A Gardening Tip...

The weekend before we had to make our emergency trip to Maine in June for Joe's funeral, I had planted a small "container" vegetable garden in the walkway that runs along the side of the house. 

While we were on our trip to Maine and then our vacation to Tennessee, our neighbor kept it watered for me.  :)  I have very nice neighbors!  :D

I now have baby green tomatoes, a couple of banana peppers, and lots of sweet basil!  The zucchini are having trouble because something keeps eating the leaves.  I think it's a ground hog because we have trouble with them here.  The hot peppers aren't doing great, either, so I moved the pot so it gets more direct sun.  I hope that will help.

Yesterday I dried some of the basil, so I thought I'd do a post about that.  :)

Instead of just pulling of the leaves, I actually cut the top half of the stem off, brought them inside and washed them under cool running water.  I patted them dry with a towel to remove the excess moisture...

I plucked off the leaves and placed them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper...

I had read of two different methods using the oven...one you just turn the light on and use the heat generated by the bulb to dry the basil.  The other hint was to turn the oven on, let it warm up, then turn off the oven and just use the residual heat.  I did a combination of the two...first I turned the oven on for a few minutes to warm it up and then turned the oven off, but left the light on.  I placed the cookie sheet with the basil inside the oven.

I left it overnight and this morning I had dried basil!!!

After crumbling it up...

...I placed it in an airtight jar for storage.

All that I need to do now is to label the jar!  And I now have dried basil as well as the fresh basil that is still growing outside!  :)

I'm going to start growing more of my herbs.  I'm planning on putting some shelves on the inside of my kitchen windows so that I can grow things indoors in the winter!  Eventually, I'd like to have something like this going on in my kitchen...

(photo courtesy of growveg.com)

Loretta