Herb oil

It's cold, rainy and windy today. I should be out there hunting killer snails, but I don't really feel like it. Instead I study chinese in the warm comfort of our home - it's really important to know how to call a cab in China right now...

I've finally found a way to use the surplus of herbs in my kitchen window. I make herb oil following a simple formula; cut off anything that's too much, stuff it in a jar and pour olive oil over it - sometimes I add some cloves of garlic and sambal oelek too. The end result has a mild taste, but apparantly a delicious one. We tested the first round on some roasted vegetables yesterday, and we both had two helpings and used some bread to get that last oil on the plate.

So, how's it going? 2007-08-13

Time for a new suite of photos documenting my experiment.

Let's start with my thripsberidden herbgarden. I do apologise for the blured photo; I have a disagreement with my camera. I want to take nice close ups, it says it can't. However, I've sprayed this garden with clean water from the dryer several times a day this week. The plants seems to do better, although they are not 100% healthy yet. The new leaves of the parsley have less dry spots than the old ones. I still don't know if this treatment is enough, but it looks hopefull.

This is my root garden. Everything is growing like weeds. Time for another 'thinning sallad'. And I owe an apology to my hubby after the post complaining about him making sallad before I could photo the plants I thinned out. I did tell him to do so. My only excuse is that hunger tend to affect memory...

In this garden I worry about the tiger nuts. They seem to hang their leaves, and are thinning out. The nasturtiums are doing better, although I'm not content with their spindly look. Next time I sow them I'll have to plan and place them different.

Perhaps I should put them together with these. Tiger nuts are classified as a noxious weed in the US, and here you see why. These plants are about one and a half months old, and have already filled their pot as well as the space above. I'm playing with the thought of dividing the gang next time I get around to do bigger things.

My calamondin is blooming. It's for the sake of this plant that I keep dryerwater in my spray bottle nowadays. Dryerwater is almost 100% free from calcium, something citrus trees don't like. This week I've tried to spray the calamondin three times dayly, since this seems to be the right amount for it. Every time I keep my schedule it starts setting flowers like this one. My next purchase for my indoor gardening hobby will be plastic bottles to store water and fertilised water for this baby.

Lastly I'll show you why my indoor gardening has been low key this week; I'm tied up in another project. As you can see even some of my indoor gardening items has yielded to this, since my gigantic pot was a too god drying rack for our wood to be ignored. The strawberries for the kiddo are waiting on the balcony, and I do hope they'll survive the rough weather.

So, how's it going? 2007-08-04

Well, that's the question. I've taken pictures of all my working gardens to show the experiment in progress.

Here's my herbgarden. Currently I'm growing lemon balm, thai basil, parsly, chives and sage. As usual the lemon balm and basil are growing like crazy, but not the sage. The sage brought some kind of illness from the mall, and haven't recovered at all. The herbgarden is not to its best. I've been ill lately, and haven't been able to spray the gardens with water. The result is that thrips has taken over my lemon balm. Today I cut away the most affected ares (the buds, of course) and sprayed a lot. I'll do some extra spraying with water for three weeks to see if that's enough to scare those pests away.

This garden is also filled with gnats, who thrives in the moist soil. Their precense is probably stressing the plants, making them more vulnerable to other pests. One way of getting rid of gnats is to inplant nematodes, and I have tracked down the swedish company selling these things (worms, actually). It wasn't easy, since the full name of the company isn't "Predator" like everybody's calling them, they are called "Lindesro AB, parasiter och predatorer" and their website is minimalistic.

This week I cut down the thai basil and made pesto. It tastes like ordinary pesto, although more bitter since I had to thicken it with more pine nuts than was originally intended.

What I've learned from this garden so far:

1. Spray the plants with water at any cost.
2. Get rid of those gnats!
3. Learn to sow your own plants from seeds even for those cheap herbs available at the mall.
4. Do have some almonds at hand when you are making original pesto. (Oh boy, will the genovesians kill me for this...)

I couldn't resist this angle when I took this picture. This is the box where I grow tiger nut only. It's also the first box that is half the size of my ordinary boxes, and with a weed the garden seems to work fine. I may think these plants needs a haircut, but I keep my hands away. This is the special garden for my son. He has started to help me with the plants, and he's seen this ever since the seeds grew. Every day I bring it down from the shelf, show him how it's grown and then he sprays it with water. These are things twoyearolds like.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. A twoyearold can handle a spraying can and likes to see how the garden grows.
2. Using a box half as big is fine.
3. Weeds are growing like, well, weeds.

And here's my garden unbrushed. I've sown turnip, carrots and scallion close together and now the different leaves are tumbling over to each other making complicated braids. It's time to thinning this out for the first time. At this stage the roots are thin like threads, and pretty weedy, so I'll make a leaf sallad for the family. The scallions and the carrot leaves will be used raw, but I cook the turnip leaves like spinach (surprise!). In this box I have too few, and to much trouble picking them.

I have a few gnats in this garden too and one turnip leaves have a dry spot. On the other hand this is a lot less than I've had before.

What I've learned from this garden so far:

1. Spraying water to prevent thrips works.
2. Turnip should be grown in bigger quantities as single crop in their box.

Do you recognise my thripsgarden I complained about some time ago? Don't those nasturtium leaves look dashing? I sowed them after I'd torn up the garden and I've watched them like a hawk to see if any of the pest has survived in the tigernuts (which I left) and started to affect them. So far so good. The soft soap spray seems to have worked, eventhough I didn't follow the recipe to the letter.

I'm planning to thin this out a bit, but I haven't decided if I'll take entire plants or just cut some leaves. The tigernut plants survived their haircut, and are ready for another one.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. Soft soap and water is enough.
2. Tigernuts do survive haircuts.

And the calamondin. Since I started to spray it with water its leaves has stayed on the branches instead of falling off en masse. (I once swept the floor in the room and got a heap of leaves and some pine cones instead of dust...) It's still suffering from cloros and I have changed the water in my spraying can to softened water to see if that's making any difference. The water of Uppsala is heavy with calcium and I suspect the calamondin is absobing the calcium through the leaves. (Calcium makes it harder for the plant to absorb iron, which makes it 'anemic' - it gets cloros.) Most of the flowers has fallen off, and dark green fruitlings are hiding beneath the leaves.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. Calamondins wants to be sprayed with water.

As you can see I haven't included a picture on a gigantic pot filled with strawberries. I haven't planted it yet. My biggest challenge right now is to keep the plants alive untill I get started...

And don't forget the poll in the margin ;-)

Podcast for the eyes

Podcasts are good things! The last days I've had a severe eyeinfection. For most of the time I've only been able to lay down with my eyes shut. I asked hubby to download this year's Odla i P1 podcasts (Odla is a swedish radioshow for amateur gardeners) to at least have something to listen at. So I listened.

And listened.

And before I knew I was up and about, planting my new herb garden. That was not one minute too early since the plants had been left for some days in their plastic bags (I bought them shortly before I fell ill). Unfortunately this means that the plants doesn't feel well, but I'm still glad the job's done. I even put lables on the box recording the names of the plants, the dates they were planted, date for fertilizing and that I've forgotten to hollow out the layer of leca. The last thing irritates me, since this means the self watering container wont work properly. The soil in the hole is supposed to work as a wick, sucking up moist to the rest. I'll leave the container for now to see how it works out.

It was fun to use the new soil. "Änglamarks balkonglådejord" (Änglamark is Coop Sweden's ekological brand, and Coop is our second big grocery chain - think Walmart or Tesco) is the lable I use now, and the feel of it was different to the cheep seedling soil I've used earlier. It was softer and had a better texture. It will be interesting to see if I have a better result with this. To this soil I added a pellet of "osmocote tabs" per plant. I still don't own a vermicompost, so I have to make do with this.

And to answer an unspoken question; the nice doctor gave eye medicine yesterday. In the future I'll listen to Odla while tending to my plants.

Progress so far

Here we can see my little seedlings, looking at themselves in the window. They don't seem to have noticed the added light, so I have lowered the lamp at their half of the window. The tilted armature gives our library a somewhat anarchisitic look, which in a way adds to the austere book cases. I'm not a friend of too much order.

Today I had to fill the magazines in my homemade selfwatering containers, and I'm overjoyed! This means they are working like they should. The box with the instant herb garden was empty, whereas the seedling box had a few drips of water left. I took the risk of giving both herb garden and seedling box fertilizer to see what impact it'll have.

And my carrots have surfaced. Jay!

Instant herbgarden

The two things that have worked well so far is 1. added light and 2 selfwatering pots. Today I took the consequences of this and built two giant selfwatering pots, using the plastic box "Flaj" from IKEA. (We have an enormous amont of these, and they are used for everything, from wind shield to foot bath.) I sowed common purslane, turnip and carrot in one, and planted herbs and sallat in the other. A small spot that's green already makes gardening more fun. I bought the herbs and the sallat in the vegetable section at ICA (like Walmarts or Tesco), which is both a curse and a blessing. A curse since you have absolutely no guarantee that the plants are free from pests. A blessing since the herbs are big in size and cheap. Right now I'm looking at the result of my efforts and wonder how many of the plants that will recover once they realise that they are in a new garden. Some of them seems to be weak (should have been more picke at the mall), so I've already made a replacement plan.

Sowed in box 1
Common Purslane
Turnip
Carrot

Planted in box 2
Sallat
Basil
Sage
Tarragon

My little herb garden - an update

I thought I would post a picture on how my herb garden  has 
developed after two to three weeks of added light. The sage 
and the mint have both sprouted new and greener leaves, perhaps a bit 
smaller than they should, but they are definately on the right track. 
The mint are eagerly trying to crawl over to the empty space where 
I'm planning to sow basil - given I can find my basil seeds again.

If you don't remember how my herb garden looked like before I'm 
reposting a picture where the withered leaves and such recently
have been cut, and the additional light have been up for only two days.