Herbs in the Garden

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Here is my special treat for you- I had SO much fun putting this little humorous Valentine video together for my beginner herbs class. I hope you enjoy it!

Yes, it’s me with woolcicles forming on my face gear. And yes, I know my cold weather gear is not color coordinated.

Me with antlers and woolcicles

I took a leisurely stroll out to the greenhouse yesterday morning to check on things. It’ was a balmy -2* inside the greenhouse and naturally everything was frozen solid. On the way to the greenhouse I saw that several herbs were heaving up out of the ground in the medicinal herb garden beds.

It happens after a wet fall followed by hard freezes. I will just have to replant the things I will lose this winter.

This is why I rarely have the same garden two years in a row!  Plants come and go, and herbs and plants that don’t do well either get moved, or are lost due to weather conditions.

Although we haven’t had much snow yet, it’s been really cold. More  snow is expected. I like the snow. Besides being beautiful, it protects the plants when they are well covered sith snow. White mulch.

After it all melts though it is a bit disconcerting to see what’s left alive after the winter and what has died off completely, and some years it is just downright discouraging!

I’d better break out the seed catalogs…Who knows? By the looks of it I may be redoing a LOT of garden area this year

Gluten Free Herbed Bread

Gluten free herbed bread, that is… this is a recent dietary adjustment at our house.

I combined a gluten free bread mix from Bob’s Red Mill along with another GF bread recipe I found. I tossed in some herbs, ( see below) a variety of seeds, and baked the whole thing into a large round loaf. Surprisingly it  turned out very nicely!

I never know what I’ll get when I start to experiment like this – sometimes I get carried away… *blush*

 It made a flavorful heavy/hearty “whole grain” style loaf. When paired with a steaming hot mug of beef stew, the herb bread was the perfect “dunking” companion.

I have long added herbs to my ‘regular’ flour breads and rolls, and now continue to experiment with my gluten free breads. Thankfully there are many great GF blogs I follow for great recipe ideas! If you are interested let me know and I’ll post a few of my favorites.

Here are some herbs to add to your breads. Try pairing a few of them together, or for your first try, you might just go with a single herb.  Adding seeds such as caraway, dill, coriander, and others can add great flavor to breads and rolls, too!

You could also do plain bread or rolls served with an herb butter. Herbed butter is SO easy to make and really delicious with vegetables or breads. OK, with anything really.

Yum!

I love the way this Gardenia rose decided to grow up the tree known around here as The Sacrificial Nectarine. Gardenia is a once bloomer, and not my favorite rose, but I do like the way it has decided to make a scene here!

So why do I call this tree The Sacrificial Nectarine? 

Stay tuned for pictures in an upcoming post and I’ll show you!

I have found a few ambitious youngsters in need of some cash. They are digging out the raised bed concrete blocks in the flooded,weed filled garden. Here is the garden at the beginning of the makeover.

So as not to burn the kids out, the removal phase of the project has been tentatively scheduled to take two weeks,weather permitting…which leaves the next two days out.

It’s almost unbelievable how fast these weeds pop up! This  photo I took not long ago shows the garden devoid of any vegetation.

You can see where some volunteer sunflowers have taken off. I plant them every year for the birds, bunnies, and goats.

Gold Finches come around every summer eat the seeds right off the flower heads. I guess we’ll just work around the sunflowers for the time being.

I have not transplanted any herbs from this little square bed at the foreground of the photo below. They are so happy here that I am going to leave them in place and replace the concrete with a wood bed.

Garden Overhaul in Progress

See all the concrete blocks the kids have cleaned and carried to the back of the garden so far?

I am hoping to get some photos of my shy garden helpers in a future post!

Nope,this post is not really garden related this time…

Well, sort of since it’s possible I may be planting new trees this year!

Check out this video. The dogs are playing in a small area of the back yard near the barn. It rained for days and they were SO happy to get out and romp and stomp. Watch and see what the naughty scoundrels do…

Herb Garden after rains and flooding

Too much water + herbs = never a good idea.

With all the 2008-2009 heavy rains and flooding in parts of the Midwestern USA (where I live) something had to give.

What gave? My concrete garden beds…and the roof on the goat shed you see on the right. Attractive tarp, no?

Yep, my back herb and veggie potager was flooded.  In fact it flooded many times over the last year.  Each time the garden got worse looking until I knew that the whole thing needed to be redone.

In this 75′x20′ odd space, I built raised block beds to keep my herbs up out of the wettest soil during heavy seasonal rains, and it worked pretty well for 10 years. Oh sure, I occasionally had a plant heave up out of the soil during the winter and croak, but this concrete block bed system really worked well in this lower part of the garden.

The problem/blessing is that we have flatland. It’s great for livestock, soybeans, corn(maize), and wheat- but water just stands, loitering on it.

This is great when the weather has been dry, but when the ground is saturated the water has no place to go, so we slog around in 6″ of water. This  plot is in the one area where water from the yard and barn flows to lower ground.

This herb garden was also once home to a small barn. The previous landowner burned the old barn on the spot, so there were lots of nails and glass shards that surfaced after every rain.  In order to use this bit of land, we laid a double layer of landscape fabric down over the whole thing, then laid gravel paths between the raised beds.

Now only the front part of the wide gravel paths remain intact, the rest has washed away. The solid pavers that graced the top of the beds also washed away, but many were reclaimed to make high and dry islands for the goats to stand on in the worst flooding.

The garden lies between a dog run and the buck goat pens. Perfect for keeping wild bunnies out, not so good when someone forgets to lock the gate and those ornery boy goats get loose in the garden!

I don’t mind overhauling the garden so much( OK, well actually I do) but what really slayed me was the gorgeous three foot tall pile of aged compost at the back of the garden. It’s mostly washed away. What is left is useless now, full of weed seeds and who knows what.  Do you think me silly to mourn my compost? Yeah well, it’s a gardener thing.

Never fear, there is more where that came from and the bunnies, goats, and chickens are hard at work for a new pile in time for me to use this fall. Horse poop goes to the pasture to improve the soil there.

I am considering putting in plain old untreated wood beds. What do you think?

That way I can anchor the wood and not have them shift around should it ever rain for 7  months straight again. In such an event there is the added bonus of having  the wood handy for building an ark!

If you have ideas, please leave me a comment! I would LOVE some ideas for my garden and want to know what works in your gardens.