Herbs

I love to cook.  Since I also love to garden, I have been adding herbs to my edible landscape over the years.  One is sage.  Aside from the gorgeous blue flowers, it is a tasty herb to have.  The quintessential Thanksgiving flavor.  It is a perennial, as are most of the herbs I will show today. 

Next is chives.  They are wonderful to top off lots of dishes and one of my favorites to add to eggs.  This plant is only in its second year, but will get much larger each year.

Rosemary is one of those herbs that dries wonderfully.  It isn't a perennial in my zone 6 garden, but south of me it will grow into a huge bush.  Around here, I'll simply pull up the whole plant and hang it to dry in the fall.  You can transplant it into a pot for indoors if you like, but I've never cared to.  We don't use tons of rosemary, and I get a lot of it from one plant.  It's something I tend to plant every other year or so.

Mint is a favorite here and this is peppermint.  It is wonderful in teas, jellies and mojitos.  Just be careful, as it is invasive and will quickly take over where it is planted.  This is in my new perennial flower garden at the front of my yard.  I'm hoping that everything here will take over.  I'm not a big fan of mowing the lawn, so the less lawn I have, the happier I am.

This is another mint that I just stole from my neighbors.  They have a huge patch (yes it is really invasive) and they were more than happy to let me have some.  Last year they let me harvest as much as I wanted.  I ended up drying some and making mint jelly out of the rest.  It was a real treat.

Lastly I have thyme.  This is a new plant.  I had a nice plant, but Toby decided to dig it up for a nice cool spot to lie last summer.  This is now in the aforementioned perennial flower bed.  I love thyme in chicken dishes and find it goes very well with the sage. 

I also grow the typical annuals of basil and dill, but you've seen pictures of those in past posts.  What kinds of herbs do you like to grow or eat?

Sunbathing

The tomatoes, peppers and herbs are hardening off.  So far they look very happy in their new play spot.

Seedling update

 

These are the seeds planted on 1/31.  From left to right are Pinetree lettuce mix, winter density lettuce, bouquet dill and genovese basil.   They all came up quite quickly.  I had a heat mat under them until they germinated and then shut it off.  In past years I've done this in my chilly basement.  Even with the heatmat, I had very slow germination on everything.  This year they're in my schoolroom, which is still relatively chilly, but better than the basement, by at least 10 degrees. 

I'm really curious to see how the peppers do.  In years past, they've taken weeks to germinate and then were very slow to do anything.  I typically start them in mid February for that reason.  With the new setup, that may be too early, but we'll have to see.  

 

In this tray are my onion.  Yellow sweet spanish and red bull.  The yellow sweet spanish came up 2 days before the red bull, but both seem to be coming along quite nicely now.  The heat mat was turned off on those as well.  

My plan for next weekend is to start peppers, and eggplants.  It's still ages until anything can be done in the garden yet.  The ground is frozen quite solid, with snow in the forecast for midweek.  The month of February is always the month I decide that I want to move somewhere warmer.  It will never happen, but I wish it every year.