The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

Actually, there was a lot of sneezing going on. Have you ever tried crushing a one gallon zip lock bag full of dried cayenne pepper and packing the resulting product into tiny containers?

Today we prepared and packed herbs to be given away for people to use for preparing their holiday meals.

There was about a dozen or so packets each of sage, rosemary, cilantro, cayenne, and oregano. We also picked coriander seed this fall, but it is very tedious and time consuming to pick any kind of volume. We ended up with only about a snack-sized zip lock bag full of coriander.

I sowed two flats of thyme late in the summer but never got them planted, they have been frozen and snowed on but still look happy outside. I wouldn’t recommend doing it that way. I will probably pot most of them into larger pots sometime during the next couple of weeks. I’m sure we should be able to harvest enough for our personal use later on this winter.

The plan this spring is to expand the number of varieties of herbs we plant.

Freshly dried, home grown herbs are a delight!
Rhyming and thyming,

Bob

small recloseable bags   http://www.stockpkg.com/Zipper-Bags_c_79.html

Reader Dave just kicked it up notch! (see comments)

For great garlic:

Highly fertile soil, organic matter, water etc., etc. you heard it all before, but it goes double for garlic. No weeds at all: none,nada, zip, zilch. The big secret is to plant in the fall and mulch in Dec.
Bob

key idea: plant garlic in the fall, mulch in December

Today we mulched our garlic beds. The raised beds we have for vegetable production measure about 5′x9′. Five pounds of garlic bulbs plant six of these beds exactly. We used wheat straw about 6′”-8″ deep to cover these six beds. Four moderately heavy bales did the trick. By the way, these bales of straw were of the most beautiful golden wheat color I have seen in a long time. In a way it was amost a shame to use them for mulch, but that’s what they’re there for. The bright color ensures that we don’t import a new batch of weed seeds from weed stalks that could have been baled up out in the field by the farmer along with the straw. Straw that has lots of different color stems in the bale more than likely are contaminated with weeds.
If you promise not to tell anyone, I”ll let you know the secret to growing super size and delicious garlic. So just let me know if you can “keep it under your hat”, by writing me a short note in the comment section that you like garlic.

Well, now that the garlic bulbs are all tucked in their beds for the winter, I think I’m going to have lunch and take a nap. Bob

for more information search:  mulching garlic, straw mulch