Mel Kallal back in his native state as master gardener

Mel Kallal poses at the Central Missouri Master Gardeners Demonstration Gardens in north Jefferson City.
Mel Kallal poses at the Central Missouri Master Gardeners Demonstration Gardens in north Jefferson City.

A lot of retirees might consider moving south to warmer weather. Mel Kallal, 73, and his wife did just the opposite, and moved from Monroe, Louisiana, north to Jefferson City about four years ago.

"It's not quite as humid, even though it's still pretty mean," Kallal said of summer weather along our stretch of the Mississippi River watershed as opposed to closer to its delta.

Monroe is in northern Louisiana - a little removed geographically from the larger urban centers of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette closer to the Gulf of Mexico coast that more people might be more familiar with. Monroe still very much has its own bit of Louisiana flair though in terms of food and culture, and Kallal said he does miss the place sometimes.

"Anything else is a copy, and not a very good copy," he said of Mardi Gras celebrations outside Louisiana, although he added that St. Louis's celebrations are OK.

Kallal said he was born in St. Louis, and Rita - his wife of 47 years - hails from Leavenworth, Kansas. They met in Kansas while Mel served three years in the Army at Fort Leavenworth.

He grew up on a farm halfway between St. Louis and Springfield, Illinois. His family grew corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa there; they raised cattle, hogs and chickens, too. He said he has two brothers there still who continue to raise hogs.

From the age of 5 or 6 when Kallal said he started working on the family farm, plants and agriculture have always been important parts of his life.

He studied agronomy in college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and started off his career working with agricultural chemicals in North Dakota with the Dow Chemical Company.

Dow Chemical later sent him to Louisiana, where eventually he went into agricultural consulting. After doing that for a bit, he decided to become a rural mail carrier there, and delivered for 15 years until he retired in 2009.

After spending about three decades in Louisiana, he and his wife decided to move north to live out retirement. Once he got here, he picked up being a master gardener again - something he had done for four or five years in Monroe.

Master Gardener programs generally are volunteer initiatives to learn and practice gardening and pass along that knowledge to members of the public. The Central Missouri Master Gardeners group supported by the University of Missouri extension maintains beautification sites in Cole County, which are nonprofits or public entities. Members must complete a basic training program of at least 30 hours of horticultural training, and do 30 hours of volunteer service.

Kallal said he probably spends 60 to 100 days out of each year working outside for varying amounts of time.

His favorite things to grow are tomatoes, cucumbers, sedum and hostas. Sedum is a flowering plant that's a leaf succulent, or in other words stores a lot of water in its leaves like species of cacti do.

He and his wife try to eat everything edible that they grow, and they compost whatever spoils before they can get to it.

Kallal also helps build garden sheds for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. He said each home built gets a shed big enough to put a lawnmower and other miscellaneous lawn and garden items in.

On his own homefront, he's "kind of learning to appreciate some native plants," and explained that he has an extra lot next to house that he's trying to fill in with plants so he doesn't have to mow the grass.