WINTER IN THE HERB GARDEN

Most days I go out into the herb garden to pick herbs for the kitchen. At this time of the year there is parsley, thyme, oregano, sage, the ever abundant garlic chives and rosemary, which are all good herbs for winter cooking.

Parsley has done a magnificent job of reseeding itself. It is even growing in the pathway cracks. You can never have too much parsley.

Oregano gets cut back several times a year to make sure it stays round and bushy with fresh leaves. Most of my kitchen uses are for dried oregano which I make from the fresh young leaves but I also use fresh oregano chopped with parsley and thyme in herbed polenta. A little goes a long way.

Dried oregano is wonderful when roasting butternut squash. Drizzle the cut side of the squash with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and a couple of pinches of the dried crushed oregano.
 

Sage also was trimmed back this winter so has plenty of fresh new growth. I love to use the fried leaves on top of risotto. This one is the common culinary sage, Salvia officinalis.

It has the added bonus of beautiful sprays of blue flowers in the spring.

S.officinalis flowers. Late March

This one is Salvia officinalis "Berggarten" which has the more rounded leaves. It can also be used in the kitchen although it has a stronger flavor. I use it mainly to add leaf interest to the garden.

I also have a very compact cultivar S. officinalis "minimus" which I have used at the front of the beds.

There is a small thyme bed at the base of the pillar planter. I try to grow a variety of thymes including lemon, variegated silver and German thyme.I shall have to replenish some of these thymes this spring. They get very woody with age.

Alyssum brings some welcome color into the winter garden as well as a sweet fragrance on warm sunny days.

Rosemary is just beginning to flower. For some unknown reason we lost most of our rosemary during the summer. I need to take cuttings this year to replace them.

This week was a tough week for me. Blood work, infusions, met with radiologist, a nuclear injection, followed by surgery on Thursday to remove the cancer and the sentinel nodes. Things are looking good and the preliminary biopsy on the lymph nodes showed the cancer had not spread. I await confirmation of this and the findings on the biopsy of the lumpectomy. Clear margins mean I will move on to the next phase-30 days of radiation! I started the weekend with a much lighter heart and really ready to get back out in the garden. It is perfect timing for the spring garden.

THE TEXAS TWO STEP AND THE CHELSEA CHOP

Having a cottage-style garden is one of the most difficult gardens to have even though many say it is the easiest. It isn't just a matter of throwing out a few seeds and waiting for them to flower. It is trying to create a balance between those annual plants and perennials which carry the garden through the remaining months of the year. In Texas, because we have such a long growing season, a cottage garden will go through many changes and must be helped along at every step.  Texas Two Step is my term for that time when annuals have done their thing, set their seed and must now be pulled for tidiness sake. You sow them, you gather them.
Take this area of bluebonnets, a beautiful sight back in March.

Not looking quite so attractive by mid-May. This annual plant has made and thrown its seed and the dried, crispy remains of the plant must be removed for neatness sake. It's time for the Texas two step.

Having bluebonnets is a labor of love, but isn't all gardening. I have at least 8 areas of dried bluebonnets that I need to work on over the next week or so-if the weather would just cooperate. A stroll around the garden this morning made me realize that I won't be doing much of that today unless the sun comes out and pops those seed heads. But, I will be snipping some of the almost ready heads and storing in a brown paper bags or boxes until the fall.
But first up for the two step this week were the poppies. Those of ten thousand seeds. I'm guessing that like many wildflowers their seeds lie dormant in the ground waiting for me to disturb the soil, just like the poppies in the Flanders fields following WW1, so despite the fact that I have plums to reduce their numbers next year I am sure they will be back.
If you want these, and I do.

Then you must wait for this and hope to catch a few of them. Brown paper bags at the ready!

I am serious about collecting some of these this year because of a long term project we began two years ago. That of converting our septic field into a wildflower meadow. When the field was originally done I ordered 2 bags of wildflower seeds from Native American Seed with instruction for them to be added to the spray mix they use to cover the field. It wasn't enough to tell my builder and give him the bags with instruction for them to be put in the tank before they spread. It was never done.  I would plant seeds in the fall but nothing ever grew and then I discovered that the soil was probably to rich for them. For the past 3 years we have mowed and bagged and last fall I threw out blanket flowers and bluebonnets. It worked. These and so many more wildflowers showed up this year.

May 2019 on the septic field

The next Two-Step with be with Nigella,  Love-in-a mist. A cottage garden must have these.

Their seed pods put on a pretty good show too, but....

But there comes a time when they must be pulled too.

And the herb garden will hopefully take on a tidier appearance as I remove the parsley and cilantro once the seeds are ripe.

It's Chelsea Flower Show week and many gardeners in England adhere to the old rule of cutting back perennials by half at this time. The practice is known as The Chelsea Chop. I have quite a few plants that will get this treatment over the next couple of weeks. The roses, salvias, Mexican marigold mint, Copper Canyon daisy, mealy blue sage, the mint-I may even pull that out completely, oregano, basil, All of theses if left to continue growing will swamp the garden. I want them to look good right through to the fall. A little cut back will help them do that-and some summer rain.

GOING TO SEED

This is the second year I will let my Italian parsley, Petroselinium neapolitanum, flower and go to seed. I will probably do so for the rest of my gardening life. The insects adore those tiny flowers. In the warm sunshine it isn't just the bees, but all manner of insects, most of which I am unable to identify. It might be easier if I could just get a good shot of them but they just don't like that camera lens moving in on them.

Parsley nectar attracts many beneficial insects and encouraging them may even protects plants such as tomatoes from the tomato hornworm caterpillar. That would be a bonus. And right by the side of the parsley plant is my newly made bug hotel. It's early days yet but someone has already moved in.

When a friend came over with her camera with new macro lens the other evening I gave her a mission. A nice close-up of those parsley flowers. Of course the bees had gone home for the night but she managed to capture this ladybird feasting on the parsley.

Yesterday, I tried once again but my camera has trouble finding the right focus. I wonder if I need to try manual?

Is this a big-eyed bug? Either way it has a big head.

Who is this?

And the ladybirds were back again only this one has spots.

Last year when the seeds were ripe I took down the plants and carried them out and threw them under the cedar trees on the edge of the septic field. I have often taken plants to this area and there is quite a garden there now. Among the plants growing is a nice field of parsley. The poor quality of the soil there has meant the plants have not grown much-unlike those in the herb garden.

The grasses are in full seed mode. In the herb garden, Mexican feather grass, Nassella tenuissima, and Ruby crystal grass, Melinis nerviglumis, caught in the morning sun.

Both these grasses need to be controlled a little as they are a little too generous with their seeds. The older ones need to be pulled out.

The same is true of the bluebonnets. I have been snipping off the ripe seed heads every day and putting them in brown paper bags until planting time in the fall.

Clearly I have missed some.

After losing the whole of last years crop to the hail it is a relief to see the seed bank filling up again. By the end of the week I should be able to remove all the dead, dried foliage and the garden will start to look a lot tidier.
But there are those plants whose seed heads put on quite  a show. First it was the poppies and now it is the Love-in-a-mist, Nigella sp. They are wonderful in dried arrangements.

Before they went to seed they put on a wonderful show, returning year after year in all different colors.

I heard the designer Bunny Guinness espouse the growing of Nigella in the rock garden where they never achieve their full height. She was right. Seed away as much as you like.