Anna Getty's Easy Green Organic - Anna Getty [14]
4. Make sure the pot gets some sun, and water it once in a while.
Ta da—a mini-garden! It sounds way too easy, but that’s because it is.
There are so many benefits from having a simple pot of living herbs. Teaching children about the life cycle is one reason. Toddlers and young children can help water and watch the plants grow. As they pick the herbs for their dinner, they are one step closer to understanding the cycle.
OTHER GARDENING OPTIONS
If you have the space and the inclination, use a few pots or a planter box and grow several types of herbs. I always have a few pots on a balcony near the kitchen filled with the herbs I use the most: thyme, sage, oregano, and lots of sweet basil, cilantro, and parsley.
You can easily buy bags of herbs at the market, but there are distinct advantages to having your own little garden. The pleasure and satisfaction of snipping or tearing off fresh herbs is a lot more rewarding than tossing a package into a shopping cart. On a practical level, growing your own herbs means you can snip a few leaves for a recipe and not waste the rest.
If you live in a big city like New York, where sunlight (and a window) may be at a premium, or even nonexistent, you can try one of several indoor planting systems on the market. They come complete with a container for the plants as well as a grow light to create a self-contained, portable, full-spectrum light source. (See Resources, page 243.)
On the other hand, you may have a patch of earth in the suburbs or the country that is big enough for a vegetable garden. Be sure to stay away from chemical fertilizers and pesticides. You may need to alter your perception of what fresh food looks like. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides ensure that fruits and vegetables are free of blemishes and produce the most yield per acre; that’s what it’s all about. And that’s why your local supermarket is filled with stacks of perfectly proportioned, visually appealing fruits and vegetables. They are so pristine, they look as suitable for a lab experiment as for your dinner table.
The problem is that the residue from those chemicals can make its way to your dinner plate and into your very cells. By growing your own food, you eliminate the need for these chemicals. Because you’re not taking your garden harvest to market, you only have to control a small yield, making it easier to stay organic. Some of the food you grow might have a blemish or two, and a couple of tomatoes might not be perfectly spherical in shape. But that makes them truly beautiful to me. Like people, it’s their blemishes that make them much more interesting.
a garden of sunflower seed sprouts
A really easy and fun thing to do is grow sunflower seed sprouts. Sunflower seeds germinate quickly, so quickly, in fact, that kids can practically watch the changes on a daily basis. And sprouting the seeds couldn’t be easier:
Place some recycled sheets of paper (such as newspaper or paper bags) or paper towel on a plate and sprinkle some sunflower seeds (with shells on) on it. Place another sheet of paper on top and moisten the whole thing with water from a spray bottle. Keep the seeds moist but not too wet for the next week or so, and the seeds will germinate and pop open. After one more week, you can plant them.
To plant the seeds, place the germinated seeds just under the surface of the soil in a pot. For example, plant 3 to 4 seeds in a 6-inch pot. (You don’t have to be precise about the number or spacing.) Sprinkle some soil on top of the seeds until they’re just covered, and lightly water every other day (if you have children, let them do this). Keep the seeds moist but do not overwater and in a short time, you’ll see the sprouts freeing themselves from their husks as they push up and out of the dirt, heading for the sun. After they grow a few inches, you can pull the sprouts out of the soil and eat them; they are great in salads. Sometimes I like to leave one or two in the pot to grow into full-fledged sunflowers, harvest the seeds, and start all over again.
composting
Organic