Cajun gumbo

[George Shirley]

One of the good things we brought back to Texas from our twenty odd years in Louisiana is gumbo. Basically for the folks out there that don't know about it is pretty much a stew or soup. This one is link sausage and chicken, many gumbos are made that way routinely.

The beauty of it for us is we grew the onions and garlic and made the rue from scratch, you might have to look up rue, basically cooked flour with spices in a skillet, some call it roux but most don't where we learned.

She had a bowl for her lunch but I'm holding off until the evening meal as I'm trying to get below 200 lbs again. I'm not that fat but the 9 lbs over 200 annoys me a lot. With the disabilities I have with my legs and arms I do need to get some weight off. I can remember when I weighed 145 lbs in the Navy, and weighed 160 when I had to climb chemical towers and prefer to get as low as I can.

It is starting to be a wee cooler here than mid-summer, when we had temps over 100F frequently. Still hitting some days up to 90 or 91 but we have had some nice cooling winds.

The fall garden is all planted, the kumquats won't turn yellow for a few months more but they are getting bigger. The fig tree is done for the year as is the pear tree. Pear tree still has some small fruit on the limbs but I don't expect them to mature.

The attempt to grow blue berries didn't work, they died. I am going to take out the soil, etc. in the one foot high container and mix it up again and am thinking, come spring, of planting blackberries and have them climb a lattice. As blackberries are native to this area they should do okay. This time I think I am going to get thorn less berries as I don't like to be pricked that much.

George

[Derald]

George Shirley wrote:

Once again, just so you know: Blueberries, even the "improved" varieties developed for the Gulf Coast climate such as "Gulf Coast" and "Misty", simply will not grow in the native soils of Texas, coastal Louisiana, coastal Mississippi, coastal Alabama or Florida. Also, individual containers should be one of those large 20-25 gallon containers per plant. Blueberries are shallow-rooted but don't do well if roots are crowded. Blueberries are northern and demand a highly acid soil. Them yankees don't "lime" their soils for nothing. The place where I live is surrounded by commercial blueberry farms. My wife and I worked with a neighbor to establish his farm in the early 2000's. Grew a few myself in containers but since nobody here eats the things I quit wasting my time and composted the plants, a net gain. I know for a fact that blueberries in the Gulf coast states are grown above grade or in contatiners in pure, 100% _pine bark_ delivered in bulk from sawmills a few miles north of us, near Perry. Not pine needles but pine bark. Pine needles don't acidify, and I don't care what the home gardening magazines might say. I personally have spread tons of bark to topdress existing rows so as to prevent aerial roots. In beds of juvenile berry plants, I have set replacement plants from their pots, plop, directly into a void created in the _pine bark_!!! not in the damn Florida sand. In addition to the naturally acid pine bark, the plants are fed pelletized slowly released, acidic rose fertilizers formulated for citrus or azaleas. Also, many but not all of the local berry growers add humic acid in liquid form at least once, some of them twice, each year. If nothing else, it aids in the decay of the pine bark. Also, I might point out that in the Houston climate it may be necessary to defoliate the berry plants chemically in order to enforce a sort of dormancy. You might not have enough continuous cold or chilly weather to do the job naturally and dormancy before spring enflorescence is imperative. Down here, the commercial season ends around mid-April and many of the local farms open to the public for pick-your-own. I suspect that the person really making money from blueberry farming is the dude selling the farmers all of the crap they need to grow the damned things.

Check online or at a nursery for "improved" thornless blackberries. Helped grow them, too. Propagated thousands and thousands from greenhouse cuttings. They're well adapted to the Gulf states and produce large juicy berries that taste almost as good as those that lined the ditches alongside the country lane where we all walked home from school. Seems _everyone_ remembers a country lane lined with blackberries, hog apples, and native persimmons. On _my_ lane, for my first three school years, the brambles were so profuse and of such duration that actual tunnels existed, allowing a small child to walk along the bottom of the ditch quite literally surrounded by ripe blackberries, just like Br'er Rabbit.

[Pavel314]

We're still getting figs here in the Baltimore, Maryland, area.

I've never had any luck with berries. The blueberries died out although I g ave them the proper pH and constant care. I found some wild red raspberries growing on stone cliff faces while kayaking and tried transplanting them b ut they didn't take. The wild blackberries are great in some years, but whe n I tried transplanting them to a domesticated row, they all died. I guess I'm just not a berry guy.

Paul

[George Shirley]

Look at some of the veggie and berry catalogs for your area, lots of them have been grown to fit in different climates and dirt. I look at them on line and then look at what other people in my area have to say about them. Works pretty good most of the time.

George