Pots and Pans: Garden Update

I m

ight have mentioned that we have a tiny herb garden on our balcony- which grows more and more overcrowded as time goes by...

Below are some tiny peppers that I planted from regular green and red pepper seeds gathered from peppers bought from the shop. My husband and my theory is that the seeds are genetically modified to last only a certain amount of harvests - there's not much chance of growing perfectly normal peppers from the seeds of peppers found in the shops.

Recently I had a brilliant thought > it tasted quiet brilliant too: frying red peppers with balsamic vinegar and chilli. They were extra sweet and super tasty. Other ideas are red peppers and red wine (haven't tried that yet) or roasting red peppers with baby tomatoes and whole cloves of garlic which makes a delciously sticky and tasty mess (according to my friend Charlene > I'm yet to try this as our oven is rather out of action lately).

Speaking of Charlene, I got her a Pineapple Sage for her birthday and recently got myself one too. They make beautiful cherise/red flowers and the leaves smell like pineapple even though they're a type of sage. The apparently come from around Mexico and the leaves are edible (in a fruit salad for example, although they don't taste like pineapple!).

I recently got a red/black basil from the same Charlene, and they are, as we discovered more hardy than the green type. She put some lovely nut shells in the pot on top of the soil. They seem so useful, being so sturdy and strong.

Below you can see that our latest coriander harvest is ready. What I like about coriander as a plant is that you can use the shrubby leaves, and the ones that get all long and straggely can also be used later on when they make those lovely white flowers and seeds!

I've never managed to keep coriander alive for long, as pruning it seems counter intuitive, although, I always end up replanting the seeds and never have a shortage of them as planting one seed can produce many times more seeds.

For fun, I plant beans now and again, but it's never really enough to use in a dish (when I have a garden I will plough through it and turn it into a mini-farm, perhaps then I will have enough beans to make a tasty chili). Below you can see the sugar bean pod. I just leave it on the plant until it's dry and then end up planting it again, most often. The colour of the pod is quite dramatic and interesting though - from far away it could double as a flower.

We bought a granadilla plant last year and at first it grew very well and then slowed to almost a complete holt after bearing two beautiful flowers and one small granadilla. I was pleased to see that it's starting to grow some new tiny leaves!