tommy-toes

When my parents visited in April, my mom set me up with a little victory garden: cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, basil, parsley, cilantro, and dill. Three months later, the herbs have gone to seed and the peppers are only producing flowers, but the tomatoes are growing out of control!

I’m snacking on these beauties constantly. I hope they’ll last through the summer. The branches are starting to get all tangled up and weighted down from the tomatoes and I’ve tried tying some to the metal supports to keep them from snapping… fingers crossed that’ll be enough.

Once herbs start flowering, it seems they’re not so good for eating anymore. The cilantro flowers were getting pollen all over the place, so I pulled up the plant and am drying the seeds for cooking. (Cilantro seeds = coriander… who knew?!) The basil also started flowering and stopped growing big leaves, so I basically scalped what was left to make pesto. All that remains now is the parsley and the dill, also flowering (that’s it, shown below), but the flowers don’t seem to affect the plant’s desire to keep producing more yummy dill, so I’m leaving it alone.

I’d like to try growing some more herbs but my experience so far has been that they go to seed so quickly, I would have been better off buying a bunch at Safeway…