Anne Baker has had a lifetime of gardening and farming experience. From her Cajun family farming heritage to running a certified organic farm and nursery in Uptown New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, she has learned many skills that she enjoys passing on to other gardeners and growers.

She is known as a television guest and a popular public speaker on sustainable growing and organic techniques for the New Orleans area. She strives to regain New Orleans' rich agricultural and urban farming past by renewing our food growing traditions with vigor as the city rebuilds.

Seeds are a measurable way to garden organically, by ensuring your plants don't contain man-made chemicals from the nurseries. Seeds also provide a greater range of varieties to pick from, and often the heirloom, rare, and unique varieties only are available by seed. Seeding will allow you to control your harvest to get a more productive and extended season. You additionally get a better bang for your buck than buying transplants in nursery pots. All that, and you get to look at the colorful catalogs on the bad weather days dreaming about your next garden...Read more →

Ok, so even though this month's title may have you thinking of your friends' friend that parties way too much and wears strange clothing to attract attention to himself, I am trying to refer to the more natural urban wildlife that we may want to attract to our houses.Read more →

I had some nasty flooding in my yard due to Katrina this last year, and while dealing with the cleanup and heartache involved with getting my house back to a livable state, I just completely ignored my yard. It became a "holding area" for stuff that I could clean up and resurrect as usable again in the future.

Now, my yard has become a new palette for landscape design. This is so exciting! Many folks have looked at the task at re-landscaping as a costly burden, but for me, it's an opportunity to put in stuff that I've yearned for. My yard was so-so before; I had long quit using it as a space to relax and enjoy company in. It became the dog playground and the place where we stood fending off mosquitoes when we grilled out. I have the perfect excuse now for a wholesale yard design challenge to make me (and my guests) comfortable.

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I recently had to glaze some windows at my house and went to a hardware store to see what kind of tool would be best for my job. When I got to the tool section, I was overwhelmed. All I wanted was the glazing-angle-scraper-thingy. There were miles of choices. I thought that maybe an inexpensive one would work-I don't professionally glaze windows, but I was reminded that you get what you pay for when it comes to quality in tools. I thought of cheap tools that I bought in the past, and remembered that every one ended up being discarded after much frustration from crappy performance or construction.Read more →

Water seems to be difficult to come by this year. With another summer upon us and the relative lack of rain so far in our New Orleans' area, I'm getting more concerned about how often I'll be sweating as I water yet another time in the yard each week. Read more →

It's my favorite time of year; warm, early-summer-like weather, crawfish and soft-shell crab season, festivals abound, and here come the holes. Yeah, holes. Read more →

"Is that a new shoot from that plant that croaked back in the fall?"

"What? How am I gonna get this whole garden redone in time for blooms during Jazz Fest?"

"Did my shovel float off, too?"

"Where's my blood meal?"

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It's been a warm winter this year which allows the area gardeners to do a little gambling. In our Hardiness Zone of 8 or 9, which is based on average temperatures and frost dates, we can get away with a lot more tropical plantings than some of our zonal neighbors. So what do ya do? For the less risky, you can stick to the tried and true varieties of semi-tropicals that have a safer Zone rating, or plant native species that look great and seem to make it through everything with little care. Read more →

It's a little different routine when gardening in the New Orleans area, post Katrina and Rita! The good news is that both Environmental Protection Agency and other independent soil testers are finding that our soil is not laden any more than it was before the flooding with heavy metals or petrochemicals (with exceptions in a few specific areas). Read more →