"A Rich Spot of Earth" - Bees, Peonies, and Warm-weather Vegetables

Michael Tricomi:

It's May here at Monticello and the weather has been cool with some decent rain showers—perfect conditions for growing plants. This is a busy transition time, when we’re no longer worried about the threat of a frost and can do a lot of planting before it gets hot.

Spring wildflowers and bulbs are winding down and perennials, biennials, and annuals are starting to bloom. In May, you can see lilacs, roses, columbine, wild geranium, peonies, and dozens of other flowers on the mountaintop. In the vegetable garden, we’re harvesting spring vegetables, like peas and asparagus, and starting to plant our warm weather vegetables, like tomatoes. 

Introduction

Michael Tricomi:

This is “A Rich Spot of Earth,” a podcast about gardening and the natural world. I’m Michael Tricomi, Interim Manager and Curator of Historic Gardens at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Albemarle County, Virginia. 

May Flowers: Peonies and Hardy Annuals

Michael Tricomi:

For our flower segment this month, Curator of Plants Peggy Cornett and Flower Gardener Debbie Donley sat down to talk about peonies. 

Debbie Donley:

The tulip show is nearly over. They started early March and here we are to May. And so that is a long time. And we do the same thing with the peonies. We've had peonies that have been blooming for several weeks, the tree peonies, but now we're going into the later season peonies as well.  So you can always plan on extending your seasons by having early season, mid-season, and late season varieties.

Peggy Cornett:

With the peonies, the first to flower are the European peony, which Jefferson called the "Piony," p-i-o-n-y. And it's a different species than the ones that are cultivated more commonly in gardens today. The species is Paeonia officinalis. They're not as easy to get.  A smaller plant, usually maybe a foot and a half tall, it has a lighter green foliage. There are double forms and single forms. And I think it's so beautiful. I have a dark double red one in my home garden, and it's just really my favorite. It's just more of a delicate looking plant. And it's a long-lived perennial. It can be in your garden for over a hundred years. But Jefferson wanted to actually naturalize peonies on the north slope of the mountain, along with many other flowers, so it's quite interesting that this was vision of his.

The later ones that are starting to bloom now are from China and Japan, and Paonia lactiflora is the species name, and they have a darker green foliage. They're about three feet tall.

Debbie Donley:

One problem with them is that they're bigger, they're more topheavy. And so if you can get them supported early before they bloom, it's really helpful because once they start coming into flower, that weight just bends them down and then the mud splatters all over them.  At home I start putting my metal hoops up probably when the peonies are only about five inches tall because you get these rains and they just start shooting up and then you're trying to bend them into place.

Peggy Cornett:

The other nice thing that I like about peonies is that it's a great plant to naturalize daffodils because when the foliage comes up--of the peony--it's covering the dying foliage of the daffodils. So it's just a nice combination where the peony is allowing the daffodil to naturally die down.

The ones on the mountain are--there's one called Felix Crousse, which is a red one. It dates to the mid-1800s. The Duchesse de Nemours is a white one, but then my favorite is Festiva Maxima, which is a classic peony. It's pure white with this beautiful fleck of red in the petals. And it's a big flower, too.  

Debbie Donley:

And the scent is incredible.

Peggy Cornett:

They do have great fragrance.

Michael Tricomi:

At Monticello, we grow historic varieties of flowers, usually plants Jefferson documented or that were available when he was alive. But things sometimes go awry.

Debbie Donley:

We have a particularly beautiful peony that Peggy and I had ordered, and when it came in and we planted it and it bloomed, we realized it wasn't at all what we ordered.

Peggy Cornett:

It was supposed to be a European peony and I'm sure it's something else.

Debbie Donley:

It's beautiful though. It's magenta and it's a single flower.

Peggy Cornett:

Big. . . 

Debbie Donley:

And the inside has beautiful yellow stamens.

Peggy Cornett:

We don't have the heart to dig it out because everyone loves it, but yeah, it might be a little bit of an error out there. Yeah.

Debbie Donley:

One thing I'd like to mention about the peonies is when the buds are just starting to open, you can cut them, put them in your refrigerator without any water, and leave them in there. And then when the peonies out in the garden are finished, you can take your peonies out of the refrigerator, give them a fresh cut, put them in a vase of water, and you will have peonies when everybody else's are done. I learned that trick from a cut flower gardener.

Peggy Cornett:

And I keep forgetting to do that. 

Debbie Donley:

As soon as it breaks open that bud just a little bit, do it. 

Self-Sowing Flowers

Michael Tricomi:

Sydney MacCreary joined Peggy and Debbie to discuss the flowers she’s growing in the greenhouse at Monticello’s Center for Historic Plants. The center is located about two miles east of Monticello, at one of Jefferson's farms, called Tufton. We also have a farm there, which we’ll talk about later in the podcast.

Peggy Cornett:

This is the time of year when a lot of the annuals that have seeded from last year, they've planted themselves in the garden, basically, and they've been growing all through the winter. And they're beginning to bloom now, larkspur and poppies, bachelor buttons. I call them hardy annuals. 

Debbie Donley:

Right. Once you get them going, you will have them all the time. Sometimes it's difficult to get them started but just let them go to seed and scratch around that dirt and give them a nice little place that they can sprout. 

Peggy Cornett:

In some ways, I think they're better plants if they've grown over the wintertime than if you've tried to start them indoors and planted them out in the spring.

Debbie Donley:

Definitely. The poppies that we grew in the greenhouse are quite small still, whereas the self-sown beds are two feet tall and blooming. Sometimes I'd like to let one bed self-sow and then plant another bed of the poppies we've grown in the greenhouse and that way when the one bed is finishing, the others are really coming on strong. So again, it extends your season.

Peggy Cornett:

And Sydney's actually starting a lot of these flowers in the greenhouses at Tufton. 

Sydney MacCreary:

We have a greenhouse that we use for production of mail order plants as well as sales plants that we sell up at the visitor center shop. We just had our first spring open house last Saturday, so the past couple of weeks have just been making sure all the plants are ready to go for that. I have the impatiens, the centaurea, the coreoposis tinctoria, the Plains coreopsis. I'm going to redo the visitor center planters with them, but they are good hardy annuals.

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah.

Sydney MacCreary:

But primarily we grow perennials, biennials, and then our annuals are in the seed side of things.

Peggy Cornett:

So you have, you had Canterbury bells this year? And the foxglove?

Sydney MacCreary:

Yeah. Dianthus barbatus is another biennial.

Peggy Cornett:

Sweet William. Yeah.

Sydney MacCreary:

Sweet William.

Peggy Cornett:

The Sweet William was an important one. Jefferson documents it quite early. And they come in lovely color ranges, from reds to whites to stripe. It's considered a biennial. Generally you start a biennial in the late summer and let it get nice and large as a leafy plant, and then it will overwinter and then in the spring it will flower, and then a true biennial will then die after it flowers. Sometimes they're called "weak perennials" because they'll bloom again another year.

Debbie Donley:

But they do occasionally self-sow as well. Yes. So if you're paying attention, It'll keep coming back if you have enough of 'em. But you have to let it go to seed in order for it to do that.

Michael Tricomi:

Sydney mentioned an open house at the Center for Historic Plants. The next one is May 27th. Peggy will be there to talk about our collection of antique roses, which will be in full bloom. We'll be selling plants as well.

Let’s hear from some recent visitors to Monticello and then we'll switch gears and talk about vegetables.

Visitor Spotlight

Kathy:

Hi, I'm Kathy . . .

Reese:

. . . and Reese.

Kathy:

We're from Boston. We just finished the tour, and it was very educational and enjoyable. 

Reese:

Yeah, it's inspirational, actually, what Jefferson believed in. To this day, it's probably the most important concepts and ideas. So, it was just delightful to be here.

Kathy:

Layers and layers.

Vegetable Garden

Michael Tricomi:

Earlier this month, I sat down with Peggy and our vegetable farmer Anna Lobianco-Sims to talk about the vegetable garden.

Michael Tricomi:

In 1812, Thomas Jefferson divided the vegetable garden into three different sections: fruits, roots, and leaves. Fruits, of course, being tomatoes and beans and peppers and squash, the roots -- we have potatoes and garlic and radishes, beets and carrots, and then leaves, more of like lettuce and cabbage. I think that was partially for crop rotation.

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah. Some diseases are spread in the roots, so he might've wanted to remove everything from that bed in a certain year so that he could clean the soil out, but yeah he only did it one year as far as I can tell, but

Michael Tricomi:

just the one, one time.

It was one of the most fascinating arrangements of the garden was to have everything like in a grocery store where you're walking along with the fruits that you know, all the tomatoes and squashes in one section and then you move along to the cabbages and lettuces and so forth. But I think it might've been hard to keep it up. We've tried it before years ago. And we started out okay, but then it got a little bit confused later on in the season. So we'll see if we can keep it up this year.

Peggy Cornett:

Sure. Yeah. The challenge is on.

Michael Tricomi:

The challenge is on.

Peggy Cornett:

So the asparagus is coming in.

Michael Tricomi:

It is and it's delicious.

Peggy Cornett:

It's a big time of year. Yeah.

 Anna Lobianco-Sims:  

Is this your third year yet?

Michael Tricomi:

This is the third year, yes. We replanted pretty much all the crowns in 2020. So they should be pretty productive this year.

You need to get the roots really established.  And I think just giving it that time to get settled because it's a long lived plant, just by harvesting it, you're reducing the amount of energy it can put into developing good, strong roots. 

Michael Tricomi:

You're eating the spear that emerges from the soil, usually about eight inches tall or so, you'd cut it. If you don't cut it and you allow it to grow, it'll just produce seed and photosynthesize and help feed the roots and store nutrients for next year.

Peggy Cornett:

Another thing that can be done is to blanch the base of the asparagus. You know, if you've ever had white asparagus, the entire plant has been blanched or covered so that it won't photosynthesize and turn green. And that makes for a sweeter asparagus. And they're all sorts of blanching pots. The pots we have are probably a foot tall with an open bottom and a lid on the other end, so you can check the progress of your plant as it's growing. But you can also just bring the earth up around the base of the asparagus and keep it white around the base. And so it's a little bit sweeter at the bottom of that spear. 

Michael Tricomi:

And we demonstrate that also in the garden with the sea kale bed, covering the plants as they grow and blanching them.

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah. If you just harvest it like green kale, It would be very bitter. The sea kale it's in the cabbage family. Yeah. But it's a perennial, beautiful bed this year, the flowers,

Michael Tricomi:

It's quite full and it's very fragrant. You walk by it, you will notice it.

Peggy Cornett:

It's not a pleasant fragrance.

Michael Tricomi:

Our viticulturist, Gabriele, he offered to make me a sea kale risotto. 

Peggy Cornett: 

He has some really good recipes

Michael Tricomi:

He does.

Peggy Cornett:

You can roast it or saute it, I guess.  Jefferson, they used a lot of butter when they, but we don't really harvest that much of it because we kinda let it go. 

Michael Tricomi:

It's really showy. The pods we use for the wreath workshop, too.

Peggy Cornett:

The flowers are pretty, so we let it grow out.

Michael Tricomi:

The flowers are very nice. And yeah, it seems to be a tricky plant to cook with.

Peggy Cornett:

It does tend to go semi dormant in the summer when it's really hot and then  it sends out a beautiful new flush of growth in the late summer when it cools down.

Michael Tricomi:

We notice in the garden the Harlequin beetle will start gnawing on them and eating holes in all the leaves. So especially in the summertime we are doing a lot of trimming and we cut them back quite a bit. And then, like you said, in the fall, they just re-sprout.

Peggy Cornett:

And you do that also with the horseradish?

Michael Tricomi:

Yes. Those will also get attacked by the harlequin beetle, but you just cut the foliage down and it will sprout back. It is timing really. If you get through their life cycle, you can get to the other end and let it grow again. Same thing with cucumber beetles. I think they have a period where they're more active than other times. They do. Yes.  The Harlequin beetles, they're very slow. You can pick them off plants pretty easily. The cucumber beetles, they're pretty elusive.

Peggy Cornett:

They're fast. They're sneaky.

We mainly have issues with the flea beetles, especially like on the eggplant. And arugula. And the only way that we've been able to manage them is with row covers, a barrier method, because you can't catch those. They're so fast, like a flea.

Michael Tricomi:

We've also tried some sticky traps with a cucumber beetle lure inside of it, usually placed, in a spot  where other types of insects and animals and birds     can't get to it. And we've had pretty good success with those as well.  Those cucumber beetles especially, they can transmit a lot of different viruses to the plant. It's a perennial insect that we deal with.

Peppers, Tomatoes, Squash

Michael Tricomi:

It's easy to get sidetracked by pests! They're a constant challenge. Let's get back to peppers and tomatoes. We’ve been growing them in our greenhouse and will plant them in the garden this month.

Jefferson only recorded two types of tomatoes. He recorded Spanish and dwarf. And so we interpret that we grow two varieties of tomatoes for seed, one of which is a pre-Colombian, Mexican tomato called the purple Calabash, which has a really beautiful purple coloring and really acidic flavor. And then the other one is a very old Italian heirloom. It's the Costoluto Genovese, and that is also very acidic. And both of them are very lobed, and that's a sign of a very old heirloom tomato variety.

Peggy Cornett:

Costaluto actually means lobed in Italian, so costaluto is a kind of an adjective, or a descriptive term and we're using one  from Genovese, but there's other costalutos as well. We have lots of different type, like a pear ... 

Michael Tricomi:

Yellow pear tomatoes. Red fig tomato. That's a similar shaped tomato to the yellow pear. And then, yeah, a lot of larger heirlooms as well. We do the German Johnson, Eva purple ball, a lot of those eight 19th century tomato varieties we grow in the garden.

Peggy Cornett:

A lot of them are indeterminate. Indeterminate means it's gonna grow indeterminately. It just keeps growing. So in other words, In its native habitat, they're from South America, They grow like a vine.  And there's certain ways you can deal with that with posts and poles and stuff to train them, but that becomes a problem for a home gardener. But there are others that are, they're called determinate, which means that they're just gonna grow about four or five feet tall at the most.

Michael Tricomi:

Yeah.

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah. And  it'll tell you on the seed packet. There are some that are dwarf and they've also developed a lot that are just more for the home garden that that are not gonna get all that big. And you also can do things like suckering them. In between the branches they'll send another  stalk out and you can just pinch that off and then

Michael Tricomi:

it'll get really bushy really fast. And so suckering them, like Peggy mentioned, that'll help keep it really nice and uniform and growing vertically. And another thing too  that we've tried to do is keep it trimmed up from the bottom as much as possible because when it rains, the rain will pelt the ground and soil will get ejected up and hit the leaves. And that's really what transmits a lot of disease for tomatoes is the soil-borne pests.

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah.  A lot of times those lower leaves that get yellow, just get rid of them.

Michael Tricomi:

We'll trim them up either a foot or two at least, just to make sure that there's that distance between the leaves and the ground.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

Yeah. I always irrigate tomatoes from the base as opposed to overhead watering because of that exact reason. And it's better to keep the foliage as dry as possible.

Farm Production

Michael Tricomi:

Anna runs Monticello's farm, where she grows crops the chefs use in our farm-to-table cafe as well as the ingredients that make up products we sell in our shop, like our bloody mary mix, hot sauce, and pepper jelly. We're hoping to produce salsa next year.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
Tomatoes-- I'm putting in about 1500 plants this year. Peppers, hopefully about a thousand. And then anything else that I can fit in there-- squashes and cucumbers and greens and things along those lines. And that'll be mostly for the cafe. And then a large amount of our produce is also donated to local charities because ultimately the farm produces more than anybody can realistically take.

I like to focus on heirloom tomatoes just because we enjoy keeping those genetics around. So we're also growing a lot of the same stuff as on the mountaintop, the Eva Purple, the German Johnson, various cherries, Amish Paste. But ultimately some of the tomatoes do have to be hybridized just because we rely so heavily on good productions for the value added products.  Roma and San Marzano are a couple that we're also growing. Those tend to be very heavy producers.

The peppers, it's always fun growing a really wide variety of the peppers. We're doing Italia, Marconi, habaneros, jalapenos, things along those lines.

Peggy Cornett:
What's that pretty little?

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
The Doe Hill?

Peggy Cornett:
Yeah.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
Yeah. Hill Doe Hill is another good one.

Peggy Cornett:
That's a nice clean plant.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
But it's a pain to pick. They're so small. You have to pick a million of them to get a substantial amount.

Michael Tricomi:
Not quite as much as the Texas Bird Pepper. Yeah.

Peggy Cornett:
We'll have to mention a little bit about that Texas bird Pepper. That's one of our important peppers.

Michael Tricomi:
It is. It really is.

Peggy Cornett:
It's a Jefferson documented pepper. And they're tiny, but they're extremely hot. It's a beautiful little plant.

Michael Tricomi:
As far as I know, they grew originally as an ornamental plant. The pepper plant itself is, Probably 15 inches, two feet.

Peggy Cornett:
It looks like a cute little tiny strawberry or something.

Michael Tricomi:
The  peppers -- they're like tic-tac sized.

Peggy Cornett:
It was first introduced by a army captain from San Antonio, Texas, and he sent seeds to Jefferson in, I think, 1812, 1813. And the Texas bird pepper is so hot that it's called that because, they say they're really hot peppers can only be eaten by birds because birds don't have the taste bud   taste that heat. And and we've certainly discovered that at Monticello, we've had all kinds of birds eating those peppers including mocking birds. You can leave the plants in the garden even after the plants freeze and they're actually dead basically, but the peppers are hanging on them and if you leave 'em out through the winter it's really food for wildlife.

Michael Tricomi:
I need to add that our pepper jelly is the best! It's the perfect mixture of hot and sweet peppers. You spread cream cheese on a cracker and add a dollop of pepper jelly and it's delicious.

Bees

Michael Tricomi:
We have one last segment for you. Anna not only grows vegetables, she manages our beehives at Monticello. We currently have 30 hives, but the number continues to grow. Our goal is to harvest 60 to 80 gallons of honey every year.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
It's been a really busy season this past month. Our hives have been swarming. So  once the winter is over and all the eggs are being hatched and the new spring bees are really ramping up their numbers to prepare for honey production. If those numbers out match the space that they're given, they will take the old queen and they will leave the hive with about half the bees and they'll swarm. So they'll go to a primary location where they'll clump up on a tree branch or maybe a rooftop, and you can either scoop those bees up  and put them back in a box, which is what I've attempted to do for the past three weeks roughly. Or you can just let them go and after a day or two, they'll fly off to a secondary location and find a tree hollow or somewhere to to continue. And that's how the hives will naturally in the wild reproduce and grow their numbers.

But here in Virginia the survival rate of swarms is pretty low. It's only about 25%. So to benefit the bees and give them the best chance possible at survival, we like to catch those swarms and bring them back into the yard and give them food and water and space and hope that they stick around.

Michael Tricomi:
Working with bees sounds scary, but if you know their habits, you can handle them safely.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
I could, in theory, stand right next to a swarm and they won't bother me, as opposed to if I stood in front a in front of a beehive, they would hit me and probably sting me because they have resources that they need to guard. But as a swarm, they have no resources. They have no honey stores. It's just the bees. So they're much more docile. And so you see videos of people scooping swarms of bees and putting them into a box very gently. And I'm sure if you did it gently enough and if it was in a good enough place, that could happen. But our bees tend to be a little bit more aggressive because we've incorporated a lot of Russian bee genetics. There's a number of benefits.

Peggy Cornett:
They're hardier. Yeah,

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
Hardier and higher mite resistance and things along those lines. Most people work with Italian bees and they tend to be very docile, but the Russian bees, they are not as . . . it's complicated.

Peggy Cornett:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a whole, it's a whole thing.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:
At the very least, I wear a veil and just like long sleeves and preferably gloves. Because scooping them is the easiest method. But if they're high up in a tree or they're in a really tricky location you have to just shake them, you just hit the branch or hit the item and you shake them into the box or whatever your capture vessel is. And that's when they get really angry.  

But the easiest method, in my opinion, to catching a swarm is to find the queen within the swarm. Usually she's like relatively easy to locate. She might be on the top. And if you can clip her, you can grab her and put her in a little Vessel that the holes are small enough to where she can't get in and out. But the regular smaller worker bees can get in and out. You can capture her, put her in the box that you're wanting to take the bees home with, and you leave her there. And the bees will realize that they're scent that her, their queen scent is no longer with them. They'll find her, through the pheromone and they will all slowly gravitate towards the queen. And so they will all get up into the air and fly towards her and you can close 'em up and it's the easiest method in my opinion. 

Michael Tricomi:
I’m guessing you never realized that there was a difference between Russian and Italian bees. We’ll share more about Anna’s adventures in beekeeping in upcoming episodes. For now, thanks so much for listening. I hope your own garden is a rich spot of earth, just like ours. Until next time, happy gardening!