BY: RUSSELL MCCULLEY

Fall is a good time to prepare your home garden so it yields winter and spring feasts.

This fall’s E. coli scare—when an outbreak of food-borne illness precipitated a nationwide recall of bagged spinach and mixed greens—got a lot of people thinking about food safety. For many, it reinforced the notion of eating close to home: that is, buying produce that doesn’t have to travel far from farm to market, preferably from a known and trusted grower.

For many local gardeners, eating close to home has a much more literal meaning. Thanks to our typically mild winters, a backyard garden can provide salad lovers with months of recall-proof greens, along with a host of other vegetables and herbs.


Vegetables and Herbs to Plant Now
Head lettuce can be tough to grow in our region, but the trend today is toward “open” varieties of lettuce and leafy greens such as arugula, spinach, sorrel, salad burnet and watercress—all of which can be grown in cooler months, says Joan Doyle, volunteer coordinator and greenhouse manager for Parkway Partners.

“Salads are so much better since we got rid of iceberg lettuce,” Doyle says.

Flowering cabbage and kale planted in late fall can survive until spring, she says—just pick a few leaves and let the plants keep producing.
November is a good time to plant carrots, leeks and shallots. Garlic and celery planted now will be ready for harvest in late spring.

A number of herbs can survive the winter chill, especially perennials like thyme, rosemary, sage and oregano. Some annuals will keep growing through cold weather, Doyle says. Parsley and fennel will survive a freeze, especially if covered, but gardeners may want to put freeze-prone herbs such as cilantro, basil and dill in pots that can be dragged indoors during
cold spells.

Protecting Vegetables and Herbs
Doyle recommends “cheapy greenhouses” as a way to guard more delicate herbs from the cold. These portable enclosures, which have plastic covering and mesh shelves, run about $30 at garden centers.

“We don’t have to do a lot here for protection from the cold,” says LSU AgCenter horticulturalist Karen Blackburn. In the event of a prolonged freeze, she says, most winter vegetables will survive under a protective covering. “But if you use plastic, you really want to insulate it,” Blackburn says, by propping the covering up so that it does not touch the delicate foliage.

Preparing beds for winter is much the same as any time of year: plenty of organic matter and good drainage is the rule of (green) thumb. But keep in mind, Blackburn says, that “a lot of bugs and disease will survive winter.” So it’s a good idea to clear the beds of old plants, weeds and debris before planting the winter garden, either with chemicals or, preferably, by covering beds with plastic long enough to kill anything that might be growing there.

A winter vegetable and herb garden serves two purposes, both visual and nutritional. Last year, Doyle planted a crop of greens from a seed mix labeled “bright lights kale.” In winter, the beds were a riot of yellow, orange, white and fuchsia.

“The colors were unbelievable,” she says. And the taste?
“I sautéed it with a little olive oil and garlic, and it was delicious.”




Plaquemines Parish Citrus
The deadly 2005 hurricane season, which inundated lower Plaquemines Parish, knocked out more than half of the state’s citrus orchards. “Everything south of Port Sulphur is pretty much gone,” says Alan Vaughn, county agent for Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Not only were orchards flooded and trees uprooted, he says, the infrastructure needed to maintain them—the houses, tractors and sheds of individual farmers, as well as the short-term labor force—was eliminated in many areas. “I foresee a large number of these growers not going back into the business,” Vaughn says.

Nevertheless, he says, the 500 acres of Plaquemines citrus that escaped major damage should be able to supply enough satsumas, oranges, grapefruit and other citrus to avert a shortage.

“There should be no shortage of fruit,” Vaughn says. “We’re a niche market. We don’t really export, so there should be plenty.”

A note for home citrus growers: Be on the lookout this year for the stink bug-like insect known as the plant bug, a brownish beetle with a yellow stripe on its back and a voracious appetite for satsumas. If you see one satsuma ripen prematurely while the rest of the tree’s fruit is still green, it could be a sign that you have an infestation, Vaughn says. The beetle, which only attacks satsumas, can be controlled with the insecticide Malathion.