, and a small plot of vegetables, stood a wonderful structure that serves as a potting shed and focal point for the surrounding flora and fauna. We moved onto the front yard, filled with masses of sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants, many in full bloom.

As we completed the tour, Angie told me about wanting to share her wealth of information with all who share her love of gardening. One of the things I tried to do and did do is put up a website for people here in the Texas Penn handle called HighplainsGardening.com that gives all these tips about how to garden organically, how to garden with water conservation in mind and using all your little micro-nitches within your home landscape. It's a chock full of tips, HighplainsGardening.com. A visit to Atwood Kansas brought me to the gardens of Alice Hill, who provides a cornucopia of fresh produce that served up daily at her Aberdeen Steakhouse. I have a nursery shed, it used to just be a little chicken house, and we insulated it, and I used fluorescent lights that were the fixtures at the courthouse, and when they remodeled the courthouse, we salvaged those fixtures.

I found that the little expanded peat pellets seemed to work best, and I used 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. I also run an oscillating fan, 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. 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 to 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, might typically rotate cucumbers and tomatoes. This year I started a new Sparigus bed, the Sparigus 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.

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 grounds stays moist and soft, the microorganisms can do their job. 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. I asked Alice about her methods of feeding the soil. I use a variety of different things trying to match what the soil needs with the product. 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 in 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. Help is one of the things I use quite a lot of, 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. Another product that I use is called green sand. It helps to break up the soil. Gypsum is another naturally mind product that helps to loosen the soil and it has a slight acidifying factor to it as well. Earthworms, anytime you're making your earthworms happy, you're making your plants happy. When asked for some final thoughts about gardening, Alice Hill had this to say. 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 can just have those glut of tomatoes.

There's enough for everybody, and I really admire the generosity of nature. It wants to feed us. 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. Our next stop on the Great Gardener series is Amarillo at the home of Bob Hatton located on the western side of the city. Bob's beautiful home is surrounded by perennial beds of a variety of trees and a cottage garden, but it wasn't always thus as Bob explained.

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 the exception of a few foundation plantings is something that I have beds that I have dug and plants that I have planted. This is a rather ziric bed over here. As I said, I basically had nothing but grass when I moved in here, so the whole yard is sprinklered. I have turned off many, many, many of the heads because I don't need them and whatnot, but as you can see, most much of this is very low water use, the Russian sage, Petroskia, at Triplicapolia, and the Stypa tenuesimmon, the Maidengrass, and Jupiter's Beards is low water use. These are main night salvia, as you can see, I've cut back after their initial bloom and they're beginning to come back here.

These moms 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. 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 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. 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. And a peach tree? Yes, I have two peach trees. I had 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 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 it's bigger. We love the porch, we love the gazebo. Now this tree over here. That's a Chinese pistachio, as is the one on the other side. Great trees for this area, my favorite tree however is my little red bud right there. I put in several years ago but 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. Well this is a wonderful place, thank you very much for the walkthrough but 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 and enough to do it for the end result. That's what you're looking for as the end result. Some people grow more than living plants in their gardens and today we'll visit just such a place. Located along a network of canyons that all lead toward the Paladurro over the past

11 years, Darla Wood has carved out a garden from the Mesquite Yucca and Buffalo grass that surround her place and in the midst of blooming annuals, perennials and fruit trees there are several metal sculptures and structures that seem to fit right in. There's a large metal rose here, a metal sculpture. This was leftover something that I had from another project and I just decided to do a rose out of it and then cut the leaves out and welded them together and made the leaf ball. And you do the welding yourself? My husband taught me how. I got tired of waiting on him so I decided to learn how so I could do stuff myself. We have kind of a pagoda-looking shape here. I wanted the wisteria to eventually grow up through the top and cascade out over the edges.

Hopefully someday it will. I'm here in lots of birds. Oh yeah. Bird village out here in the back. Oh wonderful, different bird houses, now did you make those? My dad makes some of them and I get gifts because people know that I have that out there and then I make some of them and I bought a couple of the feeders. Oh you have a maze? A labyrinth? Yes. Oh I love this. What we're looking at now is I call it a maze, you call it a labyrinth? Labyrinth. And it's a circular patterned walkway. My husband is an architect and he designs for a lot of hospitals and I've read that they're using this more and more because number one it's a good way to get exercise in a small

space. You don't have to have a huge walking track, you just walk in a very concise prescribed area but also from meditation just for general mental health that's really good. Tell me the process you did for putting in your labyrinth. We made all of the great colored stones but all of the red ones that we just bought and did those and researched it on the internet and got a pattern. I tried to grow grass out here like two or three times and never would take soil. I thought well this would be a great area and about the right size for it. We put it in, dug the paths and laid the stones down, filled in with the gravel and then did plantings. All rock garden plants and they don't require water as much so. Oh this is such a wonderful place. Yeah, we've really enjoyed it.

It's like living in a small town and you know all your neighbors and you can depend on them and that's what makes it nice but you also have your privacy and the other night they had dark skies where everyone in the village is supposed to turn off their lights so that you can view the stars better. On 4th of July we can sit out in the driveway and we can sleep fireworks all around us coming from Emorillo and Canyon and people who shoot them off out in the country. Those have a great firework show right out here. Today our great gardens tour takes us just south of Garden City to the home of Larry and Carol Geier. I'm in what's called the sand hills. It's along the bed of the used to be Arkansas River, now Arkansas River bed. So it's rolling sagebrush. It's an area called sagebrush estates and so in just being here I'm thinking Carol and

Larry that this is a fairly good example of prairie. Yeah, that's true. When we first decided to move out here then just going on 15 years ago we've been here. Carol actually found this area and we come out to look at it and it was sagebrush and weeds, no trees and we're just trying to cross the road from the buffalo preserve. That's basically what it was when we came out and decided to build out here. As you can see in 14 years it's turned into a little different story. Oh it's beautiful. For one thing your gardens have many many levels so why don't we just take off and start down these wooden steps here. This kind of reminds me of a California look here just in all the different terraces and different levels or something like that, you know, not flatland Kansas. Yeah. I keep telling people where I live, everything's uphill both ways. And I'm here in bird dogs here. Ah yes. Yeah we have a shed with the kennels and everything, I have a pointer in the lap.

This needs to be my vegetable garden but it's turned into just an herb patch. But again it's raised beds on a lot of different levels so there's lots of vertical gardening here at the gaiers. The grass is that you see here all native grasses that I originally planted and just let them, and gradually it's building and going to the north each year. It just expands a little bit more. And it just fits right in with that rise there and the sagebrush and native grasses that are out there. Yeah. This little locust tree was our very first tree entry. All the ostriches that you see here all were little seedlings and I'm nurse them to what they are today and they take a lot of water. They do. They're like a little, they're a little type tree and they do take a lot of water and they do steel water from the other plants so you do have to keep after them. But I've taken a lot of time to trim them and to nurture them. A lot of people plan them and then just leave them be and they just turn it a big, scraggly bush. But I've trimmed and pruned them, stayed after them, took all the suckers off every year and so the energy goes to height and inside some beautiful tall trees.

Do they really grow as fast as the ants say? Oh yes. So about how much can they put on them? These are 14 years old and there's some of them here that are way over 60 foot tall. And some of them have a diameter and I have one down there that's probably got a four foot diameter in the trunk. But you just have to stay after them and they are a lot of maintenance but I enjoy them all of them. Well you know I'm finding and talking with people in this great gardens tour and then just my own experiences. Over the years with gardening you have to stay after it, you know. And I don't think there's a low maintenance garden really unless it's concrete. It's been kind of fun to watch the ecosystem kind of changes with all the stuff you plant. You end up with shade and you end up with leaves that mulch things and nourish the soil and it's kind of fun to watch that. Those changes in a place that all you had was one little tree in a lot of sagebrush and a lot of sand.

We moved out here in January and in February one morning we opened up the front door and there was this like a 18 inch drift of sand in our front by our front door and we both looked at Jesus, what have we done? I think I had a mistake. We feel like when we come home we are somewhere else completely. There's no overhead lines, there's no light, the street lights, it's so quiet out here. You know it's just unbelievable. It's very dark. You can see the stars and right next door the buffalo realm. Do they ever come up here to where you can see them so they're right across the road from you. There's time when they have them in this pasture they graze right through here. Kathleen and Robert Fields live in an older section of Amarillo and their backyard garden benefits from a border of tall trees that have been providing shade and privacy for years. But we began our great gardens tour in the front of the house where Kathleen talked about

the importance of soil building to achieve their great looking lawn. As many years as I've been gardening that's the one thing I learned and that's the one thing I swear by. You can get a sick plant and bring it back to health as long as you have good soil and good microbes in it and organic material and that sort of thing. Basically we do composting in our own yard and when we when all the trees around here lose their leaves we just mow them up and mulch them and throw them in the beds let them decay over the wintertime and we just keep stirring them in and we add more compost on top of that and let it go. For the particular beds that we started when we first moved here we didn't have enough of the organic material here because we just moved here so we went out and purchased it. It was organic material that we purchased and it's a never-ending job right? It's a part of gardening. It is a never-ending job. It's like to have a healthy body you have to eat every day you have to drink and get rid of the waste and you just keep reprocessing the same thing but the healthier your plants

are the healthier your yard is then the material you get from those whether it's the leaves off the trees or if you're taking cuttings off of plants and that sort of thing they're healthier to begin with so by the time you compost those and put them back on it's just adding to that mixture. That's a wonderful thing. Well let's go back to the backyard and see what you have back there. You get a concert from your camp in the old bells. Look at this the backyard is incredible. It's surrounded by large trees tall green leafy trees. As I talked with Kathleen about her gardening techniques the term going to seed gathered new meaning for me. Obviously I've let a lot of the marks per go to seed and one of the reasons that I haven't cut back the Columbine yet is it's just now drying out the seed heads and then I take all

those seeds and I'll just fling them out in the garden and that way you don't have to buy seed and you just every year new things come up everywhere. In fact I'll try doing things from seed when I first started gardening I went precisely you have to have X amount of inches do the right amount of thing. Now at the end of the season if I still have seeds I throw them all in a bowl together no matter what it is. Mix it up with my hand tell it if you want to grow you better grow and I fling it out whether it's sun or shade under a tree or whatever and it's amazing little come up. So sometimes I think having a cavalier attitude is a little more useful than just being so careful in and trying to take care of it. I'm a firm believer in perennials usually perennials will reward you not only by coming back stronger and better every year and I have a quote I can't lay claim to it but it's the most wonderful quote I've ever heard about perennials they say the first year they sleep the second year they creep the third year they leap and that's the truth. As the evening light began to fade Kathleen and I talked about the contrasts between the

more traditional front yard landscaping and the freedom to grow reflected in the backyard world she and Robert have created. When I first started gardening that was I thought it was a failure because it never looked like it did in the magazines and when I feel like I finally started understanding what gardening was about is when I realized it will never look like what it does in the catalog. Right. Unless you have a staff of the Queen's gardeners. Yes. And who wants a garden that's all that stiff and formal some people do but that's just not for me. I like a little craziness going on and well it's very a very comfortable place a very natural place. Thank you. You're welcome. Today we take our great garden series to Colby for a visit with Bev and Kurt Eiker and a look at their English cottage garden. We went on a garden tour of England and this is not like the gardens in the biggest

states. This is a garden like the vegetable houses have. Well it is absolutely wonderful and we're here during the first week of June so it looks like this is a prime time to come and see the garden. I see poppies and daisies and pannies and salvia and flax and roses and everything seems to be in bloom. Are there certain times when it is better than others or do you always have a bloom out here of some kind? Well we're trying to always have a bloom and usually we're successful. Is everything here pretty much perennial? It's either perennial or self-seeds. It still looks very gorgeous. It's a sea of color. This is our herb area and we have some fairly unusual herbs. Partly because K-State used to have an herb trial garden here at the experiment station. Not all herbs are culinary like we think of many other medicinal or aromatic and so we have some fairly unusual herbs here I think.

In the midst of all the flowers you have found some space for a few vegetables it looks like. I'm seeing some tomato plants and again some more herbs, some chives and things like that. So you have a little bit of a kitchen garden here. You've got a gorgeous rose coming out there too and I love the flax. I have flax at home. I have larkspurt at home too in mind because my dad gave me some seeds one year in a little packet and it's written in it. I still have the packet I keep seeds in it and it's written in his handwriting when he was getting older and he's having trouble writing and it says, for skip little blue flowers. Now these are what now? Let us leave poppies and some of them are confetti with you know really doubling everything. Some are just single. And I get some red ones dark red and some pinkish and some orange and some white all from the same.

Oh they're wonderful. Now where I got these was my sisters and I used to have what we call sisters week after our children grew up we'd get together and go to each other's homes and we were my sisters in Harrington one year and we were driving over to Newton and we went through a little town and we saw this yard that was just full of these. And it was just so striking we just stopped the car and knocked on the woman's door and said, are those? You know we never seen such things and she told us and she gave us a lovely tour of a garden which was almost all poppies. And she said if you come back in a few months I'll give you seed. And so in a few months my sister went back and got a seed and she sent it to us all and the next spring mine were just about ready to bloom when we had word that my sister had died suddenly. And so whenever these bloom these are genes poppies you know I always think of her. You know isn't that amazing how gardens are like a family heritage like my dad's Larkspur and the big old fashioned rose bush over there the yellow one is from my parents farm.

Yeah so I have I have roses and I have lilacs and a rose of Sharon from my grandparents farm so you know and then I've given plants to other people you know it really is a network isn't it? And gardening is a network it's a family a world family. Growing on the high plains is a production of high plains public radio it's written and produced by Skip Band Syni.