The Herb Garden

This area will become the herb garden. It didn't start out this way, but this is how it will end up. This area is just on the other side of the early plantings of garlic, onions, broccoli, romanesco, and potatoes. By the way, no one has asked what romaneso is yet, so I will wait until questions are asked and explain later. It is a great vegetable steamed just like cauliflower. The original plan was to put sweet corn in here. The main reason was the tall stalks would give us a buffer from all the traffic coming down the highway. The north bound traffic sometimes seems like it's heading straight into the side of our house. When this old farm house was built, I don't think they ever could have imagined the volume of cars that travel this stretch daily. One of the many down sides to progress I guess. Since I wanted the corn to have a good eighteen inches of loose soil to establish its root system in, I dug an eighteen inch trench to start things off. This method is called the "Double Dig". You dig a trench and then turn the hard soil next to it, into the existing trench. The soil from the initial trench is moved by wheel barrow to fill in the depression on the opposite side from you started. The idea is that the soil profile is loosened down fairly deep to let deep rooted crops like sweet corn do well. After I had dug back a couple feet from the starting point, I found a pipe from the septic system about fourteen inches below the ground. Not wanting to disturb things that could potentially cause me or my landlord some serious grief, I made the decision to keep this area planted to shallower rooted crops. The plan will be to only loosen to a depth of ten or twelve inches and plant herbs. Herbs for the most part are not deep rooted so this should suit them fine.

One thing I will plant here will be basil. Basil to me is what summer is all about. A few of the smaller leaves sprinkled over fully ripened tomatoes with fresh mozzarella cheese and then drizzled with good olive oil is a treat. One trick to keeping basil around for those that don't have a garden is to clip the ends and put them in a small glass of water. Pretty much like you would keep flowers fresh on your table. Change the water every day or so and the basil sprigs will stay very fresh. Just pull off however many leaves you need for dinner that night. A great memory I have related to basil goes back over ten years ago, back when I was still farming. We were growing basil for a food processor that put basil leaves in with diced tomatoes. We grew the basil and pulled the leaves off and washed them. These washed, whole basil leaves were put in the cans of diced tomatoes right before the lids were fastened. The product was sold as "Italian Style" diced tomatoes. The whole project was a struggle to fine tune and my daughter, Jessica must have listened to me gripe about what a pain it was. She volunteered to go out and help strip leaves off of basil stalks the next day. I'll never forget her sitting there on top of a stack of boxes, patiently pulling every leaf from each stalk of basil and putting into the plastic tote. She was only seven years old but she was willing to work hard to make sure dad's business deal worked out. I'll never forget how focused she was and how important it was to her that this deal work. She was truly an inspiration to the crew I had working on this project.