Gardening in South Louisiana: 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!!