Early May -- Assessing My Gardens

May 4.

It has warmed up nicely here--not too warm, but warm enough for the dandelions to pop up everywhere (yeah, that's my back yard above...).  While Fernando started mowing the back yard...

I went to check on what plants have been growing in early spring--rhubarb, garlic, and strawberries.  I started with my rhubarb, because there were strange stalks I had never seen before growing out of the one large plant!

My rhubarb plant had actually flowered!  I cut them off at the stems so I could still harvest the rhubarb.  Yum!

I'm always late to the game when it comes to chives.  I always forget to use them in salads, burgers, and other dishes, and they end up budding and flowering by the time I finally remember.  See?

I just hack them down and wait for them to regrow.  Next I checked on the strawberries.  Amazing--there were blossoms everywhere!  I'm hoping for a huge strawberry harvest this year!

The front yard garden gets an assessment too, since I've got some herbs growing there.  I'm not much of a flower gardener; my philosophy is that if I can't kill it and it's halfway pretty, it gets planted in my flower gardens somewhere.

Here is my brick garden, as I call it, with flowers and herbs.  That huge bushy thing in the front is oregano, growing like a weed--which is good, in this case!

Another angle.

My English thyme (below, left side) also came in like gangbusters!  I love running my hands through the plant, then sniffing my hands.  I'm sure people walking and driving by wonder what I'm doing.  But I don't care.  Next to the thyme below is a green leafy lettuce-looking plant called French sorrel.  Yes, the English and French are coexisting nicely.  I found a recipe for sorrel soup which I can't wait to try.  Also, sorrel has a lemony flavor with a little tartness and it's really good chopped up in a raw garden salad or on top of fish.

English thyme.

My last stop is my front porch garden, with its little blue brunnera (Siberian bugloss) and the multi-colored coral bells (I think I have five varieties in there!).  The woodland hydrangea bush anchors this garden (that taller bush in the back), and there's also some astilbe still hidden there, along with a few hosta plants that keep coming back even though I've dug them up a few times.  Ha!

It's always nice to make a pre-planting trip around my gardens.  It gives me an idea of how things stand and what space will be available for this year's plants.  Now it's off to plan my veggie garden!


Back to life,
Christine

Visit my photography blog
Visit my photography website

Drying Oregano for Long-Term Storage--Finishing the Process

Once your oregano is dry, it's time to process it!  If you didn't already do that, click here to find out how I typically dry my oregano.  Then come back to this post, which is also linked from that post at the end.  :)

If you don't want to click over, here are a few pictures of a newly picked batch of oregano.  I didn't hang these sprigs to dry, as I did with my first, smaller batch.  There was just too much.  I am letting these dry on a large, clean beach towel in my basement, and I turn bunches of sprigs over every few days or so until they're really dry and ready to process.  See here:

Harvest the sprigs of oregano.

Wash the sprigs thoroughly with cold/cool water.

I arranged all the sprigs on a large, clean beach towel to dry in the basement.

Now on to the second part of the storage process!

Here are my dry bundles of oregano that I hung in the basement:

I untied all the bundles and brought them up to my kitchen.  Then I removed the dried leaves from the stems--I hold the base of the stem with one hand, pulling the stem through two fingers and a thumb of my other hand.  The leaves go into a bowl; the stems get discarded.

Time for my awesome Braun stick blender!  It has a blender cup for blending, among other things, herbs, of course!

I fill the cup pretty full, as you can see, and blend that quantity with several pulses, until it's the consistency I want.  You can get it blended pretty finely, or more coarse--it's up to you!

I use a canning funnel with a quart-sized canning jar.  I just pour the chopped leaves into the jar.

Doesn't look like a lot, huh?  That's why recipes always call for less dried herbs than they do fresh.  However, this is a great way to save freezer space!  This jar is in my "bomb shelter" space in our basement.  I'm hoping to get enough oregano for the entire year, and with that second batch of oregano you saw above in this post, maybe I'll just do that!


Back to life,
Christine

Visit my photography blog
Visit my photography website

Drying Oregano for Long Term Storage

June 2.

Time to head back out to my front yard flower/herb garden to harvest my oregano.  It has become a literal bush!  I snip the stalks off close to their base, keeping them in an orderly pile as I snip.  I couldn't cut out a whole lot, since I don't have a lot of room on my homemade drying rods, so I'm going to do this little by little.  I hope.

While I was at it, I snipped a few sprigs of English thyme (below).  I don't use much thyme throughout the year, but I bought this plant hoping it would provide enough for me not to have to purchase dried thyme at the store any more.

Thyme sprig.

In my colander below, you can also see a few green leaves just to the left of the kitchen shears. Those leaves are French sorrel, a surprisingly lemony-tasting herb leaf that is awesome chopped into a salad, or served with fish.  That's a new herb in this garden, too!

Inside, I started the tying pricess with the thyme here, but it's the same with the oregano.  Once you rinse all the herbs off with cold water, and dry them (leave them on a towel on the counter to dry a bit), tie them in small bunches with string.  I lost my garage-sale-find cheap regular good-ol' string, so I'm using this jute stuff.  Not the best but it works.  When you're cutting lengths of string, make sure each length is long enough to then tie up to a hanging rod for drying.

Then you just need a place to hang each bundle to dry!  For me, this would be my basement.  Just look over there at the "guts" of our house!  Fernando rigged up this drying rod contraption for me to use to dry my herbs.  Since I don't have enough string to tie each bundle to the lengthwise rod, I made a "clothes line" from end to end of each hanging rod, then used clothespins to clip each bundle to the clothes line.  Innovation at work!!

Here's how I did it, picture by picture:

You can see the English thyme hanging on the string which is hanging down in between the two rods, lol--whatever worked at this point!

I usually leave the bundles in place for a week or two (sometimes longer if I forget, which happens frequently...!)   I'll add a link to this post in a few weeks, when I actually process the dried herbs for storage, so you can see the rest of how to do it.  Ciao for now!


Back to life,
Christine

Visit my photography blog
Visit my photography website

Late September Garden

Here's what was happening in my garden, late September.

Overview of an overgrown garden!

Some marigolds were still blooming in the corners of the green bean patch:

All my cayenne peppers turned red this year:

My plum tomato harvest remained steady throughout the summer:

I planted only a few jalapeño plants this year; I harvested them once early on, then just let them grow the rest of the summer.  They got really big.

The strawberry plants grew and grew, expanding to fill a whole square section!

Strawberry leaves

I let the oregano go to flower, since I had already harvested so much this year.

Time to pick the rest of the carrots!  This sweet Nantes variety is short and stubby.

Finally, I had another large harvest of cherry tomatoes.  These were extraordinarily sweet!

Back to life,
Christine

Visit my photography blog
Visit my photography website