Friday, June 12, 2015

Herbs: Use Them Liberally


You must be getting tired of me and my plants by now. Honestly, I had no clue how obsessed I was with flowers and gardening until I looked back on how many posts have been about at least one of those topics, and here’s yet another!

I grew up with vegetable gardens. My grandfather always had these lush gardens filled with tomatoes, squash, string beans, cucumbers, scallion (green onion), and thyme. When my family would visit on the weekends, four year old Brittany would put on her special overalls and head down to the garden to “help” water all the plants (which we did by hand, with buckets). When he passed away when I was eleven, my parents and I tried to keep up the tradition but quickly discovered that taking care of his large garden was a full-time job, not something we could feasibly do with work and school.

Since then, we’ve kind of had a memorial garden at our own home where we grow tomatoes and scotch bonnet (a super-hot pepper from Jamaica). We’ve slowly but surely expanded the garden to include strawberries and raspberries, and I am desperately trying to convince my parents to get a fruit tree (to no avail…yet).

My latest additions to our garden though are herbs! I’m really not a huge cook, but the thought of being able to go into the garden and pluck some mint leaves seemed like such fun. And dried herbs pale in comparison to the fresh stuff. As an added bonus, the herbs smell lovely.

We now have mint, sweet basil, rosemary, and sage growing in a little planter on our patio. The mint is definitely going into some iced tea this summer, and a few cocktails. The basil will go so well with our homegrown tomatoes and some mozzarella—Margherita pizza, anyone? As for the sage and rosemary, if any of you have some recipes, I’d love to hear them!

2 comments:

  1. Oh! It must be really cool to have your plants at home, too bad I'm a disaster for taking care of them. But after you can cook with them!!! Have a nice day,
    Vera

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