Showing posts with label Garden Area 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Garden Area 1. Show all posts

Sunday, July 27, 2008


Here is our herb garden with plenty of flowers. I love white petunias! On the patio are potato plants in pots. I've been wanting to try it so since we had so many sprouters left over from last year we decided to give it a try. They are starting to flower and should be mature in 4-6 weeks. Yukon Gold. The herb garden was rocky hardpan clay! Covered in weedy grass. We both feel lawn is a waste of space and since many herbs are irradiated these days, we planted dill, garden sage, tarragon (French) thyme, oregano, 4 different kinds of basil, 2 different kinds of lavender, pineapple sage (I just like the bush and it smells awesome), echinacea, calendula, spearmint, and a knock out rose in the middle of it all. Petunias and marigolds round it out. I love it. I have always desired to put one of these in. It was a lot of hard work. After turning it up and shaking the dirt off the grass roots (which we added to our compost pile) we picked out multitudes of rocks. This is right near the house so the soil is full of rocks from when they built. We amended the soil with Michigan peat and composted cow manure. Then tilled it again and pulled more rocks. Since herbs can take or leave rich soil, they have flourished. But many flowers and herbs I planted did not come up. Maybe next year with finished compost on it. I used some of the dill last night in a "dill crock". I bought a 2 gallon crock and followed Euell Gibbons directions in my thrift store buy, "Stocking Up" by Rodale. We used dill, cauliflower, green beans, garlic, more dill, onion chunks, pepper flakes and more dill on top. Then we put 1 measure of salt to 10 measures of water and mixed it until the salt dissolved then added it to the crock, put a salad plate on top, and weighted it down with a glass jar 1/3 filled with water. The food must stay under the brine or it goes bad. This a.m. I added 1/4 cup of salt on top of the plate and skimmed off a little scum. It should be ready in 2 weeks. We are keeping it in the livingroom which stays between 70 -80 degrees. We'll see! Oh yeah, I also put in little rock hard green tomatoes. I hope it works. The art of fermenting foods (way better than pickled stuff) is almost lost. I'm going to learn this, I really am.