lettuce

Lettuce's season here is the winter - LSU Ag Center says planting can begin mid-August into October, then again from January into February. Once the heat of April comes, it quickly turns bitter and bolts.

Bolting is when a cool-season plant (such as lettuce and cilantro) shoot up and turn to flower. It makes the leaves bitter and unusable, and once it goes to seed it dies off.

But don't get turned off by that, because there is very little that is more exciting than a salad made from garden-fresh greens. They are so sweet, so tender, smooth like buttah. Frequently I have to pick a good deal more than I intend because once I start tasting the sweet leaves I don't want to stop. All on their own, they are amazing. Paired with other seasonal produce, and I fall off my chair with bliss.

I planted lettuce under the shade of the okra, and I noticed today they're starting to come about. I planted a bunch of stuff a month ago (August 23, 2009), and it's been slow growing, but they looked like little baby lettuces.

I like to plant a nice mix of different types, especially green and red leaf. When I harvest I just take off the outside leaves, letting the plant live and produce more leaves throughout the season.

holy basil

Mizell's Farms sells plant starts at the farmer's market - and I bought their holy basil on a whim once last year and fell in love with it. It's fantastic with beef or chicken - a much better basil flavor cooked with them than the Italian basil in the grocery store.

However, I ordered seeds for holy basil and the plant is verrrryyyy different - not the taste I was expecting.

So: From Mizell's - it's ocimum basilicum.

From seed, it's ocimum tenuiflorum. Which is better for teas and medicines.

seed saving: okra

Okra is easily cross-pollinated by insects and different varieties would have to be isolated by a mile or blossoms bagged up to prevent cross-pollinating.

I have no patience for that and don't care if it cross-pollinates since I'm not selling seeds and just want to eat it! It could be some hybrid for all I care.

The pods that you want to save, just leave them on the plant rather than harvesting. Picture here of what a mature pod would look like - dried out and large. I've heard the mature pods cause major skin irritation.

Break the pods open and let the seeds fall out, then store them.

Okra seems to be one of the easiest plants to collect seeds, and one of the most worth it: the germination rates of stored okra seeds deteriorates significantly with time.

what on earth are these bugs?

Click to make larger.From what I can tell, they might be assassin bugs - the little orange ones nymphs (which makes sense since with that huge cluster it appears eggs just hatched).

Assassin bugs are reportedly beneficial insects - eating other pests. Their only problem is that they also will bite humans and that's painful (and in some places, they carry Chagas disease ... which a friend of mine researches - it's a serious problem).

There are soooo many on my tomatillos today - that huge cluster of nymphs plus at least a dozen other large ones mulling about. Crazy.

Not sure what to do - let them be? Avoid my garden to avoid being bit?

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Dan Gill of LSU Ag Center ROCKS. Just got this email from him:

Although we use the term “bug” generically, there is actually a group of insects called the “true bugs.” The three insects in your photos are all members of the true bug Order.

In image 016 [the second photo above]the large brown bug is a leaf-footed bug (true bugs generally have the word bug in their name, but bug can also be applied to insects in other Orders, such as ladybug which is a beetle). Leaf-footed bugs are distinguished by the flat, leaf-shaped structure on their hind legs. They are destructive sucking insects that commonly damage tomatoes and citrus. Hard to control. Organically, a combination of pyrethrin and rotenone will help. Malathion and Sevin are used by non-organic gardeners. Or pick them off/collect them and destroy them.

The cluster of orange black-legged insects in image 016 is young assassin bugs. The assassin bug when mature will be larger and have black wings, an orange body and long black legs. They are beneficial predatory insects that should be left alone. You often see them lurking on plants (in groups when babies and individually as adults) looking/waiting for their next meal.

The bug in image 019 is also a true bug but is unknown to me. I looked at a variety of images on the Internet and don’t see anything quite like it. That may indicate that it is not a significant pest species.

broadleaf weeds of Louisiana

From the LSU Ag Center.

I do love living in a place with stuff called alligator weed!

Though I find the pictures not great on this site, they did help me learn that my main weed problem is spurge, probably prostrate spurge - and these are in the Euphorbia family. Fascinating, that.

and when I buy a house and have an orchard

Quinces can also go to zone 9. (Not sure which variety is best ... I loved the stewed quinces and quince jelly when I lived in Germany, and their aroma while ripening in a house is amazing.)

Citrus, definitely. Satsumas, oranges, lemons (meyer and "regular"), limes (Mexican [are these the same as Persian?] and "regular").

Apples?

Pears?

Persimmons?

Pomegranates?

Looks like I'll need to get a good rainwater catch system in place to water all these trees!

small peppers

I wondered why my bell peppers were so small.

Just read Dan Gill:
Every home gardener who grows bell peppers complains about the size. There's not much I can tell you to do. The beautiful peppers you see in the supermarket were not grown locally. Really, all you can do is provide the best care you can -- which you and your neighbor have been doing. When selecting what varieties to grow, look for bell peppers that produce unusually large fruit. An example would be Big Bertha. Since you will not reliably be able to find large-fruited varieties at the local nurseries, you may have to order seeds and grow transplants yourself. One other important point: Bell peppers are always small from mid-June to October because of the extreme heat here. Our largest bell peppers are harvested in May and early June and in October, November and early December.

But since my goal isn't to stuff them, doesn't matter to me - small is just fine!

By the way, if you don't grow them yourself, bell peppers are one of those things most important to buy organic because they're one of five vegetables most likely to expose us to pesticides. (The others are celery, kale, lettuce, and carrots - all very easy to grow organically in New Orleans!)

vermiculture

I made a bin with directions from here.

I found a young fellow in Gentilly with worms to sell from Craigslist (he's still in my phone as "worm guy"). I think I bought about 250 worms from him (though I think it was less - I just got tired of him searching & counting them); maybe it was only 100.

That was back in April. Now into August, there is some indication of castings (falling out the holes on the bottom, and when I put more food in) but they're nowhere near ready to move to a new bin.

When I first set up the bin, I had it outside and was quite happy with that until my landlord's handyman, not knowing what it was, moved it into direct sun and used it as a sawhorse. Lots of cutting and hammering on it. Poor worms. When I finally arrived home and saw the situation, I grabbed them to bring inside - opening the lid, it was really hot inside there. They didn't all die though.

I read not to put onions in, and to chop things finely. I put some whole half-egg shells in because I read baby worms like that shelter. Otherwise, only vegetable matter and no oil.

The worm bin cannot keep up with all my kitchen waste - I am only one person, but I do have a lot of vegetables in my life - so I still have a compost pile outside. I think that at a couple times I overwhelmed them and the population died back while the food rotted. I was recently gone for three weeks, and before I left I chopped up four large cucumbers that overgrew in the garden, with seeds and all, and threw that in. When I got back, the seeds had sprouted (!) but there was a very healthy worm population in there, though when I took off the lid about four worms were near the top - trying to escape? I threw a big layer of ripped, dry newspaper over the top and it soaked up the excess moisture. I just added a bunch of cantaloupe peelings which I didn't chop up, so I'll be curious how they handle that.

So, overall: it takes a lot longer than I expected to create the rich compost, and the worms are kind of picky but do best with neglect. It's too hot outside most the year here for the bin to stay out there because the plastic bin just really holds in the heat. It takes up more room than I would like it to in my house. But, if I can stick with it, once I move to a new house I'll be darned excited to have this great stuff to build up the soil.

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Today I went to put some cilantro in the bin, opened it, and there was a cockroach.

The bin is outside now and will stay there. I'm sorry, little worms, for the extreme heat, but you partied with the wrong crowd and now you're all evicted.

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1/22/10
We had some bitter cold here a few weeks back, so I did bring the bin in until it warmed up. I can't seem to find an authoritative source on exactly how cold the worms can take it, but if it's not warming up about 55 or if it's getting into the low 30's, it's probably good to keep it inside. They survived and I've seen quite a few in there when I've added food - but they haven't been keeping up with all the food waste I have (and no citrus or onions or garlic for them), and it's nowhere near ready to harvest. Nine months now? I must be doing something wrong, as I thought these were advertised as creating garden-ready castings in a few months - perhaps keeping outside? But, they are still living and that counts for something! Perhaps I just need to slow down my expectations.

okra

Okra has been the most wonderful of surprises here. It thrives in this heat & humidity which wipe out most other plants, and it shrugs off all pests and problems with a special grace. Last year winds from Gustav and then Ike knocked the okra over - but when I just picked them up and staked them down (stakes at either end of the row and rope between), then kept on producing well into October. I had so much okra I didn't know what to do with it, so started pickling it - and that is a special joy as well.

Perhaps the first surprise okra brought me was the beauty of its flowers. Holy moley! They knock me flat every time I see them.

In The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch, she says to get new seed every year and to speed up the normally slow germination process by soaking the seeds overnight in tepid water. I found if I plant when it's very warm out, there's no need to soak.

I was dismayed when mine this year had a very bad infestation of aphids and ants (the ants tend the aphids like cattle) and then mealy bugs, and I went to some great lengths to rid myself of them. (Really I was just an idiot for laying a garden bed on what was clearly an ant trail - but what to do in these tiny New Orleans yards?) I sprinkled cinnamon, turmeric, and cayenne pepper (it looked like this in July - now it's September and it's producing).

It looked like Indian food, but it did no good.

Then, I tried vinegar water based on website & a friend, and it killed all the leaves I sprayed it on. But, the plant came back. Neither bugs nor poisons killed it, and now I'm getting some wonderful okra pods each day.

The trick is to pick it when it's little and tender rather than too large and woody. This can be tricky because sometimes the pods seem to hide, and the day after being sure you picked all possible pods, you find one 8" long which is tough like a tree. You need to pick every other day at least - because when you stop picking, the okra stops producing.

I like Clemson Spineless because those pesky spines are irritating.

When I pick, I make sure they're fully dry, then stick them in a green bag and accumulate until I have enough for a gumbo or to pickle. They can also be frozen (sliced or whole). I try to accumulate less than a week though - don't want quality to deteriorate too much.