Monday, December 6, 2010

The kitchen herb box

Last summer I dedicated a whole growing box to kitchen herbs. I grabbed every potted herb from the nursery that I thought I would use and planted it. All the plants grew well until about mid summer. I thought the extreme Texas heat killed off my cilantro, dill, and thyme, so I just shook the plants when they went to seed (so they would self sow) and hoped that they would come back next summer.

Well, about a week ago I started seeing a huge amount of "weed" seedlings in my garden bed. I had no time to weed due to my crazy work schedule, so I just left them thinking that a good overnight frost would soon kill them.

After another passing week, I started to recognize my little "weed" patch!

It's FULL of dill and cilantro plants!

After getting out my handy dandy garden herb book I read that these were cool weather plants. No wonder they died out before mid summer! The plants self sowed beautifully and now I have a thick fuzzy carpet of the most fragrant herbs....I'm tickled pink!

Or should I say GREEN?


I have other herbs that are just as prolific now as they were in the summer like parsley, bee balm, and lemon balm. I don't think they'll survive a hard freeze so they'll be going into the dehydrator in the next day or two.


Even my little thyme plant came back to life and is thriving with the cooler weather!

This is a great lesson in seasonal gardening for me
and I hope to apply it to the entire garden:

Seeding plants should be left to seed and self sow.


I'm going to try it with the broccoli that flowers every spring. Well see if the seeds produced will give us a nice big broccoli patch during the fall!


Lessons learned in the garden are a lot like lessons learned in life.
God knew what He was doing in His grand design of life.
I need to just sit back and let HIM take control of things!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a wonderful surprise!

Anonymous said...

Watch the lemon balm. It can be invasive. I didn't notice it the first year but by the second it had gone by underground roots to other places!! :) Next time I will plant it in a pot with some old screening in the hole in the bottom of the pot to keep it IN the pot! :) Sarah