Running a restaurant can be a game of cold numbers. The St. John Restaurant in downtown St. Martinville goes through two thousand pounds of cucumbers every year. And three thousand pounds of tomatoes. And thousands of heads of lettuce. And tens of thousands of peppers. It’s a constant mathematical demand. Which is why Chip Durand envisioned an on-site greenhouse as the centerpiece of his long-term plan for St. John when he purchased an adjacent property from the city in 2018 and proposed an ambitious expansion. What restaurant owner wouldn’t want to grow fresh cucumbers next door? What customer wouldn’t want to eat fresh lettuce like that?

Fast forward five years. Today, the newly-expanded St. John extends beyond the old pecan warehouse at Hamilton and New Market all the way to Madison, occupying the whole block along Bayou Teche. A large parking area has been added between the restaurant and an old ice house on the property. And two glowing greenhouses, as of January 2023, are delivering their first crop of tomatoes.

The old ice house—once used to manufacture and store blocks of ice—has found new life as part of the St. John expansion. The one-of-a-kind structure is oddly-shaped, in the way that warehouses often are, their form being defined primarily by the function they were meant to fulfill, and not by a conscious effort to be beautiful. It’s effortlessly chic in ways that would be impossible to contrive. Two greenhouses—wood-and-glass lean-to structures with tall south-facing windows—have been built into the side of the ice house, their sun-weathered boards so elegantly incorporated into the overall corrugated patchwork architecture, you don’t immediately realize that the two structures are from different centuries.

Luke Dugas, newly appointed farm-to-table director for St. John, was instrumental in bringing the greenhouses to life. The St. Martinville native moved to Lafayette at the age of five, and after graduating with a degree in environmental engineering from LSU, found himself in Denver, Colorado, where he put his education and his knack for raising shrimp in home aquariums into action, working in the field of aquaponics. (Aquaponics is a system that combines aquafarming with hydroponics, for example, lettuce grown hydroponically in close association with tilapia.)

*Luke Dugas, farm-to-table director for St. John Restaurant*

Dugas had initially approached Durand as a potential client, but when Durand shared his farm-to-table vision for the restaurant, Dugas came around to the idea of moving back to St. Martinville and spearheading the project. He gave me a tour of the greenhouses forty days after the first seeds were planted. Stepping inside, surrounded by trellising cucumber and tomato vines, Dugas cut a Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk figure among the towering plants. I was immediately struck by the spare artistry of the set-up—part art installation, part science experiment.

For a hundred thousand dollars, he explained, you can have a hydroponics system set up for you from scratch. Or if you know what you’re doing, and you’re good at building things, you can do it yourself and save a lot of money. You start small and scale up from there.

The Dutch bucket system, as this particular arrangement is called, is simple, in the sense that you can see how it works just by looking at it. Extending the length of the interior of the greenhouse is a narrow wooden table tailor-made to the space. Dugas has staggered twenty-nine buckets along the length of the table, fourteen on one side, fifteen on the other, assembling them along an irrigation line. There are two plants in each bucket—two tomatoes, two cucumbers or two peppers. A reservoir on the floor pumps a nutrient-rich solution up to the buckets, where the solution is dripped in, and a return line allows extra solution to return to the reservoir, preventing the roots from drowning.

Compared with traditional open-air methods, greenhouses allow greater control over a plant’s environment. The idea is that if you give the plants exactly what they need—the right temperature, the right amount of light, the right amount of water and nutrients—they will give you their best crop in return. Think of a greenhouse as a large container of growing plants. You’re optimizing that container. You’re attuned to the whole space of it—a sentiment summarized by a pithy piece of advice Dugas learned from one of his mentors. “The best farmer is the best janitor.” When you hear it said, and you see the tidy and orderly space Dugas has achieved in the greenhouse, nothing extra or out of place, you intuitively understand the truth in it.

Tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers all grow well in Dutch buckets, and Dugas has found the flexibility of the system to be one of its principal virtues. For example, the buckets can be set at various heights, to make the plants most accessible, and the height of the trellis can be extended vertically, allowing vining plants to climb as they grow.

*Perlite as a stand-alone growing medium*

There’s no soil in the buckets. Instead, the plants grow in a material called perlite. You have probably seen perlite before; those translucent white pearls that come sometimes in potting soil. The naturally-occurring volcanic glass can be used as a stand-alone growing medium and can do a lot of what soil does. The porous material holds water well, and although it’s light and airy, compacted, it provides the perfect foundation for a growing plant to send its roots into. One thing perlite doesn’t do—it doesn’t provide nutrients to a plant like soil does. So nutrients get pumped in with the water.

Dugas went through the numbers with me. The set-up cost for a Dutch bucket system of this scale is around $3500. Each bucket has two tomato plants, so with twenty-nine buckets, that’s fifty-eight tomato plants. At forty pounds per plant, that’s 2320 pounds of tomatoes annually. Taking into account a twenty percent loss, that leaves you with around 1800 pounds of tomatoes. Two such Dutch bucket set-ups would easily supply the restaurant.

*Delanius Narcisse, promoting tomato pollination with an electric toothbrush*

Grow lights are a significant expense. Ideally, plants get eighteen hours of light every day by either natural or artificial means. One of the upsides of St. Martinville’s climate is the plentiful sunshine the area receives throughout the year—although considerably less so in winter. Using past weather patterns as a guide, Dugas is able to estimate how much artificial light needs to be supplemented. Full spectrum LED lights are the most energy efficient light source, and when mounted on a track, they can be slowly moved among plants, further enhancing efficiency. One of the downsides of St. Martinville’s climate is the high humidity, which renders plants vulnerable to mold. Humidity is primarily controlled by ensuring adequate ventilation.

Labor is also a significant expense. The plants must be frequently monitored for pests. Irrigation is tightly controlled. Nutritional deficiencies must be corrected. And certain plants benefit from individualized attention. Tomato vines, for example, produce more tomatoes when the vines are gently shaken with a battery-operated toothbrush. The vibration loosens the pollen inside the star-shaped yellow flowers, promoting self-pollination. Other expenses are the materials needed for building the infrastructure—PVC pipes, treated lumber, water pump, etc.—as well as seeds, nutrients, fungicides and pesticides.

The first seeds were planted on November 25, 2022, and a month and half later, tomatoes and cucumbers have already climbed halfway to the ceiling. Dugas encourages people to come and peek through the windows of the greenhouses, whether they eat at the restaurant or not.

Running a restaurant can be a game of cold numbers, to be sure, but it isn’t going to thrive unless it’s rooted in something deeper. For Dugas, it’s more than just supplying fresh produce to meet the restaurant’s constant demand. It’s an opportunity to be a craftsman and an artist. And if the living billboard of the greenhouse sparks someone’s curiosity, that only sweetens the deal. For Durand, it’s about staying close to the land. It’s about being rooted in the history of his family, and in the history of St. Martinville. One look around St. John, and you can see it for yourself.

Twilight, in my opinion, is the best time to visit. After the statue of Evangeline, the twentieth-century ice house, glowing with the light of two twenty-first century greenhouses, is the most enchanting space in downtown St. Martinville when night begins to fall. The three-dimensional tomato plants growing taller before your eyes; the orderly volumes of cucumber vines spiraling up the trellises. People sharing meals around tables in the old pecan warehouse. The Bayou Teche flowing by on its way to the Evangeline Oak, telling a story beautifully without saying a word.

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