Rooted in the ’burbs

On that busy stretch of Perkins Road over by Pennington, surrounded by boxy buildings full of doctors and dentists and lawyers and accountants, there’s a working farm. Honest.

A productive three-acre farm whose soil is moistened with water drawn up from an old well, right in the midst of all the big-city hustle and bustle around Perkins and Essen. Really.

Now, when Alfred “Buck” Bayhi bought the place in 1952, this was the country. The city limits were over near College Drive. Perkins was two-lane blacktop, and Essen and Siegen were nothing but gravel roads.

“If you saw more than 12 cars out there, my wife would say, ‘There must be a funeral,’” Bayhi says.

In the succeeding decades—as Baton Rouge sprawled out to the Bayhi place and then kept on going—the little farm matured. Bayhi and his wife Margaret raised five children and sent them out into the world. The cow that once provided the milk Buck sold to neighbors for 15 cents a quart is long gone. So, too, are the hog pen, the chicken house, the rabbit house and the 4-H lambs the kids raised.

The vegetable garden, though, is still going strong.

Long, plowed rows stretch toward the railroad tracks that define the back of the narrow lot.

In the spring and summer they yield tomatoes, peppers (hot and sweet), eggplants of several shapes and shades, cucumbers and squash.

In fall and winter: broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, greens, spinach, turnips, onions and cabbage. Oh my, the cabbage—bigger than a big man’s head. If you’ve savored a cabbage roll at an Arzi’s Café, odds are it came from Buck Bayhi’s soil.

He relies on the simplest advertising to move his produce: word of mouth, plus a small sign he’ll post out front. Workers at Baron and Budd, the two-story law office next door, enjoy a bird’s-eye view. When they see him working they’ll start popping over, curious. “What are you selling? What do you have today?”

He gets the same question from friends, fellow churchgoers and regular customers who just drop by.

“We love him,” says Karen Watkins, who works at Baron and Budd. “You can pick out which cabbage you want, and he’ll pick it for you. You can’t get any fresher than that.”

Watkins and her co-workers see Bayhi in his gardens every day that it’s not raining. “I wish I had half his energy,” she says.

Longtime friend Wayne Hirschey knows Bayhi both for his gardening and as a dedicated volunteer at St. Aloysius Catholic Church.

“We call Buck’s place ‘The Tomato Factory.’ Even when there is bad weather, he’ll end up with tomatoes,” Hirschey says. “One slice from one of his tomatoes would cover a whole piece of bread.”

Bayhi is an unstoppable gardener. “He’ll keep going until he can’t hardly walk,” Hirschey says.

“I am so blessed to have known Buck and Miss Margaret. He goes overboard to help people any way he can,” Hirschey adds. “They are such tremendous role models.”

For 36 years, until 1982, Bayhi worked as an operator at what’s now the ExxonMobil plant. In his working days, he ran the little farm more as a hobby, a source of food for the family and as a way to show his children the value of hard work.

After his retirement, he became more of a nurseryman. He raised tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and other vegetables from seed and would sell them to a dozen hardware stores all over the area, from Baker to Plaquemine. He created a three-tiered rack to slide in the back of his van just to carry sets of seedlings to wholesale customers.

As that business developed, so did the farm. Six wood-framed greenhouses sprang up behind the house, joining a ramshackle shed roofed with galvanized tin and a spacious cinderblock barn that now serves as workshop and office.

The row of hand tools—all flavors of shovels, rakes, hoes and forks—stretches 20 feet down one wall of the shed. In another part of the building, a rack holds dozens upon dozens of rusty and muddy steel reinforcing bars that Bayhi uses for plant stakes.

Hurricane Gustav took down his best greenhouse, an aluminum-framed building 100 feet by 60 feet with a ventilation system. He’s now using three of the remaining six greenhouses.

The farm still has its own well. “When I first moved here there was no city water,” Bayhi says. Now the well irrigates his gardens. “If I had to pay for city water I couldn’t afford this.”

This complex of buildings, greenhouses, fruit trees and row after row of vegetable beds is all but hidden from the street. Even if you know Bayhi is there, he’s easy to zip past.

Bayhi says he’s eased back on the business side of his farm. He no longer sells rose plants, or poinsettias to churches during Christmas, and he’s reduced the number of seedlings he sells.

Bayhi came by his green thumb legitimately. He grew up on the Poplar Grove sugar plantation and mill in West Baton Rouge Parish where his father was head carpenter. “Daddy would make a garden. He’d get a man with a mule to come in and plow it into rows,” Bayhi says. Then he’d send his children out to hoe the soil into planting condition.

At 84, Bayhi is still going strong. A golf cart helps him zip around the place, and a cross between a golf cart and small pickup helps him move equipment and haul the harvest.

These days, he counts on his son Rick and his tractor to till rows for his vegetable crops. Then the elder Bayhi follows up with one of his Gravelly walk-behind tillers to finish the prep work. That’s just the garden.

On a bright but still-chilled January morning Bayhi is getting ready to start seeding for the coming spring and summer crops, both for himself and his retail and wholesale customers. A couple of work benches and hundreds of wooden flats—already sterilized with a bleach solution to kill any lurking pathogens—stand ready for pots, soil and seeds.

Bayhi waits on the right weather. Start plants before another cold snap, and he’ll have to heat his greenhouses—and natural gas is not cheap. He figures about the first of February for starting his seeds: 12,000 little pots’ worth.

For Bayhi that means mixing up his own potting mixture by adding blood meal, bone meal and cottonseed meal to commercial potting mix. The shed already holds bags and bales of that commercial mix. “Oh, that’s not nearly enough,” he says.

He does have all his seeds in and ready. In addition to saving seeds from rare and favorite varieties, Bayhi orders in bulk. A filing cabinet in the barn/office brims with seed catalogues. Friends and researchers also bring him interesting varieties to try. The owner of Arzi’s Café often returns from trips to the Middle East with seeds from unique vegetable varieties.

Bayhi says he’s not much on trying new types of vegetable on a large scale. “You’re set in your ways. You know your seeds, and you know the results you’ll get,” he says.

Three full-size refrigerators sit inside Bayhi’s barn/office. Open any one and you’ll find seeds: bins with sliding drawers stacked high, glass bottles, tin cans sealed with plastic wrap and rubber bands, and wholesaler’s bulk bags. Each container is neatly labeled. Many are dated. (Bayhi says properly stored and cooled seeds can last 10-12 years.) A few years ago, he found a tomato variety he thought was lost long before.

The freezers, though, are empty.

Bayhi said he plans to start 15 varieties of tomato, six of sweet pepper, four of eggplant and three or four of hot pepper. It will take Bayhi and two part-time helpers a couple of weeks to fill, seed and water all 12,000 starter pots. They’ll sprout in five days or so, depending on the weather. About four weeks later the seedlings will be six inches high and ready for market.

Bayhi will start a few of his favorite varieties, some of which can’t be found in seed catalogs. He swears that oblong green eggplants have much better taste, but they don’t sell. Customers want black or purple eggplants—so they get what they want.

Even in his 80s, Bayhi has no plans to slow down. “It keeps me young. Younger than my children,” he says.

And as the city continues to squeeze in around him, Bayhi also has no plans to sell his three acres, despite several offers of $1.5 million.

“I tell them keep on trucking,” he says. “You couldn’t give me enough money. Where else could I go to do what I do here?”

The sign advertising “Plants for Sale” should be up in the Bayhi front yard any day now. A few months later, expect to see the sign touting vegetables for sale.

Farm-fresh produce in the midst of urban hustle and bustle.

By day Chris Frink is director of the Louisiana House Democratic Caucus. By night, he’s a cigar-puffing freelance writer with a garden of his own. He can be reached at [email protected].