Recently in Medicinal Herbs Category

As usual, both my garden and my garden blog were very neglected by the end of summer.  But now that it's fall and I can be outside without thinking my brain is going to evaporate, I'm excited to be doing things with plants again!

First I picked leaves off the volunteer tulsi, then put them in a jar and poured jojoba oil over them.  I couldn't find an exact recipe online or in any of my herb books, but I'm trying to make a tulsi oil to possibly be used in soap.

Then I dug up a bunch of dandelion roots.  I washed them off and left them to dry overnight on a paper towel.

Then I chopped 'em up ...

... and drowned them in 100 proof vodka.  (I'm glad that I remembered to move the burning white sage incense off of the counter where I was working before I started splattering high-octane hooch all over the place or my adventures this morning would've been way more exciting.)

I'm never as on top of record-keeping as I wish I was.  I should just accept this and move on. :P

Today while madly planting the calendula and the rest of the peppers before it rains all weekend, I realized that I'm not really sure what I did with the cayenne peppers.  I think I know, but that was determined by process of elimination.  For the record, I think they're parallel to the edamame. Heh.  But that means that I don't know where the Hungarian Hot Banana peppers are - unless I alternated the two.  Luckily those two varieties should be easy to tell apart. But I might have put them with the jalapenos.  Hmm ... I guess time will tell ...

The jalapenos are interspersed with the tomatoes.  And the tomatoes ... well, I made up a little acronym so that I can remember what is what.  It's LAG, which stands for Lollipop, Amish Paste, Gold Medal.  Except there are three plants that aren't either of those.  Isn't that always the way - all these exceptions ... Anyway - I also have a German Pink, a Black Cherry, and a Mortgage Lifter.  The German Pink and the Black Cherry are the western-most tomatoes, and the Mortgage Lifter is the Eastern-most on the southern side.  Yeah, that's not complicated.  Maybe I should make a little coordinate grid for them!

I had a similar problem with the peppers.  I had three varieties left.  So, facing north, the peppers are TOY.  That's Thai Hot, Orange, and Yellow.  ("Yellow" is actually Doe Hill Golden.)

Alright, that's duly documented.

I think the chard are finally deciding to sprout, maybe.  And I'm very excited to see that I have baby cucumbers forming, yay!

Oh! And the Nikko Blue hydrangea is blooming!  The ... one next to it should start blooming any day now, too. ^_^

And I noticed that valerian flowers do have a very faint, delicate smell.

I've been trying to post these pictures since Sunday afternoon.  So without further ado and no photo editing, here they are.

This is the long view of the raised beds before I cut the fabric and planted lima beans, chard, squash, and zucchini.

Here's a close-up of the stakes I drove to keep the boards from bowing.  And I also plan to tie bean poles and tomato trellises to them.

These are the cucumber buckets.  (They're former kitty litter buckets with drainage holes drilled into them.)

In the outdoor seed starting tray, the catnip and Krishna tulsi are finally sprouting.  I was beginning to think that catnip just doesn't like me!  But I guess it thinks I'm OK, after all. ;)  You can't really see it in this picture, but there are two little sprouts under the post-it note on the left.

The blue vervain did come back - I thought it was dead.  And I think there might be an echinacea next to it.  Or it might be a weed.  I guess time will tell. 

I finished chunking dirt into the raised beds today.  Much to my horror, I discovered that stuff sprouted under the landscaping fabric! Not. Good.  I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do about that.

I haven't seen signs of any more deer damage, but I'm still sprinkling chili powder on stuff every few days.

The wire grass woke up this week. Ugh.  Now the battle to keep it from overrunning everything will commence in earnest. 

But the most worrisome thing I noticed today is that the tomatoes are sickly.  The peppers are fine - it's just the tomatoes.  The ends of the leaves lose their color and then shrivel up.  The plants overall look pretty anemic.  I gave 'em a shot of worm poop today in case they're undernourished and didn't leave them out in the sun as long as I did the peppers.  I'm not sure that the sun is hurting them - I keep them well-watered and the leaves aren't really droopy.  So I don't know what the deal is.  Needless to say, I hope they make a miraculous recovery!  I tried to take a close-up picture of them, but it's all blurry and you can't see what I'm talking about.

Here's a longer view of the tomatoes and squash, zucchini, and cucumbers:

And the peppers:


I also finally put up a trellis for my snow peas.  I staked twine down with landscaping fabric anchors and looped it through the rungs of my deck railing.

Deer continue to appear in my yard, too.  I found this footprint in my front flowerbed, the one right against my front porch!  The mailbox flowerbed was bad enough, but six feet from my house?!

Those impertinent deer had better be glad that I live in the city, that's all I'm sayin'.

I walked around the yard and dumped chili powder on all of my plants.  I saw 5lb bags of red pepper at an asian market yesterday.  I think I'll have to go back and get some. 

I'm working on a better solution for  deterring the deer, but I haven't finished thinking the design through yet. 

Meanwhile, in happy news, the calendula have appeared!

It looks like those weird little pod-looking things were the seeds. (I was concerned that the seeds were in the pod, and that I needed to break the pod apart.)

I didn't see any signs of life from the other seedlings in that tray, but I'm very glad to see the calendula. :)

In One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka said something like "Nobody's garden is the same, and no two gardeners are the same.  Experiment and find a system of gardening that works for you."  That is a really loose paraphrase, but I thought that general idea was brilliant advice, and I decided to follow it.  Some of the ways I'd been taught to do things (or learned through research) were not working out for me for one reason or another. 

Today I started an experiment to attempt to solve one of those problems. 

The problem is that I'm not at home to cart tender seedlings indoors and then back outside as conditions dictate.  With the exception of tomatoes and peppers, all of the seeds I've started indoors and then put outside have dried up like vampires in the sun.  They can't survive the transition from indirect sunlight to direct for the 8 hours that I'm at work.  People who don't have to sit in an office for 8 hours a day can drag their seeds back out of the light after 2 hours, and then gradually increase the amount of light until the seedlings are OK with being outside all day.  Apparently tomatoes and peppers are more tolerant of suddenly being blasted by sunlight.

So I decided to start some of my seeds outdoors so that they'll grow up with the sun and wind and not die from shock when they meet the sun and wind for the first time.   I didn't just plant them into the ground itself because I've still got about a month before the last frost date for my area, and I don't want to tempt fate.

I want to avoid dumping water on the seeds before they get established, so I drilled holes in the bottom of a nursery tray.  The idea is that I'll be able to put water in the cover that the tray is sitting in and the water will wick up through the holes.  I hope.  This is an experiment! :P

Here's sunlight shining through the holes I drilled in the tray.  (I got to use a power tool, woo! :P  You know, I think that's the first time I've actually used a drill. Huh.)

I totally put the wrong dirt in the tray the first time.  I wanted to kick my own butt.  Luckily I noticed before I planted the seeds in it, so I dumped the potting soil back into the bag and poured the sterile seed starter mix into the tray. 



Then I soaked the mix down with rainwater from my rain barrel and started planting the seeds.  I've never planted calendula before, and the seeds are weird!  I'm not sure if these are really little seed pods with the seeds clinging to them, or if the whole thing is a seed.

Today I planted my Fall garden.  It's in containers.  Containers will hopefully be much easier to keep weed-free. 

Here are the containers:



That's bamboo leaves on the top of the pots.  The meteorologists say that it's going to rain all week, and a friend advised me to lightly mulch the seeds to keep them from floating away during the rain.

And here's a diagram illustrating what's in the containers:



I have another gigantic terra cotta pot elsewhere in the yard, and it's planted with garlic and Osaka Purple mustard.

Today at the local farmer's market I bought this cool variegated hydrangea:



The blooms are supposed to be red.  Neat!

I forgot to take a picture of the cute violas I bought. Well, they'll look better once I fix their little bed and put them in it, anyway.

Saturday I harvested tulsi and I'm attempting to dry it.  I have the green tulsi drying on screens.  I ran out of space on the screens so I'm also drying some red/purple tulsi in a bunch. 

The weather today was perfect.  I cannot imagine better weather conditions.  A few stray clouds floated by on the breeze, and it was not cool enough for me to wear long sleeves, but I only broke a sweat around noon when I was ripping the wild muscadine vines out of the bamboo.

My initial goal today was to plant the shrubberies.  I have quite a collection of shrubberies-needing-planting now: butterfly bush, ume (tree, not shrub), and the other tea bush.

I plunked the ume into the ground, then decided that I want to put the tea bush near it.  Unfortunately the precise location I wanted to put it is near the chain link fence that was overshadowed by muscadine-infested bamboo. So I decided to solve that problem.

I got a little carried away.  I ripped and yanked and chopped and snipped away at vines and bamboo stalks for hours.  There are piles of vine and bamboo in the yard now.  I left the piles right where they are because when my husband came out to look, he noted that I had disturbed a yellow jacket nest somewhere along the way, and they were all milling around the stacks of vines and bamboo. So I decided to come back to that tomorrow. Eek.  I'm amazed and grateful that I didn't get stung!

I recently learned how to make baskets out of vines, so I'm collecting the muscadine vines for basketry. My husband is going to try making tej (honey wine) from the grapes.

Woohoo, yay Fall! :D

I also weeded the front herb garden a bit and noted that tulsi is growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Wow. Tulsi is hard core. :P

Whew!  It's been raining for nearly a week.  I don't know how much rain has fallen because I don't have a rain gauge.  (Maybe I should get one.) The rain has been good for my plants and the weeds, both.  My poor garden is so weedy that I'm embarrassed to take pictures of it. *sheepish*

The bamboo continues to run rampant.  I've been kicking shoots down as I cross their path out in the yard.  They seem to grow in a straight line, presumably following a segment of root under the ground.  I guess if we were super industrious, we'd use the shoots to pinpoint the root's location and dig it up.  With everything else that needs to be done, I don't really see that happening.

I lost one tomato seedling.  Luckily, I have a few others that are candidates for replacing it.  I actually have more leftover tomato seedlings than I have space to plant them in the garden.  I would ordinarily give them away, but since the seedlings have some sort of issue that may be contagious, I think I'll just hang on to these and plant them ... somewhere.  I'm on the lookout for large cheap pots now.  Maybe I'll buy one of those upside-down tomato growing bag things.  I haven't decided yet.

That one tomato seedling is the only seedling that I've lost so far. *knocks on wood*  My poor tomatoes still look scrawny and sickly compared to other tomato plants I've seen around. *sigh*  I hope they catch up!

Today I noticed that three of my beans have finally sprouted.  I was starting to wonder if I'd planted them incorrectly.  I'm not sure which of the three types of beans the sprouts are.  I'll have to dig out my planting diagram and compare it to the sprouts.  I'm excited about the beans, yay! 

I still have some sprouts indoors that desperately need to be transplanted: chamomile, balloonflower, and tulsi.  Hopefully I won't accidentally nuke these in the sunlight like I did with the other non-pepper or tomato seedlings. 

Oh, and the shiso. The shiso seedlings definitely need to be transplanted from the pots where they're growing wild. I think I'll put some in the space I saved for the leeks that didn't make it.

I also have a bunch of plants from the farmer's market to plant in the herb garden.  As long as it doesn't rain, it looks like it will be a very busy weekend for me.