This past week was my first week off!! A real vacation. OMG! Great, right? Sleep in, watch a bunch of TV, spend the whole week in pajamas. Yeah, I suck at vacations. I have a hard time doing nothing. I think I spent one day sleeping in and being a couch potato but then the rest of the week, I pretty much spent it thinking up stuff to do like preserving herbs. It was "thyme" to dry thyme....
For a while when I first transplanted my thyme into my raised bed I thought it would die. It was totally turning brown and leaves were falling off but then this....
The thing is huge now and I really need to chop it down some. The one good thing is that it takes no "thyme" to dry thyme. :-) I just washed it, dried it on a kitchen towel, and strung up a bunch to air dry. Now that I think about it, the thyme came back when I stopped watering it.... hmmmm?
My green beans did not do so well. I did get a variety that is a dual purpose bean so now I have black beans.
BTW, the Weck jars are courtesy of my friends Anne and Tommy. The one fun thing that we did was drive up to Connecticut over the weekend for their post-wedding east coast party. Their fabulous wedding gifts were these beautiful Weck preserving jars filled with gummi bears. I ate most of the gummi bears for breakfast once we got back to VA. Mmmmm.... gummi bears for breakfast. It was truly a beautiful party and a beautiful weekend. I was very honored to be part of it!
Basil. I have psycho basil plants. I have so much basil right now. I've already made a couple of batches of pesto to freeze. This time, I decided to freeze fresh basil in an ice tray.
Once frozen, just pop them into a freezer bag and use all winter.
So here's the crazy thing, I'm waiting for my basil to go to seed because as much stress as my original plant went through this past year, and the fact that I stopped watering it in the beginning of the season because I thought it was dead just to have it come back producing stronger, bigger plants, dude, I am saving the seeds! The other craziness is that I've been neglecting the garden a bit. I stopped watering a lot of the plants and over the weekend when we were in CT, the garden hadn't been watered for over 4 days. I thought that my newly planted seedlings would be dead as well as my other crops. Well.... was I WRONG!!!
This is the watermelon bed. I stopped watering this thing weeks ago. It's even healthier and bigger now in Sept. What??!! And the last (well, I thought it was the last) watermelon ripened over the weekend and cracked.
Amish paste tomatoes. NOW the tomatoes are growing? The whole summer, I got a handful of green zebras and cream sausage tomatoes but none from the Amish paste. Now there's so many tomatoes that the plant is leaning over and using the Korean pepper's cage to support itself.
This fall, I decided to grow Korean radishes along with daikon radishes. The Korean variety is smaller, about 3 inches long and used to make bachelor radish kimchee. I'm also growing 2 varieties of carrots this fall; a conventional orange and a Japanese red heirloom variety, Kyoto red.
The daikons are up and flourishing right now. They're loving this cooler weather.
This is one of the rows of Korean radishes.
Your average orange carrots.
Kyoto reds in the barrel.
So what have I learned from this week? Maybe less is more. Less worrying about the garden, less watering for sure and maybe doing less is o.k. Gotta work on the doing less.
Have a great weekend!
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