Sunday, August 3, 2014

Garden Progressions: Potatoes

From humble beginnings:
 

The first to leaf up.

Most of the Red Norland did not come up by this point, but the others were all growing nicely.

A few weeks later, a lot of rain helped to fill in the gaps in this bed.

All the potatoes that did make an appearance are growing heartily.  I think I will be leaving them in the ground until the tops die back.  I am hoping for a good sized harvest from the looks of these happy plants.
 

Friday, August 1, 2014

Preserving Chamomile Flowers

Chamomile tea is one of my favorite warm drinks because of the flowery sweet taste.  This spring I started some chamomile plants from seed and planted them out in my herb patch  Only two of them survived but they grew very well once they got going. 
As you can see the plants have formed a nice mound which happens to be front and center in the herb patch.  The plants are positively loaded with flowers and it seems like the more flowers I pluck from the plant, the more flowers it makes to replace them.  I have been able to harvest the plant about once a week now for the last few weeks and I am preserving them by dehydrating them.
 
I usually wait until mid day to pick the flowers because that is when they are fully open.  Once I have gathered them I rinse them very well under cold water because there are many insects that are fond of the flowers also.  Then I lay them out on my dehydrator tray and set it to 95 degrees (the lowest setting) because I only want to dry them, not cook them.
 
At this setting it takes about two days to get them fully dry.  I usually wait until they crumble into dust when I pinch them. 
Once they are dry, there really isn't much left of them.  The finished product gets funneled into a jar where it awaits the next step in it's journey of becoming tea.