What in the heck is it?

Several months back, as I was planning my garden, I was very interested in companion planting and learned that borage grows well with tomatoes. I had never heard of borage, but found some seeds at the store, so I decided to go ahead and include them in my garden. Wow! What a plant! Often people ask me "what the heck is it?" when I point it out in my garden. I did a little research and thought I'd share it with you.

First of all, borage is edible--the leaves are most tasty when young. The plant is hairy all over and the consistency is a little strange to get used to, but the leaves taste like cucumber and make a great addition to salads. The flowers are edible too. Second of all, when you plant this in your garden, make sure you leave a lot of room for it to grow. Though the flowers are tiny, the plant itself can grow up to two or three feet tall and just as wide! Bees love the flowers, which is another added bonus if you are growing organically.

Grown as an herb, this plant is popular in Europe, and it is most often used in Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Germany the popular Frankfurter Grüne Soβe (Gruene Sosse) uses borage along with many other herbs.

Perhaps most importantly, at least in my mind, borage grows well with tomatoes. It is said that borage repels the tomato worm and makes tomatoes taste better if grown together. In my garden I have a ring of borage intermixed with nasturtiums, marigolds, and basil (all also make excellent tomato companions) surrounding four tomato plants. Whether they taste better will be the subject for a later post!

Creative Gardening

I guess it's been a while since I posted an update about my garden. Surprisingly it's coming along very well! Already we've enjoyed the bounties of our harvest--plenty of lettuce salads with borage leaves, radishes, and basil tossed in, all courtesy of our garden. We've also enjoyed turnips and beets as well as swiss chard. I went out yesterday to weed a little and as I was readjusting the cucumbers to climb the trellis, I noticed I had several green beans ready to pick! We ate those last night.

I also noticed that my tomato plants are growing so large (remember those tomatoes I was fussing about earlier this spring???) that they're beginning to droop onto the ground. As I don't want to spend money on tomato cages, and because I have a whole pile of dried bamboo laying in the yard, I did a little research to figure out a way to make tomato cages out of bamboo. Already I've poked a stalk of bamboo next to some tomatoes, but it's just not enough to support all the branches. I found an article at e-how about "How to Build a Bamboo Tomato Cage" and adapted it for my tomatoes. As I was building the first cage today I realized there is no magic one size fits all tomato cage since everyone's tomato needs are different. I have some areas where I have two or four tomatoes of varying heights and sizes growing along side one another, and I have other areas where I have a lone tomato plant. They are spread throughout my garden. In order to make most efficient use of the bamboo as well as my space, I built one cage that supports two plants today.

As you can see, it is important to build a tomato cage with the proper supervision. Ami passes by just in time for the camera to go off, on her way to a shady spot where she casually watched my progress.

I planted the three back poles first, and then beginning with the bottom, I added smaller stalks broken from the top of the bamboo poles (some of the poles are well over 10 feet tall!), working from the bottom up. I used zip ties to hold the sides in place. It's not perfect--as I worked along I realized ways I could have built the cage and used less zip ties. Next time I'll run one long pole across all three rather than shorter ones linking each bamboo pole. I did this along the back, but for some reason (maybe the sun was getting to my brain?) I didn't do that on the front. I'm not sure I like the looks of plastic zip ties in my garden, but you do what you gotta do!

More of life's little lessons

It's been a month now since I was cleaning out my garden space and planting seeds. My vision of a garden bursting forth with new plants by this time has not come to fruition, and has been peppered with few successes. I am a little disgruntled by the very few seeds that have germinated, and even more so with their very slow growth. As I was reviewing my post about the seeds I planted, I do realize that most of them have produced a few plants each. By now I have several (albeit tiny) basil plants throughout my garden. I have a few borage plants growing, and some nasturtiums. I see some of the cosmos flowers are doing well, too. The peppers are very slow, but some are coming up, and the lettuce, onion, garlic, zucchini, and squash are flourishing. My tomatoes, on the other hand, are another story entirely.

The other day, as I was huddled over my plants (as I do multiple times a day), I realized that gardening is a reflection of life itself. Seeds of thought, of action, of hope need proper germination. The right temperature, humidity, and light will either bring a seed to life, or it will lie stagnant in the soil and wither to nothingness. I find myself nurturing these little plants, feeling a love and passion for each. I want them to grow, not only for myself, but for the energy I have tranferred into each one of them. They each are a reflection of myself.

I was accused of loving my plants to death, scaring them because of my hovering. I suppose there is some truth in that to those plants that didn't make it, but for those that are struggling to survive, I say my love is what keeps them going. I nurture them as I try to do with my children. I suppose I liken these little plants' physical needs to my own children's emotional needs. Some would also say I hover, and mother my children to death, but I see myself as a protector of their emotions, helping them develop and mature into fruitful adults.

I remember one time when my son, who is now 19, was only four years old, had some emotional upheaval happen which brought him to tears. At the time we were visiting my in-laws; my husband's step-father said to my son, "Boys don't cry!" and made him feel even worse for feeling the way he did. Where does this notion come from? Why is it we stifle our sons from feeling anything and then expect them to be compassionate, loving adults? How can we expect our children to feel anything at all if we do not nurture their emotions?

I suppose, as with all things, there is a balance. But when it comes to tending my little plants, coaching them, nourishing them, and nurturing them, I won't give up. Not even when they've grown up and produced little fruits of their own.

Gardening Lessons learned

The Seed Saver seeds arrived and as I posted earlier, I eagerly planted as many as I could in peat pots to get a jump start on my garden. Here in Northern California we're still experiencing relatively cool temperatures. Highs in the 60s, with a few days in the 70s, and nighttime lows still into the 30s and 40s. Not knowing any better, I filled my little pots, set them in a tray of water and set them in the sun on a table near the garden. I watched anxiously and nothing happened. I watered and watched, watered and watched, but still nothing. After several weeks a few little brave seedlings began to emerge (not the 4-6 days most seed packages claimed!), and my peat pots began to get some green moss on the top. Jack so kindly pointed out that 1) you cannot drown the seeds and expect them to grow, and 2) you need heat to make the seeds grow. I was beginning to get so disheartened that all my efforts were for naught.

I must step back a moment and explain that this gardening venture is entirely new to me. I've never tended a garden of my own from start to finish. I've never tried to grow seeds, unless you count those elementary school lessons on seed germination. So this is all a new experience. What little I know, I've learned from books, or from sage advice from experienced gardeners.

Jack, in all his wisdom, found some building materials that were laying around the yard and bought some insulation, and built a box around my seeds to create a cold frame box to get those seeds started. He pulled out the excess water I thought was so necessary as he explained that damp soil works better than soggy soil. A few weeks ago he and I pulled down the greenhouse that I photographed for my previous post, and from that he salvaged a window that he used for the top of the new cold frame. Within a couple of days more seeds were popping out thanks to the warmth and the drying soil.



I did succumb and buy a few plants already started in a nursery. I bought garlic, a few onion sets, a couple of rhubarb plants, a horseradish plant, and a six-pack of Lobelias. Another lesson I learned was that the onion sets have multiple onions in each cell pack. I made the mistake of planting each bunch in one clump, but last night I took the time to dig them back up and separate each little shoot and plant them individually. I'll be digging up a lot of onions this fall!

As I discover the ways to live tight in tight times, I am learning how to make do with what materials we have on hand as much as possible. The cold frame box illustrates the ingenuity of utilizing scraps to make something new and useful with very little monetary output. Stay tuned for more on this topic, and the story of the creative garden fence pictured at the top!