The Herb Patch

In all our years posting, I don't know if we've ever shown you our little herb patch.  Many years ago, we constructed a raised bed in the side yard with 2x12's and filled it with topsoil.  The idea was to plant herbs in one location to not take space out of the main garden.  We've kept this herb patch going for quite a while now.  We have a lot of different items in this bed.  We'll oftentimes come out and cut what we need and it's not that far of a walk back inside to the kitchen where the meal is being prepared.

Below you're looking at three separate celery plants.  They seem to be really happy and healthy.

Here is a close-up photo of the healthiest of the three.  If you've been following us, we planted these from store-bought celery stalks that we had eaten everything except a small 3 inch section of the base.  We rooted it in a cup of water and then transplanted it out here.  It's doing quite well.  We might get a bunch of celery after all.  This is our first time doing this.  

These two plants have similar leaves, but aren't celery.  These are flat Italian parsley.  These come in handy for gumbos.  We'll pick a bunch and the plants continue to re-grow.  We didn't plant these from seed.  They came up volunteer from last year's parsley plant that we allowed to go to seed.

This is French Sorrel and is two years old.  It continues to thrive.  I like to eat the leaves raw.  It has a unique taste.  We also put in salads.

This is lemon grass.  This group of plants was started from seed about three years ago.  We cut off bunches of it to make tea - either iced or hot.  It's delicious and has a real nice fragrance.  We aim to try to cook with it.  Lemon grass is used in lots of dishes, but we haven't tried any recipes yet.

Here is a pretty large rosemary plant.  It's four years old, I'm guessing.  We use rosemary quite often in cooking.  I love the fragrance.

Here is some ginger.  It is two years old.  The leaves look a little beat up.  I think it got hurt a little by the frost we had a couple of weeks ago.  I guess we'll need to dig it up.

And finally, here is what's left of the oregano.  This plant used to be quite large, but the drought this year really hurt the plant.  Where it used to fill up almost 1/4 of the entire bed, it's now just these small stragglers hanging on.  Hopefully it will recover.  We like its flavor in Italian dishes.

And that's a quick tour of the herb garden.  We'll plant some additional items in here in the spring.

Experimenting With Celery

For several years, I tried to plant celery seed to grow our own celery.  We like celery.  It is part of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking (onion, bell pepper, and celery) that serves as the base for many dishes we enjoy.  We grow onions, and we grow bell pepper.  I've never been able to grow celery from seed, despite trying several times.  It's not due to our locale, because we have friends that live 30 minutes away from us that can grow it just fine.  They even dug some plants up for us and gave them to us.  I planted them.  They promptly died.  

So we've resorted to buying it from the store.  My wife happened to see that you can grow celery from what's left over from your store bought celery.  We decided to give it a try.  She cut the celery we were going to eat off the stalk, leaving about 3 inches from the bottom.  Then she used a knife to barely cut off the bottom where the roots were.  She placed the celery, root side down, in a bowl of water and placed on the window sill.

In just a couple of days, fresh, new, green growth popped up out of the old celery scraps!  Over the next few days, fresh root growth appeared on the bottom of the celery in the water.  This thing wanted to live!

We prepared a nice spot in our herb garden, right between the ginger and parsley and oregano plants and planted it and watered it in.

Each day we check on it and keep it well-watered since it is so dry right now.  I moved some mulch around the base of the celery plant to keep the soil moist.  Celery loves cooler weather, so hopefully this one will flourish.  Tricia's already gotten another one sprouting on the window sill.  We'll see what happens.  Maybe, even though I never had success growing celery from seed, we will see success growing celery from the grocery store.  We'll keep you posted as the experiment progresses.