Seed and Bean

What do you do when you have a planting of mint getting out of control, a hot summer evening, and a couple of cheerful friends?…

Peppermint

You make mojitos!

Mojitos

Mint is an essential component of mojitos and, finding that I have a good-sized amount of it for the first time in almost a decade, I thought a mojito would be a good way to celebrate one of my favorite herbs.

Sugar frosts the rim of our friend's pretty glass.

Mojito Recipe

(makes one drink) 

• Stir 2 teaspoons of lime juice with 2 teaspoons of sugar in a glass until sugar dissolves.
• To the glass, add about a 1/4 cup of crushed ice and 6-8 sprigs of torn mint leaves.  Muddle together for a few seconds.
• Add 1 ounce of white rum, about a cup of more ice, a splash of club soda, and stir gently.
• Pour into a glass to which you’ve sugared the rim (rub lime juice along the top edge of the glass and swirl in a plate of sugar).
• Drink carefully – they sneak up on you!

I’m so delighted to be able to grow mint again.  When I lived in Texas I used to grind my teeth whenever I’d hear some garden expert warning us about the invasiveness of mint when it took all my skill just to keep a sprig alive through the baking hot summers!  To my Texan friends who are still trying to grow it, my best suggestion is to plant it where it gets shade from the afternoon sun, mulch it really well with a bark mulch or compost, and keep it well watered.  For those of you who are fortunate to live in a climate where mint becomes invasive…well, what can I tell you that you haven’t already heard?  Mint likes a moist, rich soil and full sun, although it can handle a part sun situation with little diminished capacity.  I topdress it with a little compost at the beginning of the year and that’s all it requires for nutrients.

Mint, to me, is the quintessential herb of summer – I lift my glass to it!

In another case of “if life gives you lemons”…the too-tall Genovese basil that I couldn’t get hardened off got pruned back to a reasonable size and I made pesto with the clippings.

Genovese basil is my favorite basil to use in the kitchen.  The leaves are large enough to roll up and slice into a chiffonade and small enough to use whole in my favorite Thai chickpea curry.  Along with mint, basil is one of my quintessential summertime herbs, and, just like mint, I find it easy to grow.  I like to do two sowings a season: the first sowing is done indoors in the early spring, about 6-8 weeks before the last average frost date into newspaper pots, and the second sowing is done in the garden after transplanting the first group of basil.  I do this kind of succession planting because once the heat hits, basil starts to flower which alters the flavor of the leaves.

I usually plant basil around the edge of beds that contain tomatoes – they combine as well in the garden as they do in the kitchen – and they have the same sun, water, and soil requirements.  They both like more than 6 hours of direct sun a day, never let them dry out, and give them a compost-rich, well-draining soil.  The basil gets fertilizer when I feed the tomatoes, a couple of times during the season, with a fish and seaweed organic liquid fertilizer.  And that’s about it, except for harvesting regularly to prevent flowering and to keep the plant bushy.

Which is why, even though I hadn’t managed to plant them out, I was making pesto in May…

The raw ingredients about to be transformed.

The finished product...now comes the fun part of deciding what to eat it with.

Basil Pesto

• 4 c. basil leaves, firmly packed
• 1/2 c. pine nuts, toasted
• 2-4 cloves of garlic (or to taste), sliced
• 1/2 c. parmesan cheese, grated
• 1/2 c. olive oil
• 1 tsp. salt (or to taste)

Combine basil, pine nuts, and garlic in a food processor or blender; pulse mixture until the basil leaves are a bit chopped up.  Add rest of ingredients and process until the mixture is the desired consistency.  Can be stored in the fridge, covered, for about a week (the flavors will intensify but the color will darken).  It can be frozen but leave out the cheese and blend it in when the pesto is thawed.

I tossed it with some pasta and shredded roast chicken but I also like it drizzled over boiled potatoes and steamed asparagus as a warm salad.  It works well as a garnish for tomato-based soups, including minestrone.  And my friend, Ilene, introduced me to the fantastic flavor combination of pesto and pretzels.

So my first harvest of the season is one I usually have to wait until mid-summer to appreciate.  Here’s to being an impatient gardener who starts her seeds too early!

Organic supermarket lemons...a far cry from the 'real' thing.

My friend, Lisa, has been putting to good use the lemon tree I left her.

When we lived in Austin, we used to own a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, a small citrus cultivar thought to be a cross between a lemon and a Mandarin orange that produces juicy, thin-skinned, sweeter-than-regular lemons.  If the fruit wasn’t enough pleasure, the (mostly) evergreen tree would produce spectacular tiny, white blooms in the spring that scented the entire back garden in a sweet, delicate aroma.  For a while, the sheer novelty of this northerner picking lemons from her own tree was enough to give the resultant olive oil & lemon juice dressings an ambrosial quality but soon enough I was wondering what else this fruit could do.  I’m not much of a baker, so it seemed a waste to use the fruit in a tart or cake that I would probably mess up, and I wanted to use it in an unusual way, expressive of how I thought of this lovely little tree.

An edition of The Herb Companion magazine brought me the inspiration I was looking for - an article on herbal liqueurs.  I chose two using lemons – Italian herb and rosemary & lemon - and, because I had a bumper crop of basil that year, decided to try the basil liqueur, as well.  After many weeks of anticipation (and shaking and smelling and salivating), the taste testing ensued.  The Italian herb liqueur came out a clear winner; the variety of ingredients produced a layered flavor, more complex and interesting than the one note flavors of the other two, especially with the overwhelming sweetness from the sugar syrup (I’d definitely half the sugar in the recipes).

I’d like to try growing a Meyer lemon tree here in Edmonton – wouldn’t it make an eye-catching houseplant?

I didn’t have much trouble growing it in Austin in a large (20 inch diameter) pot.  After planting it in a good-quality soil mix created for vegetable gardens, I top-dressed it with an inch of compost every year, fertilized it 2 or 3 times per growing season with fish fertilizer, watered it every week (more or less depending on dormancy and weather), mulched it with wine corks, and dealt with the few aphids with insecticidal soap.  Here, since it would spend most of its life inside, I’ll need a soil-less mix to mitigate the chances of disease and insect problems.  I imagine I’ll need to fit a floor lamp with a grow bulb since it won’t get enough sun (I don’t have an accessible south-facing window), and I’ll need to mist it frequently because of the dry indoor air.  When it blooms, in order to guarantee fruit, I’ll pretend I’m a bee and pollinate the flowers with a little brush.  It won’t be low care but being able to pick lemons from my own tree again would be well worth the effort.