Herbs and veggies

While I, personally, am tired of the rain, my pot of herbs are soaking it up and loving it. A few weeks back I bought rosemary, garlic chives, sweet basil and cilantro at the Rochester Farmer's Market and Dan picked me up a giant pot to plant them in. I threw in a couple of leftover purple pansies for color too.




Then, a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't help but swing into Home Depot when I was driving past its Garden Center. We don't really have a place to have a vegetable garden at our rental house, so I decided I wanted to crowd our front stoop a little more with some vegetable pots. In the interest of space, I decided to go with only two though I was tempted to buy one of every kind of veggie Home Depot had. I got a "hearty cherry tomato" plant and a green pepper plant.

The nice man inside told me how much space each plant needs, so that helped to confirm my choice to buy only two. One thing I never would have done on my own (I've never before grown vegetables) was to plant the majority of the tomato plant under the dirt -- leaves and stem included. Apparently, if you do that, any leaves/branches that are planted underground turn into roots and it all leads to bigger fruit/vegetables. So, that's just what I did.



A couple of days after that, I stopped my the rickety old fruit and veg stand by my sister's place in Milford and they had onion starters. I really, really like onions. So, I had to go for it. The only problem was, I didn't have any large pots left. So I planted a couple of the miniature onions on the outskirts of both the green pepper pot (the one on the left) and the tomato pot, and a couple in the small pot to the right of the big ones. I think that will stunt the onions' growth and probably leave them looking more like shallots, but oh, well. At 99 cents a pound, I'd say the 13 cents i paid for about 2 dozen starters was worth taking a shot at it.

So far I've used some of the rosemary in some dish I made, I used the cilantro in our black bean tacos last night, and I've made a couple of Caprese salads with the basil. The other night I made asparagus with hollandaise sauce and just to try something new, I chopped up a little of the garlic chives and a little of the rosemary, and sprinkled half of my plate of asparagus with each. I thought there would be a clear winner, but both were delicious and didn't take away from the sauce itself, which I was concerned about because I love it (I could drink it. It's sad, really).

I keep meaning to cut up the herbs to throw on a salad or on toasted buttered bread for dinner, but haven't remembered once. We're having a salad bar at work this week, so maybe I'll remember for that.

And even though I won't have tomatoes or peppers or onions until, oh, Labor Day, (if I'm successful at all) it's exciting to try my hand at this. Some day I hope to have a giant garden in the backyard of a future home, so I guess until then I'll just keep trying stuff and practicing.