Green Thumbs

Last summer I decided I wanted to try my hand at growing some herbs and things so I planted a few seeds and, lo and behold, those seeds did germinate and grow into *gasp* real live plants.  The catnip I planted went crazy, as well as the basil while my little spearmint seedlings and strawberry seeds took there sweet time to become stable little pants and by sweet time I mean almost a year!  Strawberry seeds, while not impossible, are kind of hard to come by and now I know why they just take a lot of love and a lot of time and patients for them to do anything.  It's always easy to find strawberry plants to transplant at your local garden center and I'd highly recommend just doing that than starting from seeds from my experiment.  Hopefully this spring they'll start to take off.

Here is little bitty strawberry. Still grasping at life.

Here you can see the spearmint has finally come into its own.  No more teeny tiny leaves, it is finally growing larger mature leaves.  I think I will need to transplant him to a bigger pot soon.

Over the winter I trimmed the catnip plant way back as instructed I hadn't properly pruned the plant in the first year and it was all vines and scraggly but after doing some homework I found how to properly prune the plant to grow big and full.  Catnip plants practically go dormant during the winter.  The thing did not grow not even a little but it didn't die either it just was stagnant, but ever since spring arrived (which here in Milwaukee means just last week) I've seen it start taking off growing straight up and I've remember to prune so hopefully by the middle of summer this plant will be huge and full of catnip buds for my kitty to enjoy.  Seriously catnip is super easy to grow even indoors so if you have a cat and want to try your hand at an easy, hardy plant give it a go, it needs full sun and lots of water and good pruning. This website How to Grow Killer Catnip Bud has a lot of great tips.

Here is the catnip.  I had left a few long vines but all the new growth is shooting straight up at the sun.

Unfortunately my basil plant bit the dust back in November.  I had a friend out visiting and I forgot to water him one measly day and he just never recovered.  Basil are super thirsty plants. I'm going to plant some more basil seeds this year along with some radish, kale, some alyssum flowers, which will be transplanted outside, Beaver Dam peppers. We are anxiously awaiting our pepper seeds to arrive since we had to order them special.

Some seedlings we've started this year.

Our other plants that we didn't grow from seeds.

I can't wait until I can live somewhere where I can plant a real garden.  There is nothing like growing your own food and herbs. The flavors of your own homegrown foods is out of this world.