As I overhaul my habits to complement my TeamWILD-inspired mantra “I am an athlete” I am paying more attention to the food I eat: increasing the greens, eating cleaner and creating more of my food myself.
That last one has been about cooking at home more; now I’m looking at growing things, particularly herbs as I love them for cooking, hate their cost at the grocery store, and have been reading more and more about their health benefits (note: this is not the post I remember reading, but it’ll give you an idea of the good things herbs can do in your body).
I rent a home without much of a yard. A few years ago, I grew some herbs and tomatoes in containers along the south side of the house.
It was a decent garden substitute, but required a excess of vigilance in the watering department. For the last few weeks, I’ve been on a quest for a better system. I’m about to order a self-watering windowsill box or two (found here) and Gayla Trail‘s latest book: Easy Growing: Herbs and Edible Flowers from Small Spaces which, with her book Grow Great Grub, inspires me to also re-purpose tomato cans as I get more adventurous in my mini-gardening. Now to decide between starting with seeds and buying little plants ready to go…
I am open to tips from the gardeners among you and will share my adventure now and then.
I planted some miscellaneous Asian greens (like bok choy, etc.) in my garden about 10 years ago, now they just seed themselves and come up on their own (I don’t worry about a messy garden! I let them go to seed). It gives me enough greens to last the whole year, every day for lunch. I saute them in olive oil with onions, a little feta cheese, quinoa, walnuts, sunflower seeds, and maybe dill or lemon juice. (and tomatoes if they are in season). Tastes wonderful. During the summer when there are too many to eat I’ll steam them and put them in small glass jars and freeze them. Then I eat them all winter too. They are the easiest things to grow in a garden, and also are frost tolerant– they survive into December here in upstate New York, and are the first to come up in the spring (sprouting right now when it’s 15 degrees out today). They’ve invaded the compost pile now and even showed up in my husband’s house plants last winter after he added compost; so I had a fresh source of greens inside all winter, to his dismay… he tries to pull them up but I won’t let him…