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. 

Tomatoes in the patio

I planted some tomato seedlings in the garden and they were all growing so well with thick and robust stalks until they got attacked by some blight and everything had to be destroyed. Knowing that I would get the same result if I planted tomato seedling in the garden, so decided not to do it. Instead, I bought several big plastic pots at ACE hardware ( SM mall Baguio) and used these to plant the new tomato seedlings that I've sown from seeds. I had them growing in pots at the foot of the garden right in front of the rabbitry until I decided to transfer them to the patio. The sun hits the patio from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon so the plants will get 8 hours of direct sunlight. I tried something different as well by using an old tea kettle with a long spout in watering the plants at the base without getting the leaves wet so they do not get diseased. I also pruned the bottom leaves so they are not touching the soil in the pot and the energy is concentrated in producing more fruits. It worked this time as the tomatoes grew well and were very productive! So from now on, I will plant my tomatoes  in the patio and I will buy more plastic pots for the next planting season.

 

Nothing really beats the taste of freshly picked vine-ripened organically grown tomatoes! Whenever I needed some tomatoes for my cooking or making sandwiches or pasta, I just go out and pick them right from the vine. My hubby and I enjoyed many a scrumptious meals with these tomatoes this summer. I had a good harvest of tomatoes this afternoon for making the sauce of my chicken creole recipe including a piece of bell pepper, some celery stalks and basil tops from the garden and all of these went into the pot together with my tomatoes. The result was wonderful according to my hubby who liked what I served for dinner tonight. There are still some unripened fruits in the vine but I will be gathering them soon before they get damaged by the rain. It is now the onset of the rainy season here in the Philippines so I will not be planting again until the next season. My plan is to start sowing my seeds sometime around the middle of October so I could transplant them in December. I don't have a green house yet so I could not raise tomatoes or other vegetables in the garden during the rainy season. We get a lot of rainfall here in Baguio City during the rainy season so it is best to just let the garden rest during this time. As the saying goes "time fly when you're having fun" and I did have a lot of fun with my gardening this summer.I hope you enjoy the pictures of my tomatoes.

Crop Rotation

My best friend Mary whose family comes from a long line of farmers has informed me about not planting the same kind of plant in the same location year- in and year- out so as to prevent plant diseases from building up in the soil. After I built the new additional raised bed near the outdoor aviary, I also moved the Sweet Pea trellis in this new bed. This is good practice for crop rotation in the garden. So just as I had done in the past, I placed the Sweet pea trellis nearest to the walkway where it will not cast a shade to the plants in front of it. Then I sowed some Sweet Pea seeds on both sides of this trellis. The Celery seedlings meanwhile are ready to be transplanted so I planted them next to the Sweet Peas. Since this new raised bed has never been planted before and it was rich with rabbit wastes and compost as fertilizer for the plants, all the things that were planted in this raised bed grew well and robust.  I planted the Celery seedlings close enough to each other so I did not have to blanch them as they grew. Their own leaves will serve as a shade for their stalks so they do not get the direct sunlight and this will prevent the bitter taste that most celery have when their stalks are not blanched. 

The 5-feet wide walkway is behind this Sweet Pea Trellis

Blue tanks in the background are the cooking gas tanks

Celery, Sweet Peas and Sun Flowers all growing together in one raised bed.

Adding Another Raised Bed

I got so hooked up in my gardening that I wanted to add another raised bed where I could grow more vegetables.  It's just that we do not have too much space in our small backyard so this is how I managed to gain another space to make an additional raised bed. Just above the last raised bed in the garden is a 14-inch wide cemented walkway that leads to the outdoor aviary and right beside this walkway is a flat area as shown in the picture below. Next to this walkway is a 4 feet wide and 6 feet long space where I built a temporary chicken coop and chicken run for a hen and her chicks. This hen was too aggressive to live with the rest of the flock so she had to be separated and this temporary coop and run was built for that purpose. We later transferred the hen house in another area at the back of my brother's house where they get some protection from the elements specially during the rainy season. We then covered up this vacated area with some broken clay pots and gravel as you can see in the picture below.

This vacated area is about 12 feet wide from the edge of the cemented walkway to the wall of my brother's house and it is 10 feet in length. Leaning against the wall of my brother's house is a wooden stand that is 3-feet wide at the base and tapering to 1-feet wide at the top and it is 5 feet high. This wooden stand is where we store several containers of 5-galloon  drinking water and  some cooking gas tanks. Right in front of this wooden stand is a 5-feet wide gravel walkway as shown in the picture below. Next to this walkway where the chicken coop used to stand is where I planned on making another raised bed as a new addition to the garden. So I enclosed this area with 2 layers of hollow blocks, each block is 8 inches tall. I did not have to dig up the soil in this bed because I figured that with 2 layers of hollow blocks, that will give me 16 inches of height which should be sufficient for planting some vegetables. This new raised bed is 4 feet wide by 6 feet long and 16 inches high. So with a walkway on 3 sides, it would be easy for me to reach for the plants or to do some weeding. This raised bed is next to the outdoor aviary as seen in the picture below. 

 

It's a good thing that we have plenty of different varieties of plants around the property so I gathered some leaves and chopped them up and put them in the bottom of this new raised bed. My hubby trimmed the Gumamela shrubs that serves as a fence in front of our property and these were all thrown into the new raised bed. Another good thing we have going for us is that we have rabbits! The green gold is priceless and we get to have them for free. So every day when we clean out the rabbitry, we throw the wastes over the shredded leaves in the raised bed and cover them up with a thin layer of compost so the flies will not have a chance to land into the wastes. We did this layering of green leaves, rabbit poop and compost soil for awhile until the compost reached the top of the first layer of hollow blocks. Time is really slow for those who wait, like me! I could not wait any longer until the bed is full because I was too eager to plant so I threw in a layer of about 4 inches thick of compost and smoothed the top and started planting.

Tepee Trellis and Snap Dragon Flowers

 Would it not be nice to have a continuous supply of fresh green beans from the garden during the summer? Of course I would like that very much because nothing beats the taste of freshly gathered Green Beans from the garden. They taste so sweet when you cook them as soon as you pick them from the vines. So two weeks after I planted the second batch of Green Beans in the wire trellis, I came out with the idea of sowing more Green Beans in a tepee. We have some reed sticks that were left over from another project and they were just lying around at the back of my brother's house, so I decided to put them to good use by making a tepee trellis for the Green Beans. I gathered about 12 sticks and tied them together at the top by using a rope to form a teepee and then stuck the legs about 1-foot deep into the ground. As you can see in the picture below, there are two teepees on both ends of this raised bed and I sowed some 3-4 seeds of Green Beans around each stick.

I already harvested the Sweet Peas, the lettuce as well as the Pak-Choi that were planted in this same bed except for these Carrots because it takes about 5 months before they mature. After I harvested all the crops, the raised bed looked empty. I have always wanted to plant some Snap Dragon flowers but the plant section in the mall had nothing to sell at that time. So I visited my friend at the Baguio City Orchidarium and she didn't have any of these to sell as well. I was lucky because I found some seedlings that were for sale right next to my friend's stall and I bought some. I planted these flowers right next to the Carrots and after a couple of weeks, they bloomed! It was a pretty sight to look at and I am amazed at the life span of these flowers. They really lasted a long time that I decided to plant these again next season. I will be keeping the seeds once the flowers are spent and dried so I could sow them by next planting season and I need not buy the seedlings again.  I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed planting them.