Swamp Poppin’ produce along the tracks

The City of Ville Platte is known for producing goods and services that have put the city on the world’s stage such as smoked meat and Swamp Pop Music. The city is also becoming known for producing its own produce.
The City Garden is located on NW Railroad Avenue next to the Louisiana Swamp Pop Museum alongside the railroad tracks and is across from the old Whistle Stop. It has three separate plots of six 20-foot rows on each plot.
“It gives the Boys and Girls Club an opportunity to see how food comes out of the ground,” said Ville Platte Mayor Jennifer Vidrine. “The kids are fascinated to see how food comes from the ground and not from places like Wal-Mart.”
The mayor went on to say that the produce goes to the elderly and benefits people who are involved in the Elderly Nutritional Program at the Martin Luther King Community Center.
“I took the garden over about three or four years ago,” said James Bordelon, who is a native of Beggs. “This was supposed to be an educational garden, and the kids didn’t know what a garden was. I was working at City Hall, and the mayor asked me to take it over. She said she would even give me a helper. That’s when I started.”
Bordelon said that the he plants bell peppers and onion tops, but “the biggest demand is for okra.” As he explained, “People want okra, but that’s something you don’t see anymore. Years ago you used to see okra patches, and now you don’t see that at home anymore. It’s the same thing with fig trees because people don’t want to mess with it.”
He described the ground in the garden as hard and said it needed some work before planting could start. “It’s nothing but rocks,” Bordelon said. “It’s hard ground, but it’s got good drainage. I had to build this thing up with rice hull, and I had to rebuild this dirt back up.”
The area of the garden that has the most rocks in the ground produce the darkest okra plants. Bordelon has a theory about why. “This used to be a loading ramp,” he said as he pointed out behind the garden. “They used to load bales of cotton right there. From years past a lot of trains would come here with oil and drippings of gasoline. That’s why you have a lot of chemicals in that dirt.”
Bordelon is also tasked with applying nitrates as fertilizer. “I put lots of nitrate for the okra,” he said. “You have to put nitrate about twice in the growing period. Nitrate makes it grow and keeps it green. Nitrate is a replacement for water. If I wouldn’t put any fertilizer in here, the okra wouldn’t come out of the ground. Okra requires lots of sunshine and dry weather, but we’ve been having too much rain.”
“The rain affected the okra a lot,” Bordelon continued. “If you don’t see any flowers on the plant, then you won’t see any okra. It’s starting to grow again right now, but it’s scald. Too much rain hurts it.”
Aside from the weather problems, Bordelon still cuts an average of three five-gallon buckets of okra a day. “It’s not how big it gets, it’s how hard it gets,” he said. “You cut okra to find out if it’s good, and if it breaks like thin ice then it’s good. If it doesn’t, it’s not good.”
As for the bell peppers, Bordelon said that he made “some of the biggest” he’s ever seen this year. He held up a big red bell pepper and explained, “a bell pepper like this will turn into a pimento after it gets this red.”
When he is not growing okra for the city, Bordelon grows his own okra at his home where he has about four or five rows measuring about 10 feet each. His favorite way to cook okra is in an okra gumbo. “Anybody will tell you that.”
He then gave some advice to any gardener or anybody considering starting a garden. “What you take out of the ground, you’re supposed to replace it,” advised Bordelon. “It’s like a tree. If you cut a tree, you’re supposed to replace it. Well, if it’s not done in gardening, and years from now you’re going to see erosion and all kind of things.”