In past years I–and then after retirement, me and hubby–did a bit of food preservation from the garden and purchased produce. This year, we’ve kind of eased back on that. No more garden in Clatskanie, a small patch at the Portland house, and the apple trees in Portland. However, I started some Lemon Drop peppers from seed in Enterprise and kept them in pots, and we planted dill, mint, thyme, chives, and rosemary in the beds created by the hubby’s retaining wall project.
The Lemon Drops are slow, with three peppers so far. The early chill meant that I moved the pots inside, and have taken on the role of honey bee by using Q-tips to fertilize the flowers (something I did successfully years ago with Thai Bird Peppers). So far…we’ll see what happens. It’s still fairly early in that experiment.
The rosemary died, and was replaced with lavender which seems to be thriving–we’ll see if it lasts the winter. The chives have kinda sorta been chugging along, and we harvested some to dry.
The thyme has been happily warring with the mint for turf. We got two different creeping types, and they both like it in the beds. The mint (chocolate) does what mint always does, and is growing aggressively. Last week we harvested a big batch and brought it in to dry. I now have a pint of dried mint for tea, and picked another pint to infuse the fresh leaves in Everclear for a tincture.
But the happiest thing has been the dill. Hubby would break off from his wall building to harvest dill heads before they seeded, and bring them in to dry. We’ve got lots of dill as a result. So far the deer have left the dill and the plants in the wall beds alone. We’ll see what happens as winter progresses, but…we have mint, dill, thyme, and some chives that we’ve grown here in Enterprise.
Maybe next year we’ll grow more.
