♪♪ -Hi, I'm Allen Smith and welcome back to Moss Mountain Farm.

I don't know about you, but I'm fascinated with seed.

Ever since I was a little kid, I remember taking just jar lids, putting a little water in there, putting a paper towel on it and putting bean seed and watching them sprout.

Fascinating.

And you think about a seed.

It's so small, it's so, well, simple, but it grows into a plant that produces all these things that are so good for us and essential to the planet.

So I think seeds are very important and I want to focus on those.

In our walk around the farm today, we're going to focus on some of our purple coneflowers.

We'll be deadheading for seed and take them to our drying house.

And then in the art studio, I want to take a seed from which ink is made and apply it to a work that I've been thinking about for some time.

And in the kitchen, we'll make an absolutely delicious soup containing one of my favorite legumes, the lentil.

So come on, let's get started.

-Funding for "P. Allen Smith's A Sense of Place" is provided in part by... -Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company -- since 1998, growing, saving and sharing rare heirloom varieties, seeds with stories and a sense of place, seeds worth saving.

NARRATOR: And First Community Bank, where community comes first.

♪♪ -It's full-on fall here, and there's so many things happening that [chuckles] it's really quite amazing.

These are garlic chives, and I want to point these out because they're now at a point where they're going to seed.

And this is where you make a critical decision about what you want to do.

Now, a lot of people have opinions about garlic chives.

I absolutely adore them.

Had you been with me a month ago, you'd have seen long rows of them bordering these parterre beds in the vegetable or edible garden here, with all the blooms and being worked vociferously by the bees because they were extracting the nectar from these flowers.

So that's one of the reasons we grow it.

But it's also a delicious herb.

It has no disease issues and so we love to keep it.

Now, is it a friend or foe?

I think the only reason it might be a foe is that it does drop seed and the seedlings will come up.

So the way you take care of it, if you have something that is a heavy seeder that perhaps drops a lot of seed and you don't want them, then you get all these volunteers in the spring is it's this time of year -- you just come along and you just cut them off like this and then dispose of them or dry them and use them in arrangements, or save the seed to share with friends.

In life, we have to make decisions.

So does the good outweigh the bad?

They're not invasive here for me.

And I'll tell you another advantage if you're listing the pros and cons.

I love the green foliage.

For us here in zone 8a, these garlic chives remain green through the winter.

So you get this lovely green border around the garden.

So, you know, they've been here for, gosh, almost 20 years now and I love them.

♪♪ ♪♪ Well, it's that time of year when things like this gorgeous purple coneflower has done most of its work.

And what you can see here are these beautiful seed heads.

And I like to cut them when they're still green.

Some of them have gone off -- they're dark -- but they're beautiful dried or fall arrangements.

And of course you can save the seed and replant them.

They come up well, generously, and they're one of the easiest perennials to grow from seed.

I also like to use them, particularly these green ones, in flower arrangements.

I love just the color green, and you can create lots of beautiful things with various shades of green and of course green texture.

But by cutting these back now, you can see I may very likely get a few shoots to come off with new buds and flowers that will give us beauty in the garden later in the season.

So here, as the ray petals fade, I just pluck the ray petals off like this, and you get this beautiful orb that I think is just exquisite.

So what I'll do is with half of these, I'll take them, the ones that are pretty well spent.

I'm going to put them in the drying house for some fall decorations and some seed saving.

So we'll just take these and head off to the drying house.

♪♪ -♪ When the sage brings the rite of spring ♪ ♪ Mourning dove and the sparrow sing ♪ ♪ Through the light that the sun will bring ♪ ♪ Reborn ♪ -Welcome to the drying house.

I brought this little bundle of echinacea.

And what we do here in this room is we just gather things that have benefits in the fall for flower arranging or for seed saving.

And what I do is I like to take the stems and just take a rubber band and tie them to them.

As these desiccate -- the moisture leaves -- they'll shrink.

And so the rubber band just continues to tighten and then you can hang them up.

You see like this.

And in this particular place, what we have is a pulley, and I have this rack where I can raise this up and get it out of the way.

If we want to have a little event in here, we can pull this up and down quite easily with a rope and pulley.

And if you just look around the room, you'll see a wide range of things that I've gathered.

I'm a hopeless collector, as you know, and so on the walls are these espalier pear trees that sadly died in a terrible case of spring of fire blight that wiped them out.

And I couldn't bear to throw them away because I'd spent several years training them in the candelabra shape.

We have living ones growing in the garden, but these are the corpses, sadly, of these beautiful things, and they're -- I consider them works of art.

And so we keep them in here and other places around the property.

Something I'm interested in right now -- you'll find this plant, I think, particularly interesting.

This is the beautiful flower pod of the golden rain tree.

And then a few of my favorite things include this crazy sparkler.

It's an allium.

Allium schubertii.

And we grow these and harvest them in May.

They come up rather quickly, and they're beautiful purple things.

But the skeletons of them, I think, are really good.

And they're great for Christmas decorations.

And then at the top of everyone's list are Hydrangeas, right?

So this is that one called incrediball.

It's an improvement of Annabelle Hydrangea.

You can see it's maintained its color somewhat.

And just a little floral tint can brighten those if you want to go back to that chartreuse or celadon color.

So there you have it, the drying house, good place for saving seed and these beautiful dried forms of plants that I think add beauty in the later season of the year.

♪♪ ♪♪ It's such a beautiful time of the year to talk about hearty volunteers.

Now, I don't mean hardy.

Hardiness implies cold tolerance, but hearty is about vigor.

And what I'm talking about here are seeds that just fall to the ground, winter over and they come back as a hearty volunteer.

They're volunteering themselves to be a part of your garden for yet another year.

Celosia is a great example of this for a number of reasons.

Why do I grow it?

Well, it's gorgeous and then it's very beneficial to friends like the bumblebee.

But really the Celosia is pollinated by the wind.

The bees just get on it and enjoy the nectar.

So it's food for the bees.

Well, let's get back to Celosia here for a moment because I love this plant for many reasons.

It's so beautiful.

But it's a very good pass-along plant because it's so generous with its seed.

And let's just talk about some of the varieties.

This one is Celosia cristata, and it's the one that's called cockscomb.

That's its common name.

And you can see it looks like a rose comb on a cockerel.

And what's lovely about it is you can see here this time of year, all these little black seed coming in here.

You can just run your hand across it and there's just scads of them.

Look at them and you can save these.

Alright.

Now this one is Celosia spicata.

And you can see this elongated spike-like bloom on it.

And the country name, as it were, the colloquial name, is rat's tail Celosia, which I love.

So you've got cockscomb, you've got rat's tail, and the little tiny seed are in this tall, spiky bit.

If you look closely, you'll see these seed forming.

The third type of Celosia that you can grow -- and we grow it here -- is Celosia plumosa, As the name suggests, the bloom is like a plume or a flame, and this is a variety called dragon's breath.

It has the most beautiful red foliage, and you can see this time of year the plume emerging at the top of the plant.

So when you think about seeding a garden, this is one of the easiest ways.

Just let nature do it and allow things to grow up.

The only thing you may want to think about is you might have to do a little thinning out.

And these are very, very thickly planted by nature herself.

Other plants that seed themselves in the garden include sunflowers, and then even some of our gourds will come up in the flower beds.

They'll use the compost and the seed is in there.

I just feel like it's a fortunate surprise.

♪♪ "From a small seed, a mighty trunk may grow."

Aeschylus.

♪♪ Take a look at this.

You know what that is?

I bet you do.

Well, that is the seed of the black walnut Juglans nigra.

It's a native tree here, and I love gathering these up and putting them to work.

They produce an amazing ink, and it's very easy to extract.

You see, what I've done here is I've taken the husk off.

So all of this really lovely inky stuff is packed into the husk.

That's the walnut itself, you see.

And what I've been doing is I've been just coming along here and applying it to this piece of paper, really to show you how you can take this dye and use it as an ink.

And you can also buy this stuff, you know, and that's what I do.

It's easier.

But this time of year, when I find some black walnuts, I can't resist to pick them up and put them to use in the studio.

So let's take a look at some of these drawings.

I've always been interested in sort of sepia-colored pictures.

This is one that I did using the ink.

I really like these drawings that were done by Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain.

You can see them done in ink.

And these three figures really ushered in the English landscape garden movement with these classical landscapes.

And so I like to do my own kind of modern version of them.

And I'm just taking some of the black walnut here and the concentrate that it comes in here in this bottle.

And I just take a stopper like this, and I fill it up with the ink.

And I sort of define my line here, just kind of framing this composition.

And there you go.

And then I'm going to make this idea of these trees kind of coming up here on this side of the composition.

But the main thing here is just to kind of give you an idea of the technique.

This is a great way to do very quick sketches of maybe a landscape that one might want to take to the next level and maybe do it in watercolor or gouache, and then maybe even on to oil, which is kind of the sequence that -- that I follow.

You see how fluid it is.

And that's what excites me is you just keep going and you don't stop, and you don't think about it too much, and you just keep trying these things.

And that's why there's so many of them, because I like doing it.

It's kind of meditative and very relaxing.

And so we might make the suggestion of a line across here as a stone wall maybe across that landscape.

And then we might even maybe create some clouds that come across here, these long, thin clouds.

There we go.

And very quickly, you kind of get the suggestion of this landscape.

And you can get some really interesting forms by blotting, if you like and then come back with another layer.

And here you can see these are various gradations of the ink where they're darker, and then they're certainly lighter here.

And that can all be applied with brushes like this.

And I'm just going to do this hurriedly so you can get an idea.

I think that just doing things quickly where you get comfortable with the technique is a good practice.

So here's the first layer, which I think is kind of nice.

Then you can build on that with other layers.

So there you have it.

Black walnuts.

Have some fun.

♪♪ ♪♪ There's so many teachable moments in the garden this time of year in particular.

And I want to just talk about different ways to plant seed.

One is directly plant the seed in the garden.

And for me, I always like to plant larger seeds.

So here we plant things like sunflowers and squash and even cucumbers directly in the ground.

Certain seed have hard outer coatings, so your germination rate is not going to be as good as you'd like.

So things like okra, you can scarify them just a little bit, scratch them.

That helps.

But if you'll just soak them in warm water overnight, 12 to 24 hours or better yet, my grandmother Smith soaked okra seed in milk.

And that just a little bit of lactic acid in that liquid helps soften that outer covering of the seed and you get better germination.

So that's just something to think about.

Now let's talk about this variety of okra.

This is red velvet.

I think it was introduced in the 1980s.

And it's just so beautiful, the color of the stems, the color of the leaves, and then of course the okra itself.

And when you grow red velvet or any okra, you want to cut it when it's young and tender like this.

The test for me is if you can just touch it with a knife and cut it, it just slides across the okra, then it's ready.

Conversely, down here, look at this piece.

See, if I put the blade against it, you get resistance because it has already -- You can feel those spines, and this one's already become way too mature.

And you can see the seed forming on the inside of it there.

When they get to this stage, this is when we like to hang them in the drying houses or use them in fall decor.

They're really very striking and people always comment on them.

The origin of okra is from Western Africa.

It was brought over to America during the slave trade, and it's been a part of American cuisine since that time, and I can't imagine growing my garden without it.

One last thing I want to point out is the flower of okra is quite beautiful.

Look at that.

You can tell that it's a member of the hibiscus family or a mallow.

Another okra variety that we like to grow here, which is just a green one.

It's called Clemson spineless.

And when you go to cut it, the okra could get a little more mature because you don't have those spines in it that resist the cut, So that's one to keep in mind if you're wanting to grow it for the kitchen.

♪♪ ♪♪ Look how striking these berries are.

This is French mulberry.

So many benefits to this plant.

It's hard to know where to start.

In the spring, each one of these berries, if you can imagine, there'd be a little tiny flower.

And those produce nectar.

So it's really good for the bees and butterflies.

Then the fruit set begins and they're ripening now.

That's why I wanted to show this plant to you.

The berries are edible.

I don't really recommend that you eat them raw, but many people do like to make a jelly or jam or preserves from them.

The Native Americans used various parts of this plant for medicinal reasons.

What I love is that nature drops these seeds, and they just come up naturally along the woodland edge.

And I love to see this colonization of these plants.

And we try to root out invasives and really try to encourage beautiful native shrubs like this to flourish.

And of course, I do love to use these in botanical displays.

And that's what I'm doing here is just gathering some of these so I can think about how I want to use them in a design, and I just clip them off and then just pick the leaves off like this, because I think the leaves really disguise some of this berry set, which is so interesting, particularly how it's set on a stem in a beautiful sort of rhythm.

Look at that.

You know, the doot doot doot doot doot doot just like that.

And this time of year, when you contrast this to things like pumpkins that are orange, this purple and orange go together so beautifully.

♪♪ ♪♪ I want to introduce you to a little friend of mine.

Actually, it's a pet plant of mine.

I have pet plants.

I don't know if you have pet plants or not, but I brought this dwarf pomegranate, two of them, back on a trip.

I always take extra luggage for plants.

And this one came back and I've had it in a container for I guess maybe eight or nine years.

Dwarf pomegranates are very beautiful.

You're just seeing here the end of the bloom cycle, and that's why I wanted to share it with you.

Just look at this intense orange of the bloom and you can see the outer covering of the bloom is reflected here on the fruit itself.

This one I just picked.

And then there's a bud.

Just look at that intense cadmium orange.

Just really extraordinary.

What is so marvelous about them is that people come through and they see them, and they're just astonished because it'll have buds, flowers and fruit on it at the same time.

Now, I move these into a really large cold frame in the winter because I don't want to risk losing them, and I've gotten them through the winter for quite some time now.

The seed in pomegranate is what's so fascinating.

I mean, that's what you're really going to eat.

And I'll just take out this little flower bud here at the top.

And if you're just kind of gentle with it, these aren't quite ripe yet, but I'm just going to open this one up so you can have a look see because pomegranates go back in history And they've been a friend of humankind for a long time, and they are associated with prosperity.

And look at all those seeds.

Isn't that amazing?

In Greek tradition, it was believed that you would throw a pomegranate on the floor, and the number of seeds that spilled out would be the number of children you would have.

I mean, all these kinds of tales and... While these aren't red, they're really very good.

And I love them on salads.

They're great garnish.

They're very tart and I like tart things.

And a little later when it gets cooler, they'll turn really red.

So there you have it.

I just wanted to introduce you to one of my little friends.

They're such a cutie.

♪♪ ♪♪ When I was a kid, we grew up on beans.

I love pinto beans, navy beans, all kinds of peas, black-eyed peas, purple-hull peas.

And later, when I was in college, I was introduced to lentils.

And I absolutely love lentils.

It's a crop that's been produced by humans for over 8,000 years.

So it's very good and very good for you.

So what we're going to do first is just create a mirepoix.

I'm just going to take a pot here with some olive oil.

Bring it over here to the stove and get 1 cup each of onion, celery and carrots.

And we're going to get these going here on sort of a medium heat.

And then I'm going to stir.

And it's going to be just a quick two minutes, not a slow two minutes.

You just want to get them tender.

That's all you have to do.

Just beautiful.

Look at the color.

Once they're nice and tender, what you want to do is take 1 cup of black beans and 1 cup of lentils and 1 cup of chopped kale.

And to this you are going to add 6 cups of vegetable stock.

And away we go.

We're going to add some garlic, minced garlic.

And then this is red pepper.

And you want to add just about 2 tablespoons of tomato paste.

Really adds a nice touch to it.

A couple of bay leaves and the lemon gives it a nice brightness.

And stir all this together.

Now, to really send it over the top is 1 teaspoon each of cumin, curry, and smoked paprika and then just salt and pepper to taste.

You're going to let this on medium heat.

Cook for about 25 to 30 minutes.

And I recommend going by and tasting it every so often.

Easy peasy.

♪♪ ♪♪ The aroma is fantastic.

I'm going to turn this off and bring it over here just so you can see.

It helps to keep a lid on it.

Look at that.

It's so beautiful.

And those spices are really coming through that.

Now, this will easily feed six.

So I'm just going to dish some of this up.

As you can see this could be garnished with a little flat-leaf Italian parsley.

It's really, really good.

Mm.

Of course, I'm a big fan of cornbread.

This in cornbread, mm-mm-mm.

♪♪ A seed is a promise you can hold in your hand.

You plant it without much guarantee.

But you hold hope in your heart.

And the most important part happens in the dark, in the quiet, in the waiting.

We spend so much of our lives wanting proof right away, immediately.

But seeds don't work like that.

They ask for patience and trust.

They ask us to do the work long before we ever get the reward.

Maybe that's why I love them so much.

Because every time I plant a seed, I choose hope.

And I choose it on purpose.

Now, that is a sense of place.

I'm Allen Smith.

I hope you've enjoyed our time together as much as I have.

We'll see you next time.

-Funding for "P. Allen Smith's A Sense of Place" is provided in part by... -Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company -- since 1998, growing, saving and sharing rare heirloom varieties, seeds with stories and a sense of place, seeds worth saving.

Learn more at rareseeds.com.

NARRATOR: And First Community Bank, where community comes first.

-Behind every episode of "A Sense of Place" is a story that extends beyond the screen.

Allen's companion coffee table book brings those stories together through more than 500 photographs he selected of the house, gardens, flowers, and animals that define life at Moss Mountain Farm.

Available at pallensmith.com.

-Learn more at my website, pallensmith.com, and dig a little deeper with our weekly newsletter and make sure you follow along with our social media.

I love planting seed any time of the year, even in the fall, as we're approaching winter even because some plants will actually germinate and grow in low-light conditions.

And collards, for instance, will.

And what I'm going to do is just drop a couple of seed in each one of these pots, and you can keep them in a cold frame or a greenhouse.

You don't need much heat.

Just above freezing is really all you have to do.

Now, I'll just put a little water over these, and in about two and a half to three weeks, they're already this big.

And in 60 days you'll have big leafy collards and you can be eating these greens throughout the winter.

Mm.