Food and Dirt
Two largely unrelated things that both involve food plants:
First - I bought a spearmint plant for the porch on a whim, seeing as I like a single spearmint leaf in my iced tea when I can get it. (I realize that at the point where one has put sugar, lemon, and a mint leaf in one's iced tea, it's no longer "tea" in any sense that a proper tea snob is bound to respect. I don't care all that much, though - Southerners are weird that way, and in at least this respect I take after my father's mother's family and their habits. I'm drinking an iced jasmine green with blackberry leaf and blackberry flavoring at the moment, with sugar and lemon, and it's awesome. Shut up.) Then I realized that I still have a lot of seeds from the last time I tried to do herbs from seed, and a lot of empty pots from when the crazy winter killed off all my plants (not that they'd have survived the following drought anyway, but I didn't replace any of them last spring). It's a little late for seeding in Houston, but eh, I figured I'd see if any of them were still any good. I planted a couple of different types of basil, two different types of tomato (I had a third, but it's not a container type), one pepper, one cucumber, parsley, mugwort, and bergamot mint. I also cleared a lot of the junk off of the porch so they'd get more light, and tossed a few cosmos seeds I'd gotten as a bonus into the hedge bed.
Today I dumped the two remaining partial bags of potting soil into the existing hedge bed, where there are a dead shrub and another one that's mostly dead - sending up a couple of shoots from the main trunk, but the branches are dry and leafless. I planted the makeshift raised bed with morning glories and moonflowers, figuring they'd use the dead hedge as a trellis and look better than the dead bush. I then had some morning glory seeds left over, so I found a couple of places along the back fence (which was partially knocked over in Ike and never really fixed, so it has gaps in it now) where there were remnants of potting soil from some of my previous experiments and planted them back there.
I don't normally do flowers. We'll see if these are at all successful.
---
Second - I bought a pair of round yellow fruit labeled "Meyer lemons" about a month ago. They were mislabeled, I think - they were clearly a cross between a Meyer lemon and something else, probably a blood orange from the internal color. When I tried the first one, it was sweet. It had some lemon flavor, but mostly it was just a generic tart citrus fruit.
I found the other one tonight and decided to use it before it went bad, so I squeezed it and drank the juice. It was fabulous! "Fresh squeezed lemonade" is a fairly good description. If they ever market this stuff, I might actually buy it.
First - I bought a spearmint plant for the porch on a whim, seeing as I like a single spearmint leaf in my iced tea when I can get it. (I realize that at the point where one has put sugar, lemon, and a mint leaf in one's iced tea, it's no longer "tea" in any sense that a proper tea snob is bound to respect. I don't care all that much, though - Southerners are weird that way, and in at least this respect I take after my father's mother's family and their habits. I'm drinking an iced jasmine green with blackberry leaf and blackberry flavoring at the moment, with sugar and lemon, and it's awesome. Shut up.) Then I realized that I still have a lot of seeds from the last time I tried to do herbs from seed, and a lot of empty pots from when the crazy winter killed off all my plants (not that they'd have survived the following drought anyway, but I didn't replace any of them last spring). It's a little late for seeding in Houston, but eh, I figured I'd see if any of them were still any good. I planted a couple of different types of basil, two different types of tomato (I had a third, but it's not a container type), one pepper, one cucumber, parsley, mugwort, and bergamot mint. I also cleared a lot of the junk off of the porch so they'd get more light, and tossed a few cosmos seeds I'd gotten as a bonus into the hedge bed.
Today I dumped the two remaining partial bags of potting soil into the existing hedge bed, where there are a dead shrub and another one that's mostly dead - sending up a couple of shoots from the main trunk, but the branches are dry and leafless. I planted the makeshift raised bed with morning glories and moonflowers, figuring they'd use the dead hedge as a trellis and look better than the dead bush. I then had some morning glory seeds left over, so I found a couple of places along the back fence (which was partially knocked over in Ike and never really fixed, so it has gaps in it now) where there were remnants of potting soil from some of my previous experiments and planted them back there.
I don't normally do flowers. We'll see if these are at all successful.
---
Second - I bought a pair of round yellow fruit labeled "Meyer lemons" about a month ago. They were mislabeled, I think - they were clearly a cross between a Meyer lemon and something else, probably a blood orange from the internal color. When I tried the first one, it was sweet. It had some lemon flavor, but mostly it was just a generic tart citrus fruit.
I found the other one tonight and decided to use it before it went bad, so I squeezed it and drank the juice. It was fabulous! "Fresh squeezed lemonade" is a fairly good description. If they ever market this stuff, I might actually buy it.