Month: June 2007

Four Types of Sage

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Yesterday afternoon I brought home a first harvest from the four different kinds of hardy sage (Salvia officinalis) I’ve got growing at the community garden. It’s not much, just a handful of clippings that I pinched off to make the plants grow bushier but it’s more than enough to make a whole lot of delicious scrambled eggs. I removed the flowers because I moved the flowering plants from my former plot earlier in the season and would rather they put their energy to getting well established and making lots of lush and tasty leaves than making babies so-to-speak.

The varieties:

  • Garden sage – Your standard, cold hardy, culinary sage. I am making it sound dull here but really you can’t beat the standard variety when it comes to hardiness and productivity. I grew a bunch of plants in my planter box a number of years ago and they survived for years getting larger and more prolific every season. This variety flowers like crazy after its first season — I like to snip a few off to put in a vase on my desk but you can eat them too or brew them into a tea. Leave a few in the garden where they will attract lots of pollinators and beneficial insects.
  • Purple Sage – I find this one to be less cold hardy than the garden sage but it will survive outdoors in colder climates if you give it lots of chance to establish itself and provide mulch or winter protection. I have grown it in the past and it never seems to get as large and bushy as the garden sage but the dark purple colour is just so pretty and makes a great contrast to the golden and tricolor sages. I am a sucker for just about anything purple in the garden.
  • Golden Sage – This variety seems to have the same issues as the purple but the chartreuse splashes in the leaves are hard to resist. Chartreuse is my other colour weakness. I’ve got the chartreuse/gold version of just about every herb (oregano, marjarom, etc) in my community plot this year.
  • Berggarten Sage – Similar to garden sage but with a dense, low growth and big, soft, oval leaves.

I have a fifth tricolor plant growing in a pot on the rooftop deck. I find the coloured sages are best for pots because they tend to stay on the smaller size and develop a really interesting topiary look if you remove the lower leaves and allow the plant to grow a woody bottom stem.

p.s Yep, those are my dirty fingernails in the photo above. Thanks to Davin for taking the photo.

Fancy Pants Pots

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I found these gorgeous, decorative pots while getting my daily plant fix the other day at Fiesta Gardens here in Toronto. (200 Christie Ave just north of Bloor). The containers on the left are metal with an embossed design while the others on the right are ceramic glazed with a metal bottom edging. At approximately $9 for a small and $25 for the red and white one on the right hand side, they’re a little out of my price range, with my price range being found-on-the-side-of-the-road free to thrifted and cheap. But look at how beautiful they are! I’m thinking that the red and white pot with flutted edging [far right] would make an excellent gift for a certain someone whose birthday is only a month and a half away!

Unfortunately I have not been able to find these online so at this point you’ve got to be local to get your hands on one. If you have seen them available elsewhere please hollar back with a link.

p.s. Sorry about the poor camera phone quality.

Sale Season is Starting

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I picked up this gorgeous and awesomely huge sage plant for a buck fifty a few days ago. Okay sure I already have more sage than I can shake a stick at but you know how it is…. It was so big and beautiful and only a buck fifty people! They charge more for candy bars these days. A comparison/justification that would have an ounce of relevancy if I actually ate candy bars. Most sale herbs look a little worse-for-wear if not completely dead because they can’t withstand the drought in the tight transplant boxes but sage is always a good choice because it just gets bigger and bigger in those little pots. I caught the sale while riding my bike past a small corner shop/plant store that was itching to get rid of their over-sized herbs. I will admit that I have been going out of my way on bike lately in an effort to keep tabs on just about every garden store I know. I bragged to a friend that I’ve got the entire west end of Toronto mapped out in my head according to who’s got what, what looks better where, cost, and if the sales are on yet.

With the heat rising to oppressive levels here in Toronto, the pressure to get things planted or sold off seems to have arrived earlier than ever this year. Yeah, I definitely don’t have enough guilt as-is. I came home with my bike basket overflowing with plants the other day — partly because I am the Angelina Jolie of the plant world (minus the lips) with my insatiable need to expand the brood and partly because I just felt so dang bad for that nasturtium (or three. Twelve if you count that they come 4 per pack).

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Colette of Urban Harvest has started selling her plants at reduced prices (I could not resist more basil!) and FoodShare had their annual plant giveaway yesterday afternoon. I said I was going to support a friend and check out the action but walked away with a very hot n’ spicy mustard plant. Thankfully I did not feel bad for the flowers that were left behind. Mostly.

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A dull but constant sense of panic is creeping in over the transplants that are still sitting in the holding area outside. The transplants! They are not planted! Everything else is getting huge and yet the stragglers sit out there in those smallish pots waiting to get into some soil. How can I so cruely deny them? And yet I can’t stop bringing new plants home. Because soon it will be harder to find certain plants as the season slows down and so the urge to go out and find more plants to add to a collection that can’t possibly be enough takes hold and the cycle continues.

Tomatoes Like Milk

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Readers of the You Grow Girl book might recall that I love a little milk mixed with water as a tomato disease preventative. Okay, I probably didn’t go so far as to indicate a “love” for the concoction but I will say it here: the tomato plants on my rooftop garden benefit from regular applications throughout the growing season and have been disease-free since I began this experiment a number of years ago. You can’t not LOVE those results. I’d cuddle a milk and water concoction on the couch while sharing a bowl of popcorn and a movie with results like that. After the movie we’d play some non-competitive board games and catch The Colbert Report before settling into our communal sleeping bag for the night. I LOVE these results.

Here’s what I do. Organic milk tends to go bad in the fridge faster than non-organic. I only drink milk in my cappuccinos so I often have lots of spoiled milk in the fridge. I dilute the milk with water to a minimum 50:50 ratio (I often dilute much further than this) and either pour it directly over the plant leaves or pour it onto the soil at the roots. I used to put it into a spray bottle first but am too lazy to take that extra step now-a-days.

I should add that this is the only time I water tomato leaves directly. I am careful to water the soil only on all other occasions. This is because tomatoes do not like wet leaves and can develop fungal diseases as the result of too much humidity and moisture sitting on the leaves for long periods of time.

One of my favourite things about gardening is experimenting and trying to improve on old ideas. Last year I figured I might as well mix up my milk remedy with my fertilizer routine. My thought process is that perhaps it all works better when it’s mixed together. I mix the same water and milk solution and add a splash of sea kelp and a dash of fish emulsion to the mix then pour the whole thing onto the soil.

It doesn’t smell great but the plants like it. And I like tomatoes. If it means more tomatoes come fall then I’m all for it.

Hint: If you’re not a milk drinker you can make up the same mix using powdered milk. In fact many people swear by dry powdered milk mixed directly into the soil.