That herbal time of year

I have said before that my annual herb-planting ritual embodies the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson said about second marriages. But every year it seems my herbs grow a little better, and I have a good feeling about harvest season ’13 so far.

It’s only been four days since I bought them and three since I transplanted them from small plastic pots into large planters, but to me, they look really happy and healthy in their new home on our deck. The hot sunny weather last weekend followed by warm rain and high humidity yesterday might have been just what they needed to get off to a flourishing start.

It also helps that completely by chance, I found some particularly robust seedlings with which to begin this year’s aspirational green thumb project. For the past two years, I’ve gone the high-end route and purchased my seedlings at upscale nurseries with room after room of plants, shrubs, bushes, blossoms, and trees of all kinds. This year, the obligatory nursery stop sat on my To Do list for three weekends in a row. Then, after taking the dog to the vet one morning, I pulled into the Kmart parking lot with the plan of picking up some athletic socks and was surprised to see several racks of plants in front of the store. “Vegetables and herbs!” proclaimed a large sign.

Vegetables? At Kmart? It was so counterintuitive. And yet not only did the plants look healthy and well-nourished but there was even a flat containing cilantro, something I’d searched for in vain for the past couple of growing seasons. And since it was Kmart, the price was one-third of what I’d been paying for seedlings at the high-end nurseries. If they failed to thrive, I told myself, at least I wouldn’t have wasted much money.

But in fact they show every sign of prospering. The basil leaves are shiny and large; the cilantro and rosemary are perky. Even the fragile dill seems to be holding its little leaves high in the warm late-spring rain.

Gardening is not one of my talents, but I always tell myself that’s no reason not to give it another try.  It’s good to try something outside your comfort zone, I tell myself. I’ve downsized my expectations over the years, from tomatoes to herbs, and I’ve downsized my herb goals from many to just four varieties. And I think this may be the year that my herb-growing really takes off. The thought of fresh cilantro available whenever I want it makes my mouth water, and the fact that it could be as easy as a stop at Kmart amuses me.

Unlike fruit trees or tomato plants, these seedlings won’t need to yield a large harvest to be useful. A sprinkling of herbs now and then will be enough to make me feel successful. I may not have a green thumb, but if I can have the luxury of rosemary, cilantro, dill, or basil by just walking out to the deck, I’ll feel fruitful indeed.

Herbs, again

The fact that I planted herb seedlings this Memorial Day brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s description of remarriage, though on an admittedly different order of magnitude. Me trying once again to grow something is truly the triumph of hope over experience.

It is also on some level a refutation of my newfound belief in core competencies. After reading Laura Vanderkam’s “168 Hours,” a time management tome that reassured me that the best things to spend your time on are the things you’re good at, I decided to stop dwelling on all the talents I don’t possess, all the skills I haven’t developed, all the intellectual pursuits I haven’t pursued, and concentrate more of my attention on what I already know I can do.

But even in adopting that philosophy, I recognized the downside: I was essentially giving myself permission to avoid all potential challenges. By finally admitting that I don’t want to learn yoga and I don’t seem capable of understanding the finer points of the health care debate, I was throwing in the towel.

Plus I don’t have that many core competencies. If I gave myself permission to focus on only those skills for which I possessed both interest and aptitude, my day would be restricted to writing newspaper features, baking cookies, going running, and taking walks.

So in a way, it was a relief to realize I still wanted to try growing herbs this year, even though my inaugural attempt last year didn’t yield very impressive results.

Last year, one of my four attempted crops grew: the garlic chives that my friend Jane gave me to plant. She assured me they were foolproof, and she was right. They grew, they spread, they flowered, and best of all, they reappeared this spring.

Not so with the three seedlings I bought at a nursery last year: basil, rosemary and thyme. They never grew beyond the size they were when I put them in the ground, and after one or two recipes’ worth of their leaves, they were of no more use to me. They dried up, and were apparently reabsorbed by the very same soil that was expected to help them grow and prosper.

But with the warm weather this month came the same old fantasy. Other people smell spring and imagine they’ll take up running or do a spring cleaning; I imagine myself finally having all the fresh oregano, cilantro, mint and dill I could possibly want, and all at a moment’s notice, easy as walking out the back door and into the garden.

So I decided to try again. I started small and worked hard: three herb plants – basil, rosemary and oregano – and a few hours in the garden, first weeding, then troweling a hole, then tamping in the dirt around the roots.

As I watered my young charges, I tried to convey to them a sense of hope. No, I’m not a talented gardener, but maybe they could choose to hang in there anyway. Maybe the circumstances of soil, sunlight and temperature will be propitious enough this year that they’ll flourish in spite of my inabilities.

Like a little kid, I couldn’t resist going outside to check on them several times in the 24 hours since they were planted. They look the same, which is not a bad thing. So far, so good. Rain is predicted for tomorrow, which sounds promising even if I don’t really know that they need more water just yet.

So yes, adhering to one’s core competencies is probably a good idea, or at least a safe one. But maybe it’s possible to develop new core competencies. Maybe I’ll not only be lucky this time but actually get good at herb gardening.

Go ahead and grow, little seedlings. I’m rooting for you every step of the way. And if you do prosper, maybe I’ll take another look at some of that coverage of the health care debate and try a new yoga pose or two. If I can get good at gardening, it may be time to rethink all my assumptions about core competencies.

Quasi-locavore

Preparing Sunday evening’s quasi-locavore menu reminded me that although if it’s awfully difficult to go one hundred percent locavore in our part of the country, it’s always fun to try.

Even Barbara Kingsolver, who brought the concept of a locavore diet to the attention of millions of American readers (including me) in her 2006 memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, allowed each family member one exception, one non-local ingredient that they could sneak in to the yearlong scheme of eating local. Kingsolver herself chose coffee; her daughter chose chocolate. Those would probably be my top two choices as well; I’m not sure which way I’d go if I had to pick just one or the other.

For Sunday’s dinner, to which we’d invited my parents, I started with vegetables I’d bought at Carlisle’s Farmers Market the day before: new potatoes and tomatoes. On Sunday morning, I dropped Holly off to play with her friend Bella, and Bella’s mother handed me a zucchini just picked from their garden.

And the other local cache I had, in addition to these vegetables, was herbs grown in my garden. Some were from cuttings grown in a town close by and others were from my friend Jane’s Carlisle garden, so all the herbs passed the test.

For an appetizer, I made a goat cheese tart topped with herbs and olives. Another year, I would have been able to buy goat cheese right here in town, but unfortunately, our prize-winning goat cheese makers moved out of town earlier this summer. So the cheese wasn’t local, and neither were the olives (which a truly locavore plan would require me to eliminate from our diet altogether, unless we happened to be traveling in Greece), but the herbs scattered over the cheese were. Then I sliced the tomatoes and zucchini, layered them in a baking pan, and made pesto to spread over them. The basil for the pesto came from my garden; the other ingredients – the Parmesan, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil -- were not local, however.

With the potatoes I made potato salad. The local ingredients were the potatoes, of course, and garlic chives from my garden. I theoretically could have made mayonnaise using eggs from local chickens – local eggs are ubiquitously available in our community – but I didn’t, so that was a supermarket item, as was the vinegar, the salt and the pepper.

Since I’m the only vegetarian in my family, I bought sausages to put on the grill: not local at all. I could have increased our locavore score if I’d instead grilled steaks from my parents’ farm. But somehow it never seems right to serve guests food they themselves produced.

For dessert, I made chocolate custard. It would be very difficult to grow cocoa beans in New England or most other parts of the U.S.; chocolate is something many American locavores have to compromise on or give up altogether. The milk and eggs in the custard could have been locally produced if I’d gone to a little more trouble to find those items. Not the sugar, though.

I topped the chocolate custard with raspberry sauce. One of the vendors at Farmers Market had fresh raspberries, and that’s what I should have used, but we’d eaten the entire pint of raspberries we bought before we even left Farmers Market. So that ingredient was grown elsewhere.

All in all, I think my locavore score for this meal was only about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, but at other times of year it would be a 0 or a 1, so it’s a start. Locavore eating isn’t easy, as Kingsolver admits in her book about it, especially in New England, where there are abundant choices two or three months a year but very little in the way of fruits and vegetables at other times (although I realize a lot can be done with canning, preserving and freezing).

Moreover, shopping at Farmers Market carries its own inherent conflict. Carlisle’s market includes a few local farms but mostly backyard gardening hobbyists; buying from those gardeners who cultivate plots at our town’s community gardens doesn’t do anything for the goal of supporting local agricultural businesses.

But it’s fun to experiment with locavore cooking and see how far you can get with it. I’m really enjoying my herb garden so far this year, and I’m grateful so many of my neighbors grow vegetables. Later in the summer we’ll go blueberry picking and peach picking and count those into our options as well. In the winter, I’ll probably cave altogether and buy all kinds of distantly grown items. The intent is strong, but during those long winters, it’s hard to resist the occasional fresh strawberry on the supermarket shelf.

Herbs under way

On Sunday, I bought four potted herb plants. On Monday, I planted them in my garden. On Tuesday, I started cooking with my homegrown herbs, though I have to confess that I wonder just how early in the process I can refer to them as “my” homegrown herbs. At this point, the fragrant greens the little plants produce were born at the nursery where I bought the plants, not after I put them in the ground. So right now, I tell myself, it’s no different from buying herbs at the supermarket. But eventually, they’ll start generating new leaves, and those I can take responsibility for having grown.

I’ve wanted to grow herbs for years, and it was one of many back-burner interests for which life just did not seem to allow quite enough time. It’s not that I believed it would be all that much work or all that much money; it’s just that there were always more pressing demands on both time and money. So the herb idea went unpursued, year after year.

But when we moved into our current home, I inherited a fenced-in vegetable patch, ready to go. I spent a day last week weeding it and knew there was no reason not to go ahead and plant before another summer got away from me. I even had a gift card from a nearby nursery that I’d been carrying around for quite some time: it was a gift from Holly’s first-grade teacher to thank me for being a room parent, and Holly just finished third grade. The nursery, in a town about 30 minutes from here, always seemed too far away for a special trip. Preparing a plot seemed like too big a job. Tending to my plants seemed like something I just couldn’t fit in to my schedule. So instead, I bought herbs for summer cooking, year after year.

Last weekend, with the garden weeded and ready, I did the half-hour drive to the nursery (which turned out to take less than 25 minutes). Going on little more than advice from a library book and suggestions from my sister, who is a very good gardener but lives several states away, I focused on those herbs that I find most indispensable in cooking: rosemary, thyme, basil. A few days earlier I’d visited my friend Jane, and when she heard of my interest in gardening, she pulled up some garlic chive seedlings and gave them to me to replant. So with these new additions, I’d have a range of four different herbs in all. I hoped to buy cilantro as well, so that I could make fresh salsa all summer (tomatoes seem way beyond my agricultural capabilities at this point, not to mention jalapeno peppers, but I can buy those at our local farmers’ market), but the nursery didn’t have any cilantro, so I returned home with the other three.

The rest of the day was busy with other responsibilities, but the next afternoon I found time to put them into the ground. I patted down the earth around them, watered them, and hoped for the best. Like a parent with a sleeping newborn, I went outside several times over the next 24 hours to check on them. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but they looked fine to me: stalwart, with good coloring and no visible predators.

Tuesday night I roasted potatoes and tossed them with snippets of my herbs. Wednesday night, I used my herbal pickings in a pasta dish. Thursday I whirled handfuls of herbs in the food processor along with cottage cheese and sour cream and used them as a dip to serve with blanched broccoli.

My sister is a talented gardener who grows all kinds of vegetables. Years of family history have led me to believe that if she can do that, I probably can’t. But maybe herbs, I can manage. Maybe not actual vegetables; maybe I can’t actually produce a whole salad, but flavorings? That seems about my speed.

As of now, the plants seem healthy, though as I remind myself, they are really still the very same plants I brought home from the nursery or from Jane’s house. I can’t really take credit yet. But give me some time. By next month, I’m optimistic enough to think I’ll be producing herbs in abundant supplies and beautifully flavoring every dish in sight. With enough time, and thyme, who knows what I can accomplish.

Project herbal

Amidst all the work over the past few months of packing, sorting, and organizing, I indulged a few times in thoughts of what I would do when those tasks were behind me. I challenged myself to come up with a positive and proactive plan for something I could do once we moved: something beyond the necessary corollaries of unpacking, sorting and reorganizing.

I came up with the idea of growing herbs. This house has a deck right off the kitchen. I’ll put some small flowerpots of herbs on the deck and see if anything comes of it, I told myself. I know I don’t have the attention or ambition for vegetable gardening right now, but I imagined that I could nurture a small pot of some savory growing thing that didn’t require protection from pests or need special kinds of fertilizer.

My sister Lauren, an expert gardener, wrote to me with some advice on growing herbs when I asked her about it. Her long explanation reassured me that some of it would be just as straightforward as I’d hoped, even if a few parts might be a little more demanding than I’d pictured. Lauren encouraged me to think in terms of seedlings and not seeds, and I liked that idea. I didn’t feel ready to test my green thumb by actually having to wait to see something come out of the ground; using plants that were already sprouted and growing, and restricting my role to trying to make them grow some more, sounded like a task that was about my speed.

I imagined that I’d visit some high-end nursery to get the best-quality herbs I could find along with lots of garden-center advice to increase my odds of success, but as it happened, over the weekend I visited my friend Jane. We went for a walk and then ended up at her house; I was already in the car backing out of her driveway to head home when she remembered that she had planned to offer me some herbs to take home.

“Could I possibly take some that I could try replanting?” I asked. She conceded that I probably could. She fetched a trowel and some plastic bags from her garage and showed me what she was growing. We agreed that I would take a cutting of garlic chives and a cutting of mint from her.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out to plant them. Our yard already has a fenced-in area where the previous residents gardened in the past. I couldn’t find a trowel, but I found a large rake and a small one that they had abandoned in the garden, and those two implements seemed sufficient to till the soil enough that I could put my garlic chives and mint into the ground, at opposite ends since I didn’t know how much they’d spread.

I watered them, tamped down the dirt around them, and mentally encouraged them to take root. I sprinkled some water over them from the watering can, also left in the garden by the previous residents. Overnight I heard a light rain falling and hoped that it boded well for my herbs.

The next day I was shopping at Whole Foods and in the produce section discovered some herbs still in their soil, growing in small pots. Buying seedlings at the supermarket didn’t quite fit in with my vision of a visit to a high-end nursery, but then again, neither did taking them from Jane’s yard, and both opportunities had presented themselves over the weekend. I bought a cilantro plant and found a place for it within the garden when I arrived home.

In the day and a half since I planted the third of my three herbs, we’ve had a few light rainfalls and not much sun. I’m not sure how my plants are doing. The garlic chives from Jane’s yard look fairly firmly rooted, and I’ve heard no one can mess up with mint. The cilantro, on the other hand, is looking a little peaked and ragged, more like a pile of produce you might see on the floor at Whole Foods than a thriving crop. But it’s still in the ground, and I’m hopeful it will perk up in the next day or two.

Growing my own herbs would bring me great pleasure. It’s a new endeavor and one I’m not yet sure I have the skill to manage. But somehow it seems like the pieces all fell into place: the encouragement from Lauren, the visit to Jane’s yard, even the fact that Holly, who normally doesn’t like food with strong flavors, ate several stalks of garlic chive right out of the garden yesterday afternoon (and reeked of garlic and onions for the next several hours). Just as I’d hoped when I came up with the idea over the winter, though, it’s something positive, something far more appealing than more unpacking and reorganizing. It’s an attempt to do something new and proactive, and for all of those reasons I’m hoping that it turns out to be something I do well.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

We’re in the depths of a snowy, icy, wintry February, and like so many other New Englanders, I distract myself with thoughts of what I’ll do when the weather is a little bit milder.

This year, I’ve decided, I’m going to try to grow window box herbs.

As with most new endeavors, I began at the library. More specifically, I began on the library’s website, reserving the first six or eight books on herb gardening that showed up on my screen.

Never mind that I’ll never find time to read six or eight books about herbs. Never mind that chances are at my level of gardening, which I would peg as extreme beginner, there probably isn’t all that much variety in the basic information I’ll need to get started. All of that not withstanding, when a project catches my attention, the natural first step is always to check out far more library books than I’ll ever be able to read on the topic.

Somewhat overwhelmed with the choices, I’ve decided I’ll start with the herbs I’m already accustomed to using: basil, cilantro, oregano, mint, tarragon, rosemary, chives. The ones that sound wonderful but that I don’t know how to use even if someone else has done the work of growing – lemon verbena, anise hyssop – can wait for another year.

It’s still winter, but I’m already imagining the herbs growing in their little boxes on the sunny deck. I’m imagining snipping off leaves as I cook, pinching a fresh oregano leaf into a tomato sauce, having all the cilantro I want when I make salsa. I can picture freezing or drying the herbs for when the growing season is over.

But so far, all I’ve done is check the books out of the library. That still leaves buying the seedlings, setting up the window boxes, hoping for the necessary sun exposure, supplying the right amount of water, and doing whatever else it takes to make herbs grow.

It’s easy to have good intentions when the ground is still frozen and the air frigid. Dreaming of a sunlit balcony overflowing with savory crops is one thing; learning how to make it happen is another. But in a way, the herb garden is like the yoga: something I finally resolved to try this year after years of intermittently entertaining the idea. And the yoga is going pretty well so far: I’ve stuck with it for nearly four weeks already. I’ll start now with the books about herbs, and in the spring I’ll buy the seedlings. If all goes well, we’ll eat fresh herbs all summer and continue to enjoy the preserved iterations long after. If all goes well, I’ll learn to be an herb gardener. It’s another goal that may or may not come to fruition. Time – and thyme – will tell.