Grow Your Garden, Inspire Your Cooking
Insights and tips for homegrown ingredients. Whether you have a small patio garden or a backyard plot, growing your own produce can be simple, fun, and rewarding.
Practical Gardening Tips
- Start Small: Begin with a few easy-to-grow herbs or vegetables like basil, tomatoes, or peppers.
- Seasonal Planting: Learn which plants thrive in each season to keep your garden productive year-round.
- Soil and Watering: Healthy soil and proper watering are the foundation for a thriving garden.
- Container Gardening: No backyard? No problem! Pots, window boxes, and raised beds make gardening accessible for any space.
Growing Herbs
Gardening should be fun and inspiring. Some folks like to grow food to eat – vegetables and fruit. Others like to stick to flowers. One useful garden is one that is dedicated to herbs. Herbs are the easiest of edible plants to grow and they are also useful for vase arrangements and decorating.
My favorite garden to grow is a mix of herbs and zinnias. I always make sure I have rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, thyme, mint and tarragon in my herb garden. The zinnias self-plant from seed and come back every year.
Growing perennial herbs has many upsides, mainly because they come back every year without re-planting.
Some perennial herbs, such as sage, rosemary and thyme, stay green all year. Some, like mint, oregano and tarragon, die back to the ground but come back when spring and warm weather come around.
Basil is an annual in most areas. I grow it every year so I can stock my freezer with home-grown and home-made pesto. *recipe below
Ingredients for Pesto
Judie’s Pesto
- 6-8 cups fresh basil leaves
- 2 – 4 cloves fresh garlic
- Olive oil
- Fresh lemon juice
- ½ - 1 cup grated or shredded Parmesan cheese
- Salt and pepper to taste
- ¼ - ½ cup pine nuts, pecans or almonds
Directions
- Fill a food processor bowl with freshly cut and washed basil leaves. If there is a little water still on the leaves, this won’t matter at all. Add garlic cloves and pulse the leaves a few times, and when they start to settle down, you can add more leaves. When you have a good amount of chopped basil leaves (with the garlic), drizzle in 2 – 4 tablespoons olive oil and 2 – 4 tablespoons lemon juice. Pulse the mixture in the food processor until it has the consistency of cooked oatmeal. If you like pesto less firm, add more olive oil and/or lemon juice.
- Taste for salt and pepper and add to taste. Add nuts * and pulse a few times to lightly chop.
*My nut of choice for pesto is toasted almonds
Garden
