Growing Herbs

OK, so, this isn't strictly a Stuff We Cooked post, it's a Stuff We Intend To Cook When It's Grown Up post.  I figured it was food-related, and thus close enough.

Steph and I are irritated by the portion sizes of fresh herbs bought at the supermarket.  Supermarket portions for things like meat are fine - you just make twice as much as you need and get some lunches.  But with a bundle of dill, chives or rosemary, you'd have to make an order of magnitude more food than you need just to use up the bunch. And that's silly.  Our quest for customisable herb portions led us to the somewhat archaic idea of end-user agriculture.  Subsistence farming is totally where it's at!

Step one: Things in which you can put the things that will turn into things you eat.  (I am really down with the farming lingo! Splice the plough furrows! Make fast the combine harvester!)

Step two: I'm told (by my mother, who has considerably more Not Killing Things That Live In Dirt experience than me) that soil coming out the bottom of pots when you water them is a problem, and she provided us with this fibrous matting stuff designed to line the bottom of pots.  The stuff was cut, stabbed at regular intervals and then placed at the bottom of the dirt receptacles.

Step three: Dirt.  This is "Seed raising mix", which runs about $11 for 25 litres. Experts in the domain say it's good for raising seeds. We used about half of it for our two pots, retaining the rest for when the dirt gets too... dirty or something.  I dunno how that works.

 Step four: Distribute seeds according to instructions on pack. The different plants have different recommended planting depths, from 5mm to 12cm, so that's probably important. Oh, yes, I should mention: You will need packs of seeds.  Apparently this does not work very well without them.  I am not entirely sure what they do, but they are clearly important. We went with coriander, chives, basil, sage, dill and spinach.  We already have a jalapeno chilli plant and a small oregano thanks to my mother, so we think that this should cover most of our herbquirements. Yeah, the spinach isn't really a herb, but we needed a sixth, and baby spinach leaves are delicious.

 Here is my finger (safely ensconced in a latex rubber glove, because dirt is dirty) prodding at some dirt:

And here is Steph and my sophisticated planning of plantage: "I dunno, five maybe.  And put two in each hole".

Water the whole thing thoroughly (until it's dripping out the base!) and you're done.  I water these every morning, it probably takes about half a litre of water a day to keep these two pots looking slightly damp but not waterlogged.  If you miss a day it's no big deal: the soil shouldn't dry out for a few days.

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Now, here's what it all looks like two weeks later:

We made living things!  From dirt! AHAHAHAHAH!!!!

That's chives foreground on the left, basil centre left, and spinach background on the left.  Coriander is foreground on the right, the bare ground on the right houses slow-growing sage, and the right background has dill.

I shall update this post weekly with growth progress until these plants are rendered consumptible!