Wow, I can't believe it has been so long since I last visited my own blog site. We were at the end of the USDA fiscal year which goes from October 1 through September 31 each year, so there was the usual rush to get everything finished that needed to be finished. Then, I was obligated to be host to an Egyptian visitor who was here for two weeks. We were working on a USAID proposal for the benefit of both of our countries that has a deadline of October 20th. He has left now, and I feel relieved. Then, on top of everything else, we are in the middle of sugarcane selection which means I am in the field, helping out with selection as much as possible. This year, selection is especially difficult because the cane is down and tangled to some degree. Also, it has been very hot and muggy. On Thursday this week, I was involved in selection, and by 9:30 a.m., my clothes were soaking wet from top to bottom. My leather boots were oozing water out. By 11:00, I had to stop because of heat exhaustion. I was drinking water all along, after each row of selection, but when I went home at noon to change clothes, I weighed 9 lbs less than when I had left the house in the morning. When I got to the house to change, Judy informed me that the air conditioner had stopped working, and the service man wouldn't be able to check it out until the next day. After cleaning up at home and then going into the office to do desk work in the afternoon, when I returned home, we ended up turning on all the ceiling fans and opening up the windows. It still never got below 86 F indoors by the time we went to bed, so needless to say, Thursday was a rather unpleasant day for me all the way around.
Thankfully, the cold winds from the north finally made it down to Louisiana on Friday, and today, Saturday, it was unbelievably pleasant. It actually felt like the fall season had finally arrived. I had church meetings in New Orleans in the morning, but while driving in, I was listening to a guy by the name of
Dan Gill from the LSU AgCenter, who has a weekly Saturday morning talk show about plants. He mentioned that there was a Fall Garden Show going on from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at the
New Orleans Botanical Gardens in City Park. City Park, a 1,300 acre open space near downtown New Orleans, is to New Orleans what Central Park is to New York City. I had heard that it is a great place for families to spend the day together. I had never really gone into City Park before, and thought this would be a great time to check it out. So after the church meetings were over, I went to City Park and enjoyed the Garden Show, as well as the Botanical Garden. I drove around the park a little bit, and now realize that City Park is a wonderful place that has much more to offer than I had ever imagined. Perhaps, when Lori and James come later this year, we can go there.
Just for an update on our summer garden, we planted a few slips of a very colorful variety of sweet potato, bred at LSU, called Evangeline. It has a mix of purple and green leaves. I put it in the garden in early summer after we had harvested most of the spring-planted crops, and it pretty much took over the garden with very little care. It was pretty much growing wild. To our surprise, we got a bumper crop of sweet potatoes, which is amazing considering that we only planted a few slips to begin with. Judy made some pies with the sweet potatoes; the people at work swore they had to be pumpkin pies when I let them get a taste. When it came time to establish a fall garden, we knew we were going to see unwanted sweet potato plants sprouting up like weeds, but it turns out that it wasn't too much of a problem. I guess the sweet potato is related to the morning glory which helps to explain its aggressiveness.
We had some cantaloupe and watermelon plants that hung in there longer than we expected ... another pleasant surprise. Our satsuma orchard consisting of three small trees also had an amazing number of satsumas (a type of Mandarin orange originating from China but brought here from Japan). We have been enjoying them over the past month. Today, Judy harvested two small pail fulls, which will be turned into "orange" juice. I must say that our garden and back yard have surprised us by how productive they have been over the past year.
