Westhampton Beach Gardener Featured On 'Martha Knows Best'

Looking to put some positivity out into the world during the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, Jenn Neubauer decided to display her love of gardening on Instagram and share tips.

When she posted the first image — a jade plant with a rusted fishing hook set among the succulent leaves — the Westhampton Beach resident unknowingly set on a path that led to her having a virtual face-to-face with lifestyle maven Martha Stewart for a national television show.

Ms. Neubauer said last week that she has been gardening for 10 years, but never documented her activities on social media before launching the new Instagram account, hookandgarden, in April. In addition to photos of houseplants, her garden, and fresh-caught seafood, she posts short do-it-yourself tutorial videos. It was one of these that caught a casting agent’s eye.

It was the second week of May and the plants that Ms. Neubauer had started from seed were ready to be moved into pots. However, due to pandemic closures, she had never gone out and bought the little seedling pots she needed. She knew other gardeners were in the same boat — and she knew how to improvise. Using sheets of newspaper, scissors, and a can of beans as a roller, she demonstrated how to make biodegradable paper pots in a 5-minute video. The casting agent came across the video and reached out to Ms. Neubauer.

“They said that they were casting for a new gardening/DIY show,” Ms. Neubauer recalled. It would be focused on the pandemic and how everyone was “digging in” to their homes and gardens because they couldn’t go anywhere. But the agency would not tell her whose show it was, only that an expert would offer her gardening advice.

She decided to live with the mystery and go along for the ride. After a prescreening interview with the casting director and a screening with a producer, she was officially picked.

“They chose me to be part of the show, and they still didn’t disclose what network it was going to be aired on or who I would be speaking with,” Ms. Neubauer said.

The producers gave her a list of topics to choose from, and she sent back a few ideas on DIY projects and gardening challenges to share with the host. The idea the producers liked was Ms. Neubauer’s difficulty growing perennial flowers.

“I’m a really big vegetable gardener — I grow a lot of my own food, and I’ve been doing that for years and years — but I don’t have a lot of success with perennials and, specifically, dahlias,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite summer flowers.”

On the day of the Zoom call in the spring, Ms. Neubauer got set up in her backyard in front of her garden with her iPad. Up until the last second, she still didn’t know who she would be speaking with.

“The producer comes on and he’s like, ‘OK, you’re going to meet with the expert now.’ And the video comes on, and it’s Martha Stewart. I might have had a crazy reaction. I can’t remember, I might have cursed.”

Ms. Neubauer said she could not tell if Ms. Stewart was at her home in Maine or the one in East Hampton, but both are featured on the television show, which she later learned is “Martha Knows Best” on HGTV.

They were on the call together for about 40 minutes.

“She really got into it with me,” Ms. Neubauer said. Ms. Stewart taught her a few things, like that dahlias have tubers. “She corrected me because I thought that they were bulbs.”

Ms. Stewart also went over what dahlias are and how to treat perennials.

“In particular, the dahlia that I was looking to grow is the dinner plate dahlia, which is a style of dahlia that has these big huge yellow flowers, and what she told me during the call is they’re named appropriately because they are like the size of dinner plates,” Ms. Neubauer said.

Then Ms. Stewart wanted to walk Ms. Neubauer through the planting steps.

“I was kind of scrambling because I wasn’t prepared to be planting,” Ms. Neubauer said. “So I’m, like, running to my greenhouse to get my gloves and my shovel.”

After they planted the tuber “together,” they had a chat and Ms. Stewart asked her to share followups and photos of the dahlia — which Ms. Neubauer named Martha.

Ms. Neubauer, who is a former private chef and works for the wellness services software company Mindbody, co-owns the antiques shop Collect in Westhampton Beach Village with her husband, Leif Neubauer, who also has a security company. She said cooking and gardening is her creative outlet while the shop is her husband’s. He also helps in the garden; this year they built a greenhouse and expanded the garden as a “quarantine project.”

They have three children, Henry, 4, Miriam, 14, and Griffin, 16. “That’s my greatest joy, to garden with my kids,” Ms. Neubauer said.

The “Martha Knows Best” episode premiered Friday night, August 14, and is available on-demand now.