Posted by Loulou on Jul 11, 2014 | 2 comments

You know, I was thinking that maybe you’d like to know a bit about mama’s garden and how EASY it is to grow some pretty far out items–things you don’t usually find in a garden and then some things you DO find but that maybe some people are shy about trying to grow and so I went out and took some shots of mama’s weird things and also normal things and here is what you can do with very little space and NO green thumb:

Well, we all know this one: basil for pesto, for soups, for salads, or just to stick your nose in occasionally and breath in good health!

Wild arugula!!! Mama planted a few seeds from a friend years ago and she has to pull out a lot of it every year just to have space to grow the salad greens it goes with! Really tasty and picante for great salads.  A little goes a very long way because it gets hotter as the summer wears on.  But I chew on it every day…

Mentuccia–an Italian mint to use in cooking artichokes or anything with mint.   Easy as growing mint, but so much more interesting in flavour.

Shisu–a Japanese plant used to enhance maki sushi or just served on the side with sashimi, but mama put it in salad one day and it was killer!  Someone gave her a tiny plant and it comes back every year, bigger and bigger!

Wild asparagus!  Around here, the birds drop seeds from the plants that grow all over the hills and produce in spring and when mama found the seedlings coming up in her garden by chance, she moved them all to a little round bed about 1 yard across and they just keep making new babies.  Wild asparagus is very hard to see in the forests, but when it’s in your own garden, you can spot the spears pretty easily.  I’m good at that with my extraordinary kitty’s eyes and so I help a lot.  Wild asparagus is full of minerals and vitamins and is so good chopped up in an omelette. Even I get a little piece of the action…lots of antioxidants, including vitamin C.

Well, everyone knows rosemary and once it starts, it doesn’t stop and only requires cutting and using to encourage its future!  Mama make a tea of it for her hair every now and then and since I’m a “brunette”, I guess I could take a bath in it, too.

If I took baths with TEA!! Ech……..

So these are only a few of the things you can grow easily without working your green thumb to the bone.  Put some sage in there, too, to attract bees.  I love it when they come and they never sting, just buzz around and let me play with them.

Here I am wondering what I’m going to write next–always great fun:

OOPS! For got the kiwis…these are actually growing on our fence by chance because their tendrils came up from our neighbor’s yard and wrapped themselves around our fence posts! But they require NO care except trimming their tendrils…hmm…sounds a bit kinky….but homegrown kiwis are not like any others.  Sweet, sweet and firm, almost lemony.

Ciao/myow for now…