In the Garden with Kerry Heafner

There is no shortage of things to be grateful for this year.  The first and obvious are, of course, family, friends, and health.  But, 2023 has been a special year for gardening and seeds and I’m especially grateful for the plethora of opportunities!  By the time this is published, I’ll be on my way to Berea, Kentucky, to attend the annual seed swap of the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center.  This is a huge event and some of the “names” in seed saving like John Coykendall, Dr. Bill Best, and Ken Fry will be there.  I can’t wait!  I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity to obtain some new seeds, share some Louisiana heirloom seeds with others, and do some networking all for the purpose of growing our North Louisiana Seed Preservation Program. 

I’m most grateful this year for the largest harvest of seeds to date from a number of interesting heirlooms.  This year saw a bountiful harvest from both the Louisiana Kitchen Garden at the Zoo and the modest growing area at my house.  After a schizophrenic winter, spring of 2023 saw perfect weather for snapbean production in home vegetable gardens.  I grew three heirloom varieties this year: ‘Case Knife,’ half runner Appalachian greasy beans, and the Ma Savage bean, which is a landrace of the familiar ‘Rattlesnake’ pole bean.  ‘Case Knife’ pole bean was grown at Rosedown Plantation in St. Francisville during the 1800s.  This was an opportunity to see something Martha Turnbull saw and to taste what she and her family would have tasted.  ‘Case Knife’ beans have long, flattened, wide pods and the large brown seeds really bullet out as the pod matures.  Greasy Beans come out of the Appalachians and are so named because the green pods lack the fuzz found on most pole beans.  They have a shiny, slick…or greasy…look.  Thus, their name.  They are an incredibly diverse group of beans; individual families would have their own type of Greasy Bean that they grew and passed down to their descendants.  Finally, the ‘Ma Savage’ bean from Union Parish, Louisiana, was used in LSU’s pole bean breeding experiments back in the 1930s and 40s.  Dr. J.C. Miller used the Union Parish bean for developing varieties like ‘Green Savage’ and ‘Savage Wonder.’  Marcie Wilson at the Northeast Research Station has seeds of these available if you’re interested in growing them in your vegetable garden.  ‘Ma Savage’ is likely a landrace of the familiar Rattlesnake Pole Bean.  We know that Ma Savage, Ruby Jane Green Savage, brought seeds to Union Parish from Mississippi.  Pods are long and green with beautiful purple streaks.  The beans (seeds) have interesting patterns of brown streaks on them.  At the height of spring, someone said the plants looked like they had green icicles hanging off them!

One of the great pleasures this season has been growing E.H. Reid’s Yellow-Meated watermelon.  John Coykendall passed seeds along to me and I thought this would be a good late season watermelon for the Louisiana Kitchen Garden.  I was not disappointed.  Not a great deal is known about this melon, except that it has never been in commercial production, something the Reid Family of Cumming, Georgia, would like to see continue, and it apparently has been in that family since the 1800s.  This was my first attempt at growing a yellow-fleshed watermelon and rest assured it will not be my last!  This is a truly spectacular watermelon.  A few characteristics stand out.  First, the vine is vigorous and solid.  Second, melons can be deceptively large.  Being solid green, they blend in with weeds and the vine making their mature size not obvious until you sever one from the vine and try to lift it.  I grew and harvested several melons that topped out at thirty-seven pounds.  The smallest was sixteen pounds.  Third, this is one of the sweetest watermelons I have ever tasted.  I mean, it’s no Red-N-Sweet, but the mild flavor and sweetness is not to be believed.  Everybody who tasted this melon really loved it.  So, Reid’s Yellow-Meated watermelon will a be regular in both the Louisiana Kitchen Garden and my home garden.  Let me know if you’re interested in trying it.  

It has also been a great year in terms of communications and being able to get information out to a large number of people.  The radio companion to In the Garden is almost a year old, and I can’t thank Adam Holland and KWCL 96.7 FM enough for letting us do a five-minute segment twice a week.  We’re sponsored by Northeast Louisiana Power Co-op and VOLT Broadband.  The television segment continues to do well, too.  I’m grateful to Scott, Ashley, and everybody at KTVE NBC 10/KARD FOX 14 for letting us do the weekly segment for seven years.  I hope we do seven more.  I look forward to Tuesdays because it’s the only day of the week that invokes anything close to routine into my schedule.

And, if a successful gardening season despite record heat and drought isn’t enough, and it should be, I’m very pleased that the Red-N-Sweet watermelon, developed at the old Calhoun Research Station, has been nominated for boarding on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste!  I’ve been serving on the nominating committee for the southern region for the last couple of years.  There are so many interesting foods of historical significance out there.  Northern Louisiana is no exception.  We need to preserve these foods and the ways in which they’re grown and prepared.  To learn more about the Slow Food movement, visit their website at https://www.slowfoodusa.org. 

I am a lucky man.  I get to earn a living doing what I love to do and meet some neat people along the way.  For all of this and more, I am truly grateful.  

All of us at the LSU AgCenter’s Ouachita Parish Extension Office wish you and your family the happiest of Thanksgivings.