(mellow piano music) - [Narrator] J. Schwanke's Life in Bloom is brought to you by, Albertsons Companies, with additional support from the following companies, the Ball Horticultural Company, Cal Flowers, Design Master Color Tool, Golden Flowers, Sunshine Bouquet, and TheRibbonRole.com.

(mellow guitar music) - Today on Life in Bloom, we're going green.

We'll visit foliage farms to find out where the foliage in your vase comes from.

I'll create a mini living wall for the home and a beautiful long-lasting foliage arrangement.

Plus, delicious recipes that include leafy ingredients.

(mellow guitar music) I'm J. Schwanke.

Welcome to Life in Bloom.

Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

How cool is foliage?

This workhorse of the plant industry adds loads of texture, it's long-lasting, and it's a dynamic addition to any flower arrangement.

(mellow guitar music) - FernTrust is made up of 13 individual family farms.

The average farm is less than 50 acres, but combined, we have over 350 acres of production.

They grow anything from aspidistra, tree fern, plumosa, a variegated pitt, ruscus, lily grass, bloodleaf, I don't remember if I said that.

I like to get it in several times.

(man laughs) There's a list of 45 different things.

Basically, if it's green, we grow it, and some things that are more than green.

I was gonna show you how we reproduce our field.

Since a fern is not grown by seed, even though there are spores on the backs of the plants, you can see that's how it naturally produces.

- We always talk about this 'cause these will turn black.

- They'll turn black over time and then the spores release and that's actually the seed to the fern plant.

Eventually after many years, if you have that in just the right conditions, it'll grow into a fern plant.

We like to cheat a little bit.

We'll take the plants and dig them up like this and you have to divide them up.

What you look for is the growing eye.

See that white eye right there.

That's the important part.

What you'll do is you'll separate out little pieces like this and you plant them eight to 10 to 12 inches apart depending on how thick you wanna start out with your planting, but as this arisarum grows along underneath the soil, you can see this little bump on it right here.

That's where the frond's gonna come up.

As this snakes along, it'll send up fern fronds.

You can see this is a little fiddlehead that's a little more evolved, but it basically goes from that, you get the real light green fronds like this, which will fill out and eventually turn a darker green color.

- David, when I travel and I'm showing product, this is one of the most popular FernTrust pieces of magic that you do.

People go crazy for the color fresh.

- It's something we're very proud of, something we've developed her and patented.

- [J. Schwanke] You talked about it as being makeup.

- We got beautiful foliage already and it's just like beautiful models.

They wake up in the morning, they're already beautiful, but with a little makeup, they look every better.

- There you go.

We have your leatherleaf, we've got aspidistra leaves, we have tree fern.

- [David] Almost anything we can paint.

- There's the painted.

- Correct.

- There's the shimmer.

- Shimmer, with a little bit of glitter on it.

- And then the shine that has a great reflective quality.

That's a secret way you do that too.

(mellow guitar music) Why be a foliage farmer and not an astronaut or a lawyer or carpenter?

- I think it's partly because it's in my roots.

My family's been in agriculture for many generations.

My family goes back five generations here so we were some of the original people in the area, the settlers of the region, and we've always been involved in agriculture.

I wanna keep that family farm that we've had now in our family for five generations ongoing and the foliage has been a wonderful way to do it.

(mellow guitar music) - In the 38 years I've been in business, the most challenging thing here at Alpha Fern Company has been mother nature.

The hurricanes in 2004 came in and completely devastated this whole place.

I did not think we was gonna make it.

It has been down to 17 degrees here a few days.

There was one year at Christmas time in 1984, I think, '83-'84, we had a freeze coming here on Christmas day.

We had to break up the Christmas party at the house and all my family's pretty much in the fern business so we all had to go to our ferneries and start protecting them.

I came home about three days later, I stayed here three days and nights without ever going home, and my family, we opened up our Christmas presents on New Years Day.

- Tree fern is our number two seller.

1.6 million stems go out of our door annually, of tree ferns.

- Number one is leatherleaf.

- Number one is leatherleaf.

33 million stems of leatherleaf leaves out shop annually.

- Holy buckets.

- Yes, holy buckets.

- That's a lot of foliage.

- With a sturdy number two, that's why we have to work so hard to protect the hammocks that we have left.

- We are in probably one of the most picturesque portions of Florida fern growing.

This is, we call it a hammock.

- This is a hammock tree fern.

Tree fern will only grow under a hammock.

It needs the filtered light versus the straight percentage of shade that a saran fernery has.

- [J. Schwanke] The live oaks diffuses the light and then the tree fern grows excellent underneath here.

- It keeps that really dark green color thanks to the nice shade that the trees provide.

- Jennifer, we're in a pitt field.

- Yes.

- Pittosporum.

- Pittosporum.

- We were talking about that.

I was taught as a kid to say pittosporum sometimes to make it fancier, (woman giggles) but I like pittosporum.

- With our southern slang, pittosporum works.

Pittosporum is grown under 67% shade whereas leatherleaf is grown under 73% shade.

It keeps a nice, even shade.

What a lot of people don't know about a pittosporum patch is that it has a lifespan.

It's not like some of our other crops that just keeps regenerating.

They have some issues the older they get.

You get about 10 good years, seven to 10, 12 if you're really lucky, but most people just kind of continue to move their patches around.

- [J. Schwanke] Jennifer, this is all of the things you offer your customers.

- No, this is actually only a third of what we off our customers.

Because Florida is so temperate in a climate, we get to grow over 50 different foliage varieties and then in addition to what we grow, we harvest another 30 here locally.

Because we're on the East Coast, we are the western and California green supplier also to the East Coast for a lot of our customers.

- [J. Schwanke] That's where your salal comes in or the red puck.

- [Jennifer] That's where the salal comes in, yes.

- [J. Schwanke] But look at all the color, look at all the texture, and they're in the flower.

- My tagline is, Alpha Fern Company, the source for everything green and colorful because I want people to remember greens are not just green.

We have texture differences, we have color differences, variegation differences, and they can heighten any design that florists make by using the different types of foliages versus 30 years ago when my dad got started, 40.

It was 10 different foliages is all we had and now we're up to nearly 200.

(mellow guitar music) - A new trend is to have foliage plants growing on your wall as a piece of art.

For us to do that, we need a mechanism that holds it.

There are mechanisms like this that are available at garden centers or craft stores where you actually plant you plants into the mechanism and then hang them on the wall.

We're gonna show you how one works today.

With this mechanism, there's a place for nine different plants to go into the hanging piece.

We'll start by putting soil into the slots.

There's three different chambers and we'll also have the soil and the root ball from the plants so we don't need to fill it all the way to the top.

You'll also notice that there's spaces so that all of the roots can grow together and water can travel through to all of the plants.

On the front of this, there's a place.

We'll add water through there and it's dispersed in the back through these two slots and it'll make its way down to the other plants.

Our next step is to add this piece of felt.

The felt comes with it.

Each one of the places has an area cut where we'll plant through.

We'll place the top securely onto the device.

Now there's a place for each one of the plants.

We'll pull these up and place our plant inside there and then push them back down.

That's what prevents the soil from falling out.

We'll start with the plant.

With that, we open up those flaps, go inside, and plant our plant.

We wanna make sure then that our four flaps are holding our plant in place once it's set down inside there.

I've chosen a selection of ferns so that all of the plants have similar water needs.

That way they'll also enjoy being misted and they'll need water at approximately the same amount of time.

(mellow guitar music) Baby tears also likes a lot of water like our ferns so I'll use that up in this top corner so it's a great contrast to the staghorn and other ferns.

Now that we have everyone planted, we can go ahead and water them in.

When we hang this on the wall, there's a reservoir in the bottom that holds excess water.

Again, this is where we water at a later date, or we can remove it from the wall, put it in the sink and water it, let it drip, and put it back in place.

It's a great idea because we could use all sorts of different plants.

Imagine an herb garden in the kitchen, or maybe you could do lettuce.

What about a patchwork pattern?

We could have succulents in there too and do all sorts of different designs.

It's a great way for us to bring foliage and plants into the house and have it as a living piece of art.

Now, let's find a place to hang it.

(mellow guitar music) It's fun to use foliage when you're entertaining at home.

We can use foliage to set an entire place setting for a fun foliage-based party.

I love monstera leaves and they're a great accent on a table.

I'll place my monstera leaf on top of the gold charger and then I can place my salad plate on top of that.

We can also use foliage between two plates to create a serving dish.

Here, I'll lay a piece of Victoria leatherleaf in the center and place another glass plate on top.

Then we have that beautiful foliage pattern in the middle and we can set food on top of that.

Another fun way to use foliage is to use galax leaves to create a rose-type pattern around the stem of a wine glass.

The galax leaves are round and they have a long stem on them.

We use craft covered wire to attach them underneath the goblet.

Just gather up a few of them.

Grab my craft covered wire and wrap it tightly around the stem.

We just keep adding them around the outside.

Work them all the way around the glass.

Tie your two pieces of wire together and trim off the excess stems.

Now we've got two great wine glasses that have foliage around the base.

We can place our silverware on top of a couple of calathea leaves.

This is also known as a prayer plant.

That'll be a great accent on the table.

You can also use a gold permanent marker to write on a salal leaf and make place settings.

Write the name on the leaf and then the leaf can go in a flower frog.

(mellow guitar music) This is a great fresh kale salad and we eat it a lot all summer long, especially when fresh kale is abundant.

We even grown kale in the yard so I went out and harvested some today so that we could have fresh kale.

This is a special variety of variegated kale.

It has the little creamy edge on it and it's perfect for the kale salad.

You could use Tuscan or any type of kale.

It works well.

Let's start with the dressing.

We use a whole clove of garlic.

We'll press that.

Then, we need the juice of a whole lemon.

Then we'll add some olive oil.

And some pink Himalayan salt and ground pepper.

Then, we can break up our kale.

I like to tear it up.

(mellow guitar music) Then we'll add Parmesan cheese.

I like to use a mixture of shredded and powder, or I like to use the great little chunks like this too.

Then, let it sit for about 20 to 30 minutes so that the kale has time to wilt.

That's the best thing about this is giving it time to soften up.

Fresh kale salad right from the garden.

What could be better?

(mellow guitar music) (upbeat guitar music) We'll use this concrete container and I filled it with flower foam.

I cut up the flower foam so that I have a level surface all the way across.

We'll create a little scene in there using our moss first.

We're creating a piece like we almost lifted it out of the garden.

It's almost like a little garden diorama.

Put our moss in there.

Down in Florida, there's beautiful moss that grows in the beautiful hammocks where they grow the leatherleaf.

It's absolutely incredible.

We'll think about that as we're creating or arrangement today.

Got a little succulent we'll place off to the side and maybe a pine cone.

Our soaked flower foam is covered with all sorts of assorted things.

It's a little diorama, almost like a piece of a garden we lifted out.

We'll add a few flowers and then we'll add our star, our leatherleaf fronds.

We'll start with a few green lotus pods.

I like the way that those look as if they're growing out of the water.

(mellow guitar music) Down the central part of our arrangement, we've got a little pathway.

What I'm gonna do is place my carnations low and tight.

This technique is called a pave.

We borrowed the term from the jewelry industry because people would place a pave of diamonds across a piece of jewelry.

Here, our flowers are like the jewels and we'll place the carnation across the bottom.

I'll follow with a row of hypericum on the other side.

Then, I can base in between using the magic eryngium.

This will actually draw a line that will draw our eye through the arrangement once it's completed.

I've added some dianthus and some eryngium a little bit longer so that they look like a little bit of undergrowth.

We'll place a protea, a green one, on the side.

Again, off to the side and not as a focal area so it'll be a discovery later on.

Two stems of Bells-of-Ireland provide a great chartreuse green pop for the arrangement.

Now it's time for our stars.

Using a leatherleaf at full length, showing off the full frond, allows me to bring them in in groupings.

Leatherleaf grows out of a central area.

Having them come out of that central area and look like they're growing is key.

We can place them behind the protea and around the lotus blossoms.

I'm even placing a couple right at the front of the arrangement.

That way, it's the first thing that you see and it's almost like a little world that lives underneath these beautiful ferns.

This is a really long-lasting arrangement.

You should be able to have it on your table for weeks.

I love how the first thing that you see is the leatherleaf.

I like thinking about it as the star of this arrangement.

The other pieces are auxiliary that live underneath.

Amazing leatherleaf, it gives you a huge new appreciation for this wonderful foliage.

(upbeat piano music) (mellow guitar music) One of my favorite things is to have an all foliage arrangement in the house.

The great part is all the different textures, but also that it's so long-lasting.

An arrangement like this could last two or three weeks.

I can use it as a base to add my garden flowers to, or I could even use it with silk flowers.

The fresh foliages make the permanent flowers look even more real.

An all foliage arrangement is a beautiful way for us to have something long-lasting in our house.

(mellow guitar music) I think you'll agree, foliage, like flowers, is a wonderful addition to every part of your life in bloom.

I'm J. Schwanke.

See you next time.

- [J. Schwanke] What's your favorite foliage David?

- Leatherleaf.

- [J. Schwanke] Joe, what's your favorite foliage?

- My favorite foliage goes way back to how this industry started with asparagus plumosus.

A lot of florists don't like asparagus plumosus 'cause it's thorny and it don't have a long shelf life, but it's very delicate, it's lacy, it's real soft and easy and flowy to work with and to me, it is an adorable green.

- [J. Schwanke] What's the botanical name?

Do you know what the botanical name for?

(man talking gibberish) (man laughs) - [J. Schwanke] Jenna knows.

We'll ask Jenna that question.

J. Schwanke's Life in Bloom is filmed in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

- [Narrator] J. Schwanke's Life in Bloom is brought to you by, Albertsons Companies, with additional support from the following companies, the Ball Horticultural Company, Cal Flowers, Design Master Color Tool, Golden Flowers, Sunshine Bouquet, and TheRibbonRoll.com.

(mellow guitar music) Closed caption funding provided by Chrysal.

(mellow guitar music) For everything flowers, recipes, projects, and more information, visit ubloom.com.