Dry Your Own Herbs

Several weeks ago, I came across this article on the Mountain Rose Herbs web site about drying herbs from your garden. It has a great chart listing which herbs are best to dry hung upside down in bunches, and which herbs are best stripped from their stems and dried on screens.
I wanted to harvest my thyme and sage plants in my garden. According to the article, sage must be bunched and hung upside down to dry, while thyme leaves need to be stripped from their stems and dried on a rack. I didn’t have a screen to dry the thyme leaves on, but Colorado's semi-arid climate enabled the herbs to dry on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper in a few days.

For the sage, I tied them in bunches and hung them upside in my basement. It’s taken a few weeks, but the sage dried beautifully.
Now I can store these herbs in mason jars and enjoy them in my cooking for the through the winter months.

Versatile Lentil Stew

One-pot recipes make my life a lot easier on weeknights, especially when the ingredients called for are easy to swap with ones I have on hand. That’s why I’ve been making various versions of lentil-spinach stew from Better Homes And Garden Vegetarian Recipes cookbook. Here is the recipe:

1 cup dry lentils
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp cooking oil
4 cups water
7 ½ -oz can chopped tomatoes
4 tsp chicken or vegetable bouillon granules
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp salt
½ tsp dried thyme
14/ tsp fennel seed, crushed
¼ tsp pepper
1 bay leaf
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 10-oz package frozen chopped spinach
1 tbsp balsamic or red wine vinegar

Rinse lentils; set aside. In a large saucepan or Dutch oven cook onion and garlic in hot oil until tender but not brown. Stir in the lentils, water, tomatoes, bouillon granules, Worcestershire sauce, salt, thyme, fennel seed, pepper and bay leaf. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Add carrots and frozen spinach. Bring to a boil, breaking up spinach with a fork; reduce heat. Cover and simmer about 15 minutes more or until lentils are tender. Stir in vinegar. Discard bay leaf. To serve, ladle stew into individual bowls. Makes 4 servings.

Lately, I’ve been swapping the carrots, onion, canned tomatoes and spinach the recipe calls for with whatever is ready to be picked from my garden, such as green beans, mustard greens, green bell peppers and tomatoes. Plus, this is even easier to make in the crock pot—just put everything in the pot and cook on high for four hours.
Yeah, this recipe definitely makes my life easier at dinnertime. Now if I could just get my kids to eat it.

Annuals Gone Wild

Here is haphazard gardening at its best. We planted this annual—can’t remember its name—last year in a garden plot next to our patio. When the weather cooled, we pulled them up, never expecting to see these flowers again. But apparently, a seed escaped and found a new home in the rock bed on the other side of the patio.
This technically now is a weed, but it’s too pretty to pull up.

Haphazard Gardening

We have the best of intentions when we plant our garden. We want to plant, prune, weed and water the garden plot so the flowers and herbs can thrive. Then we realize how much time that would take, and the plants are on their own. Last year, we grew a monstrous nasturtium in this sliver of a garden plot, along with some basil. This year, we plopped down some petunias along with some chamomile and lemon balm, which are great for making floral waters. Then we forgot about them for a good part of the summer while we tended to our vegetables. But that’s ok—thanks to all the rain we got over the past few months, these plants have flourished and have turned into a cheerful—if messy—flower garden.

Miniature Greenhouse

Here's a great way to reuse plastic large juice bottles: cut the bottom off the bottle and place it over plants at night to keep the frost off of them. We're using the bottles to help our newly planted strawberry plants survive in Colorado's fickle spring weather.

Click here for more Thifty Green Thursday tips.

Also, today is World Autism Awareness Day. Click here to learn more about events taking place around the globe to provide awareness about this disorder.

Down on the Suburban Farm

A young eggplant, one of our new ventures in vegetable gardening.

With the cost of food increasing every month, we have high hopes for our garden this summer. Terry just built two raised beds on the south side of our yard to increase our planting area. We've always grown an organic garden. It makes for more weeding, but I like to weed--kind of weird, I know.

Bonus plant: this cilantro sprouted from seeds left in the ground from last year.

Here is what we plan to grow this year: four types of tomatoes, zucchini, peas, green beans, three types of peppers, onions, and romaine and leaf lettuce. We're also attempting to grow some fancy stuff: radicchio, arugula, egg plant and brussel sprouts.

I can't wait until the tomatoes ripen!

We save room in our garden for herbs, too: basil, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, parsley and dill. These picture show our garden at the early stage, when plants are small and tender. In a month, they will hopefully be bigger and we can start harvesting our first peas and lettuce, then peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. Growing a vegetable garden takes up our spare time, but enjoying all that fresh produce is worth it.

Greetings from Southern Arizona

I invited my sister, Adriana, to write about her experiences of trying to grow a garden in Tucson. Here is what she had to say:

A young sunflower enjoys the sun before the onslaught of summer.

Like the first wave of settlers to this Land of Perpetual Sunshine, I thought all this solar power simply meant a longer growing season than I had been used to in Colorado. Like those early westward expansionists, I took the surprising abundance of vegetation in Tucson, Ariz., to mean that things could actually grow in the desert. While they decided that their home crops of cotton, citrus, and pecans would produce that much more with all this extra sunshine and no winter to speak of, I decided that it meant I could grow the vegetables of my red-hued homeland – herbs, spinach, pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peas – with little issue. We both ignored the fact that this is a desert, and deserts are, generally, very hot and very dry and any plant seen to survive here has a wicked cache of water-saving and cooling tricks up its branches.

Ripe tomatoes on the vine.

The settlers’ mistaken judgment laid the foundation for our current water crisis and created a cornucopia of pollens perpetually wafting through our air and into our nasal passages. The crops they chose release their pollens into the air, to be later brought back to terra firma by rain. We don’t have rain here – at least not enough to wash out that much pollen – so it hangs out in the air until we breathe it in and sneeze it out (plants native to here spread their seed through burs and stickers that hook onto any passing creature and get transported to a new home). So, in addition to a longer growing season, we have a longer allergy season.

Adriana's cat, Boris, enjoys the garden.

My mistaken judgment resulted in an annual cycle of hope, delusion, frustration, bitterness, resignation, and renewed hope. The first year I called Tucson home, I kept it simple and scattered some native wildflower seeds in the dirt plot on either side of my front walkway. One side of the walk included a short, wide mesquite tree, which I worried might shade the flowers too much and inhibit their growth. Putting faith in that idea of “native” though, and working from the hope and delusion that start my growing season, I scattered, I watered, and I waited. I know some prefer seedlings, but I can’t bring myself to give up the miracle of a seed for the quick-fix of a seedling.
That miracle occurred, and the front of my yard was full of tender, green-stemmed flowers with red, orange, and yellow hats – for a week. And then, May turned to June, which in Southern Arizona doesn’t bring flowers, showers, or anything else cute and endearing. June brings sun – hot, dry, direct sun that beats incessantly down on all creatures for more and more minutes each day.
To say that my wildflowers on the side of the yard that did not have the protective shade of the mesquite “died” would not begin to adequately express their demise. In other places, plants that die curl up, fall over, and work their way back into the game as compost. Here, plants that have been killed by the sun stand like torched sentinels, screaming to all who pass, “Seek shelter! Wear your sunscreen!” with their perfectly erect, perfectly frozen, perfectly burnt shells of their former verdant selves. It happens in an instant but haunts your garden memory forever.

Young shoots get some protection from straw mulch.

Since that first season, I’ve tried to adapt. I start growing earlier. I use straw mulch to ease the evaporation of water from the soil. I add potting soil to the barren soil that seems to best support succulents and the Valley Fever virus. I build raised beds, created emergency shade from lawn chairs, and plead and pray for the sun to be gentle to my garden. And each year, as the first vulnerable green shoots break through the earth, I accept that, as with all miracles, it’s best I enjoy them in that precious moment and hold no further expectations.