"To the gardener in the winter, one's future is the spring. All the dark months may be filled with it."
– Frances Hodgson Burnett
01/12/17:
It's the first sunny day in quite a while. The "Pineapple Express" storms have passed, leaving our local reservoirs completely full from over a week of heavy rain. It got very windy too, blowing down trees, and there are mudslides along major roads that are still being cleaned up, but my own yard has escaped significant damage.
The rain put my gardening projects on hold for a time; it seems so long since I've spent hours puttering about with dirt and seeds and such. I crave the scents of warm earth and freshly pruned herbs, the sight of new sprouts, the satisfaction of tidying up and setting things right. I do have the chance this weekend to get back into it, starting with cleaning up all the mud and dumping water out of pots that didn't drain well. I'll likely ruin my manicure and need a long bath afterward, but I'm totally looking forward to it.
Lately I've been appreciating how hardy some of my garden's herbs are. The common sage seems indestructible. It doesn't suffer any from being constantly soggy in a wet winter and barely even wilts if I go a week without watering it in summer. I've had one of my sage plants for about 10 years. The Greek? or Italian? oregano is likewise continuing to grow nicely; I can pick a handful for cooking once a week and the same amount of new growth takes its place. This is one of my most aromatic herbs, along with the rosemary hedge.
The lemon thyme and tarragon are surviving; these may need to be re-potted into large containers with better-draining soil to truly thrive. I love to use tarragon in my lemon sauce for meat and pasta; I may have over-picked the leaves on that plant!
Clicking on the small images below will bring up a larger version.
Common garden sage.
Delicate fronds of dill.
Picking lavender for potpourri.
Other herbs that are a bit persnickety in the care they need include the dill, cilantro, and basil. I'm out of basil at the moment, the last plant died in November. One good thing I figured out last year is that snails are less likely to show up on the basil if I keep it far from the ground, such as on my trellis plant stand. I have a young dill plant there now, along with a bit of cilantro that started flowering. I need to remember to pick the cilantro earlier, and to re-seed it more often to keep a fresh supply at hand.
Lavender is a very common landscaping plant here on California's Central Coast. I tend to think of it more as an ornamental than an herb, like the decorative sages/salvias. It's drought-tolerant, but I've noticed that the older leaves tend to turn gray and shrivel, so I need to remove these often to keep the plant looking nice. The newly-opened flowers have those nice lavender and purple colors, although like the leaves, these fade and dry up without falling off the plant. I've been picking both the fresh and faded flowers for potpourri and drying them indoors, along with some fuchsia and geranium blossoms that were knocked off their stems by the wind and rain.
