Rachel: South Louisiana. We sit on the edge of the Gulf watching the waters rise, getting hotter, wetter, colder, and drier. In the blink of an eye our streets flood so badly we can't get to school or work, and we've lost another football field worth of wetlands. But the exciting news is that everywhere you look, we are adapting. Figuring out how to rise with the water plan better and listen to nature. I'm your host, Rachel Nederveld, and this is No Matter the Water, a series of interviews with neighbors across the region who are figuring out how to live with our unpredictable weather.

Around Lafayette and the circles I run in, planting natives is the thing to do, and that's because they're beneficial in so many ways. For example, the prairie plants that once covered Southwest Louisiana reduce water pollution, store massive amounts of water and are better at reflecting heat than, say, the grass in our lawn. And some of the plants have roots that can dig themselves 15 feet deep. It's nature's very own carbon capture, and so it should be no surprise that people are integrating native plants into their own backyards.

De Sha: Hello everybody. Did y'all sleep well? I covered y'all last night so that y'all could be extra warm. This crazy weather. I hope y'all like this pine straw put down. I see some of y'all need some water. Are you thirsty? There we go.
When I wake up in the morning and I look out my window and see the sun, the first thing I think about is what did my garden do last night? How did it fare? Did it enjoy the coolness of the night? Did it recover from the heat of the day? And I jump up most of the time, don't even brush my teeth, I put on a robe, you know, I go down the hallway and open the door, and right outside my garage is where my garden is. I touch everything, make sure everything's all right, everybody's okay. And I love that sound, you hear that sound? I love that sound of the mulch underneath my feet.

Rachel: De Sha's backyard is about 200 square feet, and the whole space is used for either gardening or enjoying the garden. There's giant pots with apple, lemon, and fig trees, buckets with different stages of homemade fertilizer, rain barrels, and a comfy, shaded sitting area. There's birds, bees, butterflies, and depending on the time of the year, in addition to all the native flowers, there's bell peppers, cabbage, beans, melons, and the list goes on.

De Sha: I like to plant holy basil, Thai basil, so that when I pass it and rub it, the scent fills the air. Oh, I hear the wind chimes, calling my name. This here is my meditation spot, anytime I feel the need to just be quiet and sit and reconnect with the creator, I come and sit. Just close my eyes, take some deep breaths, and it just resets my mind. This is if I really need calm, this is where I come. My husband, he's here with me and my grandfather is everywhere in here. So yeah, my ancestors are here with me even though they're not physically here. They are here with me, yeah.

My name is De Sha Lee and we are at my home in Duson, Louisiana. I am a nurse, and so I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders, and trying to heal people is very stressful. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of time. So when I come home, my garden lowers my blood pressure, lowers my heart rate, the feel of the earth under my feet. It just heals me from outside in.

Rachel: De Sha loves living things and caring for them, whether that's by nursing or gardening. And she has a grandpa to think for that.

De Sha: He had a garden and everything that we ate came from the land. The only thing that we bought from the store was staples. He raised chickens, he raised animals for slaughter, he had fruit trees, and I spent my summers picking strawberries and cucumbers straight out of the garden and then eating them. Gardening wasn't just a pastime, it was a necessity back then. So, we grew what we ate. We ate in season and we canned. I remember that canning, you know, shucking corn, cutting okra, getting sugarcane, climbing the fig trees, getting fig preserves.
I did all of that with my grandparents, everything came from the yard, everything, even the boucheries, you know, kept hogs, did all of that. And I grew up like that, living off the land. And I said, as soon as I have a home and a family, I want to start a garden.

Rachel: Eventually, Da Sha did have a home and a family. She bought a house 25 years ago in Duson, just outside of Lafayette.

De Sha: I love being home, this is home.

Rachel: And after a couple of years, she started gardening.

De Sha: And failed and gardened and failed, and gardening failed. Nothing grew. I was trying to learn from social media how to garden and everything was like big box. Everything was Miracle-Gro, you buy the big bags of fertilizer and you buy plants. I just bought pretty things. You're supposed to have all your pink right here and your red right here, and your short in the front and your long in the back, and so that's what I did. Spent a lot of money and a lot of time on Lowe's and Home Depot, big box, and nothing worked, nothing worked.

Rachel: Da Sha tried these mainstream conventional methods for 23 years, and for 23 years...

De Sha: Disease prevalence was high, insect prevalence was high. I'm spending all this time, all this money, all this effort, and nothing is growing.

Rachel: Then one day in,

De Sha: CPR class,

Rachel: she and the teacher got to talking

De Sha: and we started sharing our love of gardening. And she said, "Well, you should come to Fightingville Fresh this weekend. We're building a spiral garden." And I said cool, didn't know what Fightingville Fresh was.

Rachel: Fightingville Fresh is a farmer's market in North Lafayette and a real community hub. It was started as a way to offer fresh produce to an area without any easy access to grocery stores. And now it teaches people in these so-called food deserts how to grow their own food too.

De Sha: So I showed up and it's raining and it's cold, and we're building this Herb Spiral garden, so it was the first time that I handled a large hammer. So we were physically breaking up these pieces of concrete, which was amazing. And so we built this spiral garden in the rain, cold being heated and dried by a fire made in a drum. I was hooked.

Rachel: and she kept coming back.

De Sha: I just started asking questions about native things.

Rachel: Native meaning species that have historically existed in the local environment, which means they’re adapted to the area. While invasive species, those that aren't native to the local environment, outcompete the native plants and throw things off balance. Learning about native and invasive species helped her learn

De Sha: what plant goes next to the other. What shouldn't you plant together? What is this bug? Is this a good bug or is this a bad bug?

Rachel: A bad bug meaning a bug that destroys your plants and a good bug meaning one that supports the complex intertwined environment plants need to thrive.

De Sha: Without the bugs, without the natives, I wouldn't be able to grow the food, wouldn't have the pollination to actually grow the food, didn't know any of that. I was just killing everything.

Rachel: In fact, she learned the hard way.

De Sha: I was killing baby ladybugs because I didn't know what they were. I was sad. I was really sad.

Rachel: and then came her epiphany.

De Sha: I've been doing it wrong all this time. I have to get rid of this stuff. As in her entire garden, I was not paying attention to where I live. I just wanted pretty things. I just wanted color. I wish I could have gotten up, but it was like 10 o'clock at night. The next day before work, I started digging everything up. I dug up my entire front yard. I had bags and bags, huge contractor size, trash bags full of stuff from my garden, and I put it out on Facebook. This is where I live, this is what's on the curve. If you want it, come get it.

I started going back to my roots. Okay, what did Papa do? How did he do it? Don't listen to like social media. Think about what you were taught when you were a girl, and that's what I did. I started picking up cardboard from stores. I started picking up pieces of limbs off the side of the road in my car trying to find these things

Rachel: to cultivate new, healthy soil and handbuilt raised beds using a no-till method.

De Sha: You don't use a tiller to prepare the soil for any kind of planting. You get all the cardboard you can and cardboard is free. You lay the cardboard down, you can go get free mulch from the domain compost center, and then you just let it sit and in time it turns the dirt, it kills the grass, it airs the soil, and creates an environment that is better for planting.

Rachel: Yes, all she used was,

De Sha: mulch, cardboard and logs, and it worked.
Started to see a change in the soil. It softened, and then I would compost in ground, and so worms started coming and then my soil started changing.

Rachel: Changing in a good way.

De Sha: All of these bugs just started coming, good bugs, but I'd started sourcing Native plants. A lot of them came from my friends. I kept a shovel in my car, it was a lot of hard work. But the outcome, yeah, the outcome is amazing.

Rachel: And after two years, she's got the garden to prove it. 

De Sha: 23 years the old way, two years the new way. And you'll see when you walk out there, you'll see the change just, just that fast. The colors, especially in the Spring, the beautiful colors. The crispness of if you just bite into a bell pepper. The crispness of the vegetables, the flavor is amazing. And even the flowers, they're bigger, they're attracting more beneficials. So that's the difference, like actually eating food, growing things is the difference. I have monarch butterflies, I have butterflies, I have bees, different types of bees, ladybugs galore. So it's, it's not only beautifying my yard, but it has made it a habitat where the good bugs can come in and help me grow my own food. So it's, it's beautiful and has a purpose.

Rachel: Now that her garden is so prolific, De Sha mostly eats food she grew herself.

De Sha: The old way I would grow, maybe a bell pepper and three fruit would grow on it. And now I'll get a bell pepper plant and it'll have 20 to 30 on it.

Rachel: And that's without any commercial fertilizer, which means her food's healthier.

De Sha: You think about if you buy tomato, where is it coming? Is it coming from Peru? So how does it actually get here by boat, by truck? And then once it gets here, what is sprayed on it? What is embedded in its DNA to keep it the bread, when you get it at big box or at grocery store? What is that process? And a lot of people don't think about that. You know, like if you pick up a cucumber and you have all that, that stuff on it.

Rachel: That stuff is sprayed on the food to preserve its long trip to your table

De Sha: That's not natural.

Rachel: But eating straight from your garden is, and so is eating seasonally.

De Sha: Eating seasonally means you'll have the best nutritional value, you'll have the best color, you'll have the best flavor, the texture of those vegetables that are only meant to be grown in certain seasons. So when you go to Walmart and you buy a bag of carrots and if you put those carrots next to someone who grows carrots in the wintertime, they're not gonna even look the same or even taste the same. The flavor is definitely not the same, nor is the nutritional value.

Rachel: And you grow herbs and make tinctures. Can you tell me about that?

De Sha: As I'm getting older, I'm finding out that I am allergic to a lot of things. One of the things is over the counter lotions, and I'll take the herbs straight out the garden, put them in a glass container. Pour the oil over them and let 'em sit. And so I'll have a, you know, list of ingredients that I can read, lotion that is holistically scented by the herbs that I grow in the garden. And doesn't mess with my skin at all. And as far as my health journey, I've used my garden to help me become a healthier person. I purposefully will grow things that I know that are good for me. So now I can grow more things that are soothing, not only for my insides, but for my outsides as well, to help me age gracefully and safely through food. Let my food heal me. Let me grow what I can to help heal me from the inside out.

Rachel: Has gardening helped you through any tough times?

De Sha: Oh, most definitely. It was a year, March 21st, that my husband passed away, and I can say that gardening has been one of the biggest things that have healed me.

Rachel: How did it help you with the grief?

De Sha: Touching soil, having your feet on the grass, and I can't explain it. It just does something to your spirit. It, it's, it's the connection that I have with creation, with the creator, knowing that he is present in all of these things. And I kind of feel like I know, you know, the Garden of Eden, but I kind of feel that way with my garden. That is one of the direct, um, pathways that I have to my creator is taking care of and nourishing his creation. And therefore I get that nourishment back to my spirit, my soul, my mind, my body.

Rachel: And there's more tangible benefits to nourishing her yard too, because Da Sha soil is so healthy and she doesn't fertilize the big box way. She doesn't have to worry about watering all the time because when you're giving your plants a more natural way to grow,

De Sha: the root will grow long and find a a water source. That was one of the first things that I realized when I started doing more natural things, is that I didn't have to water as much and the bug population was not that bad. And if I did get a bug population, oh, here comes the heroes. The good bugs are gonna come and then eat 'em so I don't have to spray.

Rachel: Da Sha is creating a space rich in biodiversity. That means all the different kinds of life in one area, from animals and plants to fungi and even tiny microbes. She's helping to recreate the ecosystem that's disappearing as we lay more concrete for subdivisions and parking lots.

De Sha: I see all of these changes. Where I live is considered rural in the country, and we used to see deer. We would have to stop on the side of the road and watch the whole entire family, the mama and the daddy on the end, and all the babies in the middle. You don't see that anymore. We used to, you know, every morning the yard would be pulled up by raccoons and possums, and during sugar cane season, we would catch mice on the traps all the time.

We used to see lightning bugs. When you come down Highway 167, you'll see that the fields and the meadows are disappearing and they are being replaced by concrete and homes. When I worked in St. Martinville, there was a meadow that I would go pick flowers from to put in my office, that was gone. I. And then in Lafayette by Lafayette High, they used to have a lot with fig trees on 'em, lemon trees and lime trees, and we would go and pick that, that was gone. The less biodiversity we have, the less diversity we have in our meadows and our yards, that's the less of those things that we're going to see. So, you know, with the disappearing of the land, how are we going to grow our food? What if you can't find a green bell pepper anymore, or if you can't find an onion anymore, what's gonna happen? Our food supply will start to dwindle and disappear because we're not treating the earth well enough for it to give us our return in the food that we need.

So for me, I want to have just a little piece of my yard to contribute to our environment because if we don't, if I don't do it, who will? And it's just a little piece but the little piece may have a large effect, a large positive effect on our environment here. Knowing that I can do a little part of trying to keep Louisiana, Louisiana has been a big, driving force.

Rachel: Can you talk about your family's reaction to your new gardening methods?

De Sha: My mom, my dad, my children, my husband, they were not excited about me having a garden, nor did they want to eat anything from the garden. They thought everything came from Walmart, they did. So now my mom's gardening, she's planting, she's excited. My sister lives in Oklahoma, she has a garden. My sister who lives in Florida, she's gardening. And then I have one more sister who's almost there.

Rachel: How did, how did that change happen?

De Sha: They would come here and they would see the beauty of my yard. Not just the food, but my mom would be sitting out there and my sister and there would be a butterfly that would buzz in front of their face, or the hummingbird would come in the yard or we were just sitting and the, the songs of the birds and they were sitting there like, this is just so relaxing. Start a garden. Start a garden. And so that's how it happened. 

I think for my kids harvesting their first, carrot is what did it for them because I made them go out, explain everything to 'em. And then I could still see them pulling the carrot out of the ground and took it inside and cleaned it off and they ate it, and I think that is what hooked them. And they see the benefit, they really do see the benefit. They'll come here, they'll get something out of the garden. They're, they'll taste it. And they're like, this tastes so much better than the store. So now it's a family thing.

Madison: So what are we gonna pick?

De Sha: Let's pick some peppers, hot peppers, sweet peppers, maybe some bok choy.

Rachel: Da Sha and her daughter Madison are Da Sha's garden harvesting ingredients to make an omelet.

De Sha: A veggie omelet. You wanna get a few of the mustard, just a mustard leaf. Yeah. This is big and pretty. This is nice. Taste it. It's good.

Madison: Oh, it is good.What were you saying earlier?

De Sha: Onion.

Madison: Oh, onion.

De Sha: Just break a piece off. Smells good, huh? Yep. Alright,
So save at the eggshell so I can put it in the warm bin. So we have mustard, green, arugula, bell pepper, parsley, cilantro, red peppers, yellow peppers, which are sweet and hot and a bell pepper. You can cut the bell pepper. Keep the seeds.

Madison: You just fold in the vegetable.

De Sha: Yeah, let it cook on one side. And then we can add the vegetables. There you go. That's pretty right. Very pretty. A perfect omelet. Look at that, let's taste, get some forks and a knife. It was really good.

Rachel: Thank you for listening to this episode of No Matter the Water, which was produced by Rachel Nederveld and Associate Produced by Jillian Godshall.
Production support and story editing by Laine Kaplan Levinson with editing help from Theo Balcomb
The sound engineers for this episode were Jeremy Gegenheimer and Rachel Nederveld and Aaron Thomas did the Sound Design & Mix.
Our music is by Richard Revue and Cover Art by MakeMade
Thanks so much to Phyllis Griffard, our guest De Sha Lee, and to everyone who has helped make this project possible.
A special shout out to The Current for their support, especially Christiaan Mader and Johanna Divine.
You can learn more about the topics in this episode and hear the rest of the series at nomatterthewater.com
Funding for this project has been provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, South Arts, Acadiana Center for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Lafayette Economic Development Authority, the State of Louisiana, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and ArtSpark
No Matter The Water is a production of Ga De Don and The Current Media.