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!