Scenes from the June Garden

Lemon Thyme in the garden of nutmeg designs

Bee enjoying lavender in the garden of nutmeg designs

See five more June garden images here

Streaks ~ doing what I want to do, in this case cleaning up the herb garden

Mosaic Woman found an app called streaks. Simple thing. Enter an activity. Choose how often you want to perform it. At the end of each day, check off what was accomplished. Gardening was not the first activity in my list (that was blog commenting, a forgotten habit) but I am glad I made the decision to place it there.

The backyard had reached embarrassment stage. I made it four straight days before visiting family, excessive heat, a need to prepare to teach today, and a thunderstorm kept me away from the garden yesterday. But I got a new streak going today and the perennial herb garden is happy indeed.

Does anyone use yarrow as an herb? I am curious.

 

Wordless Wednesday: Late fall in the garden

25 herbs

I am teaching a workshop this weekend on herbs. I want to...

get herbs into folks hands
share my love of cooking with herbs
encourage all that they can grow them

so, I just made a list of all the herbs I have grown over the last ten years, and 25 made the list. Not counting varieties... of say basil... lime, lemon, sweet.

Some on the list I have done little with other than enjoy their presence and share a story of why they are in the garden.

Just outside the school's greenhouse are some tall perennial herbs, one is Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), a relative of Bee Balm. You see I am a lover of Earl Grey tea and so when I saw bergamot in Johnny's seed catalog, I thought "how cool."

Later I realized how wrong I was... the flavor in the tea comes from a tree, Bergamot (Citrus bergamia) which is a small citrus fruit. Word on the internet is that the fruit of this cross between a Seville Orange and Pear Lemon, is far from edible, but the oil from the peel is what makes the tea what it is. I love that some how someone decided to add this oil to tea.

Wild Bergamot, a native to North America, can also be used in a tea. Maybe this summer I will finally make tea from my bergamot.