Lazy Gardener's Guide to Drying Herbs

My garage looks like an apothecary shop, or in the words of someone who shall remain nameless, "a witches' hut." Is he trying to tell me something? I've got herbs hanging in bunches from the walls and trays of herbs that I set out everyday to dry in the sun, along with onions I'm curing so that they dry out and can be stored.

The herb bed is only one spot where herbs grow here at Seven Oaks. I planted basil, thyme and calendula along with zinnias and sweet woodruff (thanks to my friend Enni for the plants!) in the little flower bed John added to the garden shed. I've got some herbs tucked in between the other vegetables too - dill (which has since died, although I did get one crop) between the squash and cucumbers, calendula along many of the beds, catnip among the turnips, and sweet basil among the tomatoes and peppers. Some of this is intentional companion planting to ward off bugs. Herbs, along with my favorite, marigolds, can naturally repel many insects, although not all.

But mostly I just love herbs. I love their fragrance. Next to my chair in the plant room where I do my morning meditation and prayer I keep a crystal bowl with bits of rosemary and sage in it. The fragrance reminds me of autumn days and traditional holds that sage wards off evil, unseen spirits. Perhaps the analogy to a wise woman's hut isn't off base!

The Lazy Gardener's Way to Dry Herbs

I dry herbs in two ways: I hang bunches in the enclosed, hot garage, and I also place them in metal pans, trays and bowls and let them solar dry. Another way to solar dry herbs is to rinse them and spread them onto clean sheets in the sun. We used to lay a clean sheet on the picnic table when we lived on Long Island, lay the herbs flat, and they would be dry in a day.

The big trays you see here are roasting pans. John's great grandfather was a chef, and I have some huge old roasting pans among his many chef tools (and aprons - real chef aprons - piles of them, some more than 50 years old, but so sturdy I use them daily). I simply rinse the herbs and lay them in the trays, flipping them once a day. In about three days, they are dry and I use my hands to crumble them up.



The herbs hanging in the garage are hung using a bit of old twine and thumb tacks. I typically hang lavender and flowers up this way, but today I've got oregano, basil and catnip drying.

My total list of herbs drying right now include:

• Catnip (Pierre will be well provisioned!)
• Sweet Genovese Basil
• Cinnamon Basil
• Lemon Balm
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Dill

Where do I store them? Here's a list of containers that I use:

• Pierre's catnip is stored in an old tobacco tin
• I have old coffee canisters that my mother in law saved. These are old Sanka coffee jars, glass commemorative jars with pretty pictures and green and orange plastic screw on tops. They are huge and look pretty.
• I found big herb bottles at Dollar General in Farmville for just $1 each. They have a shaker and pour top and look pretty.
• Old mason jars.
  
• Coffee cans, Cool Whip containers, and similar containers can also hold herbs.
• I've also purchased plastic storage containers with lids at Dollar General - three for $1. I usually use these to freeze vegetables but they can also double as herb storage.

I've read many other ideas for storing herbs, too. Some people recommend freezing basil and oregano with either a bit of water or olive oil in icecube trays. You just pop them out and freeze the cubes. Then when you want to add them to spaghetti sauce, soup and stews, you just pop in an ice cube. Other people buy dehydrators; these machines that slowly blow hot air over ventilateld trays to dehydrate fruit, vegetables and herbs. Once the fruit trees start producing, I have a dehydrator on my list of 'wants' to dry fruit to enjoy over the winter.

Hot Color Combinations

I raced out yesterday without posting most of the pictures. Here's the pictures to accompany yesterday's post - now you can see the colors! Enjoy!

The July Garden

The July flower garden here at Seven Oaks is hot, hot, hot - brimming with eye popping oranges, yellows and golds while temperatures soar. I seem to have planted midsummer blooming perennials that are just saturated with color. It's a total accident. I have about as much garden design instinct as I do the ability to do calculus (that is: zero ability). The weeds are taking over, but I hope to get out in the evenings and make a dent in them later this week.




My favorite flowers blooming now are the Echinacea - coneflower. I bought seeds in 2007, a kit from Park Seeds. I'm always buying kits. I was told that coneflower is difficult to start from seed. Maybe, maybe not. These seem to love it here in the bright full sun garden that gets hot direct sun all day long.

The kit included purple, Echinacea "White Swan" and a golden color. Now they are all blooming...just stunning clusters of them in the little island garden in the middle of the lawn. The birds love them. They land on them as they swoop over the lawn, and I think they are enjoying the seeds too.

Before temperatures soar, enjoy these hot flower colors in the July garden here in southern Virginia!

Empty Nest

Yesterday we noticed that the baby birds were so crowded in the nest that they were leaning dangerously over the edge. You may recall that in June, a mother bird called a Phoebe built a nest on the ceiling fan on our front porch.

Around noon, John snapped these pictures. We realized that the biggest one, the 'bruiser bird', seemed to have already flown away, but the parents were still flying back and forth to feed the others. I said to John, "They're like kids who won't move out of the house!" The nest was in tatters. My porch floor is covered in...well, you know.

Then at 5 p.m, John let Shadow and Pierre out for their playtime. Pierre has been visiting the birds, chirping and meowing back at them, since they were hatched. He can't get up there. He sits under the nest and chortles at the birds. They squeak back.


Pierre raced over...and suddenly the babies FLEW!



They raced in all directions, flying this way and that, bouncing into the rain gutters, up and over the roof, mother and father bird chirping after them.

And a very disappointed kitty sat on the porch, staring up at an empty nest.

The babies were still flying around the house last night. One flew into the siding but was fine - he or she flapped up and over and onto the roof. This morning, I saw three sitting on the garage roof. They are using the house as a launch pad, taking short flights up and about and then coming back to the safety of the roof. I am relieved to see all of them flying on strong, (fairly) sure wings.


It's so funny how what really happens is different from the perception of what "should" happen. I imagined that the day the babies flew, we would watch them tentatively hop to the edge of the nest, give a few test flaps of their wings, and fly a few feet. This was what I thought "should" happen.


Little did I know that Uncle Pierre would be the ones to teach the birds how to fly!

Celebrations and Memories

Happy 4th of July to all my American friends! For my non American friends, today we celebrate America's Independence Day. It is a big holiday, the second of the year (Thanksgiving being the first) that draws all Americans together across all races, religions and classes to celebrate. Other holidays are big, but many are religious, and for non Christians not a holiday. This is one of the few that is secular and just brings everyone together. We will be celebrating with a barbecue and outdoor picnic tonight and watching fireworks on television. When I was a teenager living near New York City, my brother would take my sister and me into lower Manhattan near the seaport and we would queue up for hours to wait for the Macy's fireworks show near the Statue of Liberty. To be part of a million-strong crowd, watching fireworks blaze behind Lady Liberty, pushes even the most skeptical into patriotism. For me, just remembering the fireworks makes my nose twitch with the sulfurous smell from the fireworks and the scent of hot cart-made pretzels on city streets.

Today made me think of lots of 4th of July celebrations in my life. I remember my mom making a 'flag cake', a big sheet cake decorate with blueberries, strawberries and lots of goopy white icing to mimic the American flag. I have a photo of her holding the one she made in 1976 for the Bicentennial. My dad would grill a steak on a hibachi (a little charcoal fired grill) in the backyard. I would play with my tiny plastic farm animals in the yard while my dad grilled the steak. Guess even then I knew where I belonged!

And of course my mom insisted we got to Mass (church) in the morning...to her, 4th of July and Thanksgiving were added to the official roster of Catholic Holy Days of Obligation. There was no special service, just the regular weekday Mass, but we would sing God Bless America, America the Beautiful, My Country 'Tis of Thee and spend an hour thanking God for the gifts we have. It was a great way to start a holiday for sure. My grandma left Germany in the 1920's, and she never forgot food shortages, runaway inflation, and World War I. My grandpa had fled Germany during World War I, migrating to Holland, then Canada, then the USA. I am thankful I had two first-generation American grandparents and that I knew my grandma and the stories she told, and the stories my dad repeated, to help me understand why she was so thankful to be an American. I remember how my parents tried to make us understand why freedom was so important, and so rare. Growing up in America you take so much for granted until you get to know people living in other countries and you hear news reports from countries where people live under a dictatorship. Then you start to understand why we cherish our freedoms.

No matter where I am, there's always certain sounds and smells and sights outdoors and in the garden that instantly calls to mind a time of year.

In New York, it was the first song of cicadas and crickets, and the dance of fireflies across the lawn. For my readers who don't live in America and might not know these insects, cicadas are large, ugly and pretty harmless insects with big, bulgy eyes and green iridescent bodies. They set up a shrill long cry during the hot, humid summer days. I have heard that they only "sing" when temperatures reach 80. We used to be able to tell how hot the day would be by how early the cicadas would start singing. If they were singing at dawn, running through the lawn sprinklers and buying cherry Italian ices at Shannon's Candy Store were in order!

We used to catch big Hall's toads down at the water sump. Even children like us who grow up in city-like conditions near New York City find ways to be like country kids! A sump is a big drainage area for the street water sewer systems. They generally don't have standing water like a resevoir, but can be swampy. On Long Island, there would be one about every half mile, fenced in to keep kids out, which of course challenged us to get in. The one right by my house was near the railroad tracks and had a lot of trees planted around it which to us was like the country, even though the trees were only about 10 feet away from a paved parking lot for the town playground across the street.

My friends and I would yell to our moms, "We're going to catch frogs today!", grab a pail from the cellar, and run all the way to the sump. We ran up the hill on Magnolia Avenue, down through the tunnel, an area under the Long Island Rail Road tracks that formed a long pedestrian tunnel. It echoed and we would stop and yell and carry on to hear how loud our voices would echo. If a freight train was rumbling overhead, we would count the cars and make a wish on the caboose. If the train had 2 cabooses, it was an especially lucky day!

Around the sump, we'd hide among the trees, watching where we stepped because people would walk their dogs there and never clean up after them. Then with lightning quick reflexes we would catch as many frogs (toads) as we could! They would hide among the leaves, but as kids we were close to the ground and could catch them easily.

We would bring them home and release them into the garden, with our dads congratulating us on how we 'helped' by bringing home frogs that would eat the bugs. Later that summer we would find huge toads hiding under the cucumber and squash leaves in the garden, and I always wondered if they were the same toads we'd brought home in June, now grown to monstrous size.

Here in Virginia, summer's heralds are the blackberries ripening on the bushes growing along my driveway and around the clearing. It's the changing panorama of wildflowers, the spring blossoms giving way to summer's richness of Queen Anne's lace, purple thistle, and so many more I cannot name. It's hummingbirds darting to the feeder and back to the safety of the sheltering loblolly pines. It's a mama deer and her twin fawns scampering into the clearing at sunset.

And of course, the toads. We didn't see any the first year we lived in Virginia. Last night I took Shadow out for her walk around 10 pm, and was startled by several toads hopping around near the garage. The lights on the garage must have attracted flying insects...and the toads knew a good thing when they saw it!

Happy summer on this American "official" start to summer fun!

The Great Spinach Grow Off

Do you remember the Pillsbury Bake Off contests? People enter and bake their prized recipes, and the finalists go to some sort of convention and contest and bake on site. I've seen television shows that depict what goes on behind the scenes. I've always wanted to enter. I'm not skilled enough to win, although my sisters and I have talked about entering my Grandma's recipe for Alsace-Lorraine Bread Pudding that is our family tradition and secret weapon.




I held my own version of the bake-off. It was called the Great Spinach Grow-Off. Here's what I did:

• I bought two packets of spinach seeds. One was called "Teton Hybrid" and it cost me around $2.99. The other packet was a generic "Spinach" variety without even a name that I bought at Lowes for 99 cents.
  
• There were the same number of seeds in each packet - 100 - so I knew if I planted them all, I'd have an equal number in the garden.
• We finished the raised vegetable garden bed on March 23, 2009. I divided one half of the raised bed into two equal sections and sowed the spinach seeds.
  
• They appeared to germinate equally as well.
• The Teton hybrids had dark green foliage and curly-edged leaves that were very pretty. The other spinach grew the traditional green leaves.
• Yield from both beds was about the same. In total, we ate six meals with spinach as a side dish. I froze 3 gallon bags full of spinach too. And I must have cut baby leaves for salads and smoothies at least twice from each bed.
• Yesterday, June 30, 2009, all of the spinach plants had gone to seed and were dying, so I pulled them all up and composted them.

Results of my Great Spinach Grow-Off and my recommendation:

SAVE YOUR MONEY!

The 99 cent package of seeds from Lowes was almost indistinguishable from the fancy, expensive named package. The spinach tasted about the same, grew at the same rate, and went to seed at the same rate.

For our vegetable gardening fans out there, go for the cheap spinach seeds. They grew well in our Virginia garden, and we enjoyed the harvest for many months. And thanks to the frozen bags of spinach in my freezer, I'm hoping to enjoy the harvest for many months to come.



An Update on the Baby Birds
There are FOUR not three! I saw a fourth fuzzy head popping up from behind the three siblings yesterday and called John over to confirm the sighting. The fourth one is smaller than his nest mates and less aggressive. I can't believe there are four birds crowded into one nest. Every day we watch for babies in case one pops out. The biggest one is very vigorous and he rises on his tippy toes and flaps his baby wings and they crowd around the edge of the nest. Their eyes are still shut, but their beaks are ALWAYS open!

The Happy Family

On Friday we spotted the baby birds for the first time. These are the babies living in the nest built on the blades of the ceiling fan on our front porch. The birds are called Phoebes, and they love open fields near woods like the ones near our house. John had taped the ceiling fan blades to the ceiling so they wouldn't spin in the wind. He'd held up a big metal pot to use as a sort of mirror to peek into the nest about two weeks ago, and we saw two small, oval shaped white eggs.


Well, surprise! Mom Bird must have laid another egg. There are three babies!

Yesterday we were all entertained by their antics. We can see the nest quite clearly from inside the house, so we can pull up a chair near the window and watch without disturbing them.

Their heads are covered in fuzzy feathers that make them look like they have perpetual bed head. One guy is quite active, jumping up and down and peeping a lot and demanding food. The smallest just sits there and throws his head back and opens his mouth and lets out a huge SQUEAK of demand.

Mother and Father bird are quite busy. I never realized how much work children are until I watched the parent birds! They leave around dawn and feed the young. They're gone for some time, flying back and forth to the edge of the woods. I assume they're flying down to the creek to drink and back and forth skimming the fields for insects. We have a bird bath out back which we made sure to fill last night...hopefully it will save them a trip.

My porch railing is now covered with evidence that Mom bird perches there. We are going to need to scrub everything down for sure when they are done. But I love this happy family. I'm glad we were able to give them a home!

As I write this, I can see Mom bird from my office window. She's perched on the metal archway into the flower garden.

I hope she's helped herself to some insects!

Can you spot the three hungry mouths in the photo today? John held the camera up as high as he could over the nest and snapped the first picture without knowing what he'd captured. Amazing!

Enjoy!