Preserving Sweet Basil and Italian Flat Parsley

These are the last herbs and plants that are still in the garden: Celery, Sweet Basil, Flat Italian Parsley, Spring Onions and the Zucchini. The Spring Onions will be left in the garden because they seem to do well even during the rainy season. We harvest mostly the outer leaves of the Celery plants and feed these to the rabbits so the main stem remains in the ground and they grow back again. I will harvest some Sweet Basil leaves tomorrow to make some Pesto. I often buy the bottled Pesto in the grocery but they are kinda expensive. Since I already have the Sweet Basil in my garden, so I might as well make my own Pesto. I will preserve the rest of the Sweet Basil leaves in the microwave oven. It only takes a minute or two to dry them in the microwave.

How do I do it? First is to wash the leaves after I harvest them and let them drip dry. I separate the mature leaves from the more tender ones because the latter dries up much faster than the matured ones. Put a paper towel over the round dish of the microwave and arrange the leaves on the towel making sure that they are not overlapping together so each leaf will dry well. Then turn the microwave on high at 2 minutes and check the leaves for dryness. If it needs more time, do it again in small increments so as not to burn the leaves. I do the same thing with the Italian Flat Parsley. I like using the microwave in drying these herbs because it retains the color of the leaves even when they are dried. I could hang-dry the herbs in the kitchen by tying them on the stem and putting them in an airy room. It's just that there is a lot of moisture in the air at this time because it is now the onset of the rainy season here in the Philippines. I am afraid that molds will build up fast on the herbs before they dry so I'm going to use the microwave to dry them up.

Sweet Basil  

Italian Flat Parsley

Italian Flat Parsley and Sweet Basil

Celery in the forefront and Sweet Basil behind it.

Zucchini plant

Zucchini flower

Spring Onions

Drying the Seeds

I intentionally left some Green beans to mature on the tepee trellis and on the welded wire trellis so they will dry up on the vines because I plan on using the seeds for next year's planting season. I am hoping for a few more days of sunshine this month of June so the drying process will be complete before I harvest the seeds. Even the two Okra plants which I thought will never bear fruit somehow managed to grow 2-3 pods but I left them alone to mature and dry. I am trying to keep some of the seeds from my plants now, so I do not have to buy them for the next planting season. I dried some Tomato seeds and Pepper seeds as well including the Snap Dragon seeds and these will all be kept in an airtight bottle for the next planting season. Next time around, I know not to plant my tomatoes in the garden but will plant them in pots and put them all in the patio where they will be exposed to direct sunlight for at least 8 hours. I learned not to get the leaves of the Tomato and Pepper plants wet when watering because otherwise, they easily get infected.  In drying the tomato seeds, I soaked the seeds in a bowl of water for 3 days and I had to change the water everyday. Then I drained the water out and put the seeds on a paper towel and dried them up under the sun. In harvesting the seeds of the Snap Dragon flowers, I let the flowers mature in the stalk until they turn brown. Then I simply open the brown pods and pour out the black seeds into a paper towel and transfer them into an envelope or an airtight container. The seeds of the Snap Dragon flowers are very small just like Celery seeds so you have to be very careful when opening and taking out the seeds.

Raised Garden Bed

Gardening is never really done. There is always something that has to be done to improve things or maybe it's just me wanting to play around in the garden. In the two pictures above, you will notice that the last terraced bed at the bottom of the garden has only 1 layer of hollow blocks. The top of this raised bed is lower by 6 inches from the surface of the walkway above it as shown in the picture above.  So what I did is to put another layer of hollow blocks on top of the original ones to make a two-layer hollow blocks in this raise this bed. This makes the height of this raised bed into 16 inches high from its original height of 8 inches only. It also means that I could plant some root crops such as Carrots in this raised bed when I do my crop rotation because it now has enough room for the roots to grow. The pictures below is the result of this latest work that I have done in the garden, that of increasing the height of the raised bed. You can see the difference of the older hollow blocks at the bottom of the bed as compared to the new addition on top of it.

Maybe I will start sowing my seeds by mid November so I will be able to put them out in the garden by December. Since it takes much longer for Celery seeds to germinate, I will have to start sowing my Celery seeds by October. I harvested a lot of Basil, Parsley and Celery in the garden today and fed these to the rabbits. Some are still in the garden but I will have to gather them all before the typhoons come and destroy the plants completely.  I also harvested the last tomatoes in the patio so that my work for tomorrow. I am thinking of transferring some of the Basil plants from the garden into these big tomato pots and put them under the awning so they will not become water logged if left alone in the garden beds. I'll see how the weather holds tomorrow because there is a storm coming although it is not expected to land in the Philippines but we still get a lot of rain as a result of this storm.