By Susan Doré

My garden is a useful place, but really, garden is too strong a word. I have a “yard” where azaleas, camellias, perennials, annuals, fruit trees, live oaks, and magnolias flourish with seasonal tending and a healthy dose of benign neglect.

Any crops I grow for the kitchen are restricted to herbs and the lemon and satsuma trees. The yard has to be uncluttered, so to speak, for things like volleyball nets, croquet courses, and sundry small tents where ten-year-olds can hold Extremely Important Gatherings.

I no longer fantasize about having a more elaborate garden because, frankly, I love the idea of those Extremely Important Gatherings and will be sad when my yard no longer hosts them.

But I do turn to friends and acquaintances for whom gardening is a way of life when I want the really fresh vegetables. Such a person is Ed Wilhelm. He and his wife Susan (and their ten-year-old daughter Felicita, better known as Flitsy), reside in a glorious landscape of blue sky, sea birds, rice fields, and crawfish ponds south of Abbeville, Louisiana, in the region known as Acadiana.

The horizon this close to the Gulf of Mexico marsh is unimpeded by woods; there are certainly no hills because the land is as flat as a painter’s canvas.

Directly behind the Weilhelm home is a somewhat small (less than an acre) Garden of Eden.

Ed, a former rice and crawfish farmer, but who is now studying to become a registered nurse, confesses that he cultivates his rows as through they were part of a small-scale commercial enterprise.

“I use commercial practice, like drip-tape irrigation, alternating stakes with string trellises, and black plastic weed barriers,” he says, looking out over his plot.

There are tomatoes.

“I grow Celebrity tomatoes because they are disease-resistant and taste great,” says Ed who also experiments with other varieties, but also relies upon the tested recommendations of the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service.

He also grows cherry tomatoes because Flitsy likes them. And he has cucumbers, which complements his tomato crop. Then there’s Merit corn, and cowhorn peppers (sweet like banana peppers, but they are light green and don’t turn yellow).

Later in the season, there will be okra, and several rows of both brown and white cotton. Cotton?

“For Flitsy,” smiles Ed. “Late in the season the brown cotton will form bolls and flowers at the same time. Very pretty.”

Other home gardeners of this area also grow eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, squash, baby lima beans, green onions (called scallions elsewhere) and parsley—all the necessary ingredients for favorite South Louisiana dishes.

Be assured that I will be hoping to be on the receiving end of garden gifts, since I am only a yard person.

Filed Under: Food Talk