Gardening in South Louisiana Zone 8b/9a

Hello to anyone reading! Thank you for visiting my humble blog!

My name is Sherri, and I’m a 59 year old wife, mother, grandmother, retired RN, and lifelong avid gardener. I live in south Louisiana in Zone 8b/9a, heat zone 10...with very hot, humid summers that last around 5-6 months out of the year. 😂 While we enjoy a very long growing season, we are challenged by too much heat, humidity, rain, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, with a couple of hard freezes thrown in for good measure! Our mosquitoes, gnats, wasps, flies, aphids, grasshoppers, beetles, and other troublesome critters rarely get knocked down by said freezing temps, but our plants sure do suffer! Don’t get me wrong, I love my home and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Our culture is very unique, as anyone who has visited will tell you! I’ve lived in many other locations around the globe (I was a medical relief team RN), and home is just home, as I’m sure yours is to you! 

My husband and I live on 7.2 acres in the country north of Lake Ponchartrain in south Louisiana. We have approximately 3.5 acres cleared with a 1/4 acre pond stocked with brim, catfish, white perch (crappie), and bass. We purchased this property over 30 years ago, but moved here permanently in 2004 and began creating our home and gardens.

I started this blog years ago for one reason, and that was to chronicle the progression of my gardens through the seasons.  I let the blog go by the wayside due to many, many events in my life...illness, births, deaths, and total, complete devastation of our property in the August 2016 “Great Flood of Louisiana”, as some call it. There was NOTHING “great” about it for me, my husband, our grown children, our pets, or our neighbors! Everyone deals with adversity in life, and moreso at times as a gardener, trying to keep up with Mother Nature. So, we rebuilt on much higher ground, and we are still very much in that process. 

We’ve moved into a new house on the property, and are settled in.  This past spring and summer, we began work to rebuild the gardens.  We had almost 8 ft of water on the property, and landscape trees, shrubs, and other perennials were submerged in nasty water for almost a week. It took much longer for the root balls to dry, and has taken up to three years for some plants to die. Our local extension agent shocked us when he told us that some of our old growth camelias had died due to the flood. This was the summer of 2019, exactly 3 years after the flood! How is that even possible? They’d looked beautiful and had even bloomed the last 2 years! So, the process of assessment and replacement is ongoing.  But, isn’t that the way gardening is anyway? 

So, I’m restarting the blog for a number of reasons now. Most of all, to chronicle our garden journey, from where we started to present day and on into the growing season.  Also, when I started researching in earnest for advice for gardeners living in our growing zone, I found it was truly difficult to find. A lot of plants are labeled “hardy zones 8-10”, for example, but my zone 8b/9a is completely different from southern California’s 8b/9a. Some plants are compatible to both, but many not. The heat zone index needs to be more widely used, especially now that global warming should no longer be a debate.  We are heat zone 10, where the same zone in Southern California is heat zone 8.  Two whole zones different! So, with that in mind, I hope this blog will at least provide information to others in our situation.  I took a Master Gardener class and became certified through the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center, just to educate myself and maybe help others with their gardening questions and dilemmas.

So, those are the reasons I’m revisiting the blog.  My goal is to post a weekly update by mid-week each week. My hope is that this will educate, inform, and bring happiness to someone’s day, even if it’s just to look at the photos I will post! 

Have a great day!

Sherri

P.S. I’m posting a few photos of some of my favorite blooms (and performers) from this past growing season, just to get us restarted! 😀

‘Kopper King’ Hardy Hibiscus

Beautiful, purple foliage with giant 8” pink blooms from July-November 2019

‘Airbrush Effect’ Hardy Hibiscus

Gorgeous, dinner plate size blooms from July until November freeze in 2019

Purple Passion Vine

This tough native has bloomed continuously since last spring.  The vines have taken over two arbors, but it still has a few blooms today! It’s January!!

‘Miss Molly’ Butterfly Bush

Slow to get going, but she loves the heat and has blooms galore! Butterflies and other pollinators LOVE her as much as I do!

‘Julia Child’ Rose

Bloomed all season from June until first freeze in November; less powdery mildew and black spot than most other roses

‘Blue My Mind’ evolvulus (Proven Winners)

Extremely satisfied with the all-season bloom power of these! Beautiful!!

‘Rock n Grow Pure Joy’ sedum (Proven Winners) 

This one is so gorgeous, but will have to evaluate how it does in our climate!

Here are the Azaleas in September!

Apologies

I'm not sure why my photos are not publishing in my blog, but I will try to figure it out and add them soon!

End of Summer - Well Not Really

In most areas of the country, September brings the end of summer, but to us in South Louisiana, we know we are in for more of the same...heat indexes above 100 degrees F, humidity, and sometimes the appearance of our worst enemy of all, the hurricane.  This year, so far, we have been lucky not to see a tropical system off of our shores.  I stress, so far...  September is the height of our hurricane season, so we really don't breathe a sigh of relief until after the first weeks of October have passed and we get that first cool front.

We've had some stormy weather in the last few days, and the rains it has brought have been a welcome sight to the gardens here at home.  We had been in slight drought conditions, and my plant friends were suffering, as were the lawn and trees.  Everything has greened up again and the flowers are putting on their last big show of summer.  We have much work to do when the weather cools off a bit to allow us to get out and get busy.  My husband is helping me redesign our pool garden area this fall.  The plans are done and supplies are ready to order whenever we get the first break in the sweltering heat.  This time of year it is just too hot and humid to work outside beyond 7:30 a.m...

There will be much more to come on this garden renovation, with lots of pictures that I hope you will enjoy!  We will be installing new pathways, planting beds, and hardscape around our pool and deck area.  This is something that has been haphazardly done in the past, and I plan to have a place where visitors can stroll to view the plants in both shaded and sunny areas around our 1/2 acre side yard where our pool is located.  Selecting the plant material has been fun, and we are going with mostly native plants and lots of pine bark mulch to minimize maintenance, as this will be a rather large project.  The idea is to have a garden that spills over pea gravel pathways, with blooms at all times of the year.  We will be experimenting with some new plants to our yard, but with more than 90% being native, we expect to have great success!

More to come on that later... Today, I noticed a rare sight when I was strolling the gardens.  There is an old fashioned purple azalea, which normally only blooms in spring, full of blooms here at the beginning of September!  A rare treat that I want to share with you.  I have no idea what possessed this beauty to give us another show, because it is not one of the "reblooming" cultivars.

Here it is and I hope you enjoy your day in the garden!

Sherri

A Long Year Passed

I just reviewed my blog and saw that it's been a year since I've published my blog.  An illness took over my life, but I'm happy to say that I am healthier now and able to get back to what I love, which is my garden.  It suffered quite a bit, right along with me!  However, the summer has been good to me and I've been busy getting both myself and my garden back to health.

It is August in South Louisiana again.  We've had continuous rain today and we need it!  The weather has been hot, humid, and without rain for weeks and weeks.  My mornings and evenings have been spent trying to save my plant friends by extra watering and feeding to keep them at their best.

So much is blooming now that it would be difficult to list in the short time I have for this post.  However, my favorites this year have been coleus 'Sedona',  Hardy Hibiscus, Wild Blue Indigo,  a new heat/humidity resistant lobelia (beautifully blue), and vinca (white & fushia).  I've also enjoyed many different colors of verbena, but my favorite is a white & pink variety that is called "Lanai Twister Pink".  It has been a consistent performer all year.  One other plant that I would like to mention is the new "Sun Parasol - crimson" that has been absolutely fantastic, covering an arbor with beautiful true red trumpet shaped flowers all season, even in this weather!

I just finished planting the fall/winter vegetables in the raised planter beds.  Hopefully I will have lots of mustard greens, broccoli, spinach, lettuce, carrots, radishes, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, pumpkins, gourds, and leeks to show you in the near future!

I will be updating more frequently and posting pictures of the garden in days to come.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy your day in the garden!

Sherri

Butterfly ginger is absolutely gorgeous and the fragrance is intoxicating!

A Beautiful Day!

We are having a fantastic run of great weather in south Louisiana.  Hence, my tardiness in blogging!  I've spent the last couple of days in the garden, weeding, cleaning, mulching, and even transplanting a few things.  It is unheard of that we would have nighttime temps in the low 60's and daytime highs in the low to mid 80's AND low humidity here in August, but that is exactly what we've been experiencing and it is a blessing from above!

So, my gardening friends, this post will be brief so I can return to playing in the dirt!  The fall garden is ready for planting, and I will post about that next week. In the meantime, I will continue to pull weeds and remulch the garden beds, as well as complete a couple of whimsical pieces for the garden that I'm working on.  Will share those later!  I'll leave you with this photo of a cottage garden border that is very happy!

Wishing you all a wonderful day in the garden!




Sherri

Strange Summer

This summer has been unusual in my garden.  As I've mentioned before, we've had lower than usual night time temperatures, which I think has confused my plant friends a little.  For example, as I was walking through my gardens this morning, I discovered my ginger is blooming.  Since I planted it, more than 4 years ago, it has always been the last plant to bloom in my garden, usually in late September.  Normally, the confederate rose, golden showers tree, aster, ginger, bleeding heart, loropetulum, white camellias ("White Doves" always blooms early), and mums are blooming around the same time.  This year, I have daylillies still blooming, and now ginger...  It's lovely and an unexpected treat.  The confederate roses and camellias have tons of visible blooms, but nothing on the golden showers tree yet. 

Another plant that I wanted to mention that has been just amazing this year with continuous bloom since spring, is the cleome cultivar Senorita Rosalita.  This is the first year I've used cleome in the garden and it has not disappointed at all!  It was in bloom when I planted it in May and continues to profusely bloom today.  The flowers are a pink, almost pale lavender and are in clusters atop approximately 24 inch stalks.  It is just glorious!

 

 



Blooming today in my gardens:  daylillies, hosta, verbena (red, white, purple), salvia (annual and perennial), vinca, yellow coneflower, crape myrtle, hibiscus, pink indigo, spiderwort, peace lilly, cannas, mexican petunia, bleeding heart, ginger, alstromeria, hydrangea, melanpodium, lantana (white, purple, rainbow), the odd old-fashioned purple azalea (that has not stopped blooming all season - still don't understand that one, either), and roses (miniatures, knockout, iceberg, and various other floribundas).  I'm a happy gardener today!

Hope you have a great day in the garden and I'll leave you with a picture of my morning surprise, which was a treat for the nose as well as the eyes - ginger in bloom!

 

 

 

Sherri