The Smoking Kitchen

Crumblin’ Herbs

Some of my readership – that is, friends and family who’ll be receiving gifts this holiday season – has asked me when I’m going to put up another post. The gap between posts is only partially due to laziness. The other more substantial reason has been technical issues.

My computer recently died. My friend Adam – without whose help this website wouldn’t exist – miraculously brought my computer back to life (thanks, Adam). And then my power cord stopped working. Also, my oscillating fan’s motor wore out. I know I don’t have much money, I don’t need my electronic equipment to remind me.

In the meantime, I’ve been getting in touch with my agricultural side by tilling the soil of my back yard.

O.K., so there’s not much soil in the back yard, and what soil does exist I’ve been told not to use because there’s no way to know what has been dumped back there.

My herb-growing adventure actually began in late April, when I bought basil, parsley, and rosemary from Sprout Home.

The plan was to move them outdoors as soon as the weather turned. I don’t even have the energy to go into the latest bad weather superlatives, so I’ve come up with a Chicago weather Mad Lib that should cover the past few weeks, as well as all of the last six months:

This has been the   [ordinal number]   worst   [noun denoting calendar period]   since   [year]  . It has been unusually   [adjective describing inclement weather]  . I can’t believe the   [plural proper noun]   decided to settle here. What were those   [obscene plural noun]   thinking? Of course, I knew what I was getting into when I moved here, so what was I thinking?   [Exclamatory expletive]   .

Anyhow, time dragged on and my plants remained indoors, looking sadder and sadder. One weekend when a spate of warm weather played with my vulnerability and made me think spring was actually here, I went to get a window box and maybe a few more herbs.

I’ve always extolled the virtues of shopping at locally-owned businesses, but like many left wing causes, I only believed in it because of some vague notion that it was the right thing to do, like this rally I went to:

This time, though, I decided to check out Home Depot first, a trip that helped me realize there are pragmatic reasons for shopping local. Here’s the beaut. Notice the overcast skies, thus proving this Home Depot is in Chicago.
 

I picked up the least expensive window box they had – a 24″ plastic “terra cotta” number – and needed to buy dirt to put into it. I wanted to know how much to get, so I flagged down a Home Depot employee. After spending a good two minutes getting him to understand what I was asking – how much dirt fits in this window box – he then walked over to where the window boxes were displayed and read the tag, which of course didn’t say the volume, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked this guy in the first place.

During my year off from college, the first job I held was at Best Buy. The training about company policies, in particular the extra warranties you can purchase, was very thorough. Training about the product being sold - in my case, home audio equipment – was entirely non-existent. Another interesting fact about employment at Best Buy is that until you work there for a certain period of time, they don’t give you the Best Buy blue shortsleeve polo, or at least that’s how I remember the rules going. In either case, I spent my entire short tenure there wandering around the home audio section in street clothes, walking up to other people wandering around the home audio section in street clothes and asking if I could help them out. When I first started, they would suspiciously (understandably) ask their question, and I’d walk over to the product in question and read from the tag affixed to the display. I eventually changed my technique so that when they asked their question, I’d just tell them I’d get someone who knew what they were talking about to help them out. By the time I left, two months after starting, I just silently wandered around the home audio section in street clothes, hoping that Best Buy management, like my customers, would presume that I was an unpaid member of the public, which really, save for $8 an hour, I was.

Point is, I understood quickly that this Home Depot employee had no knowledge of the volume of the window box I had picked out, nor did he want that knowledge. In the end, I bought two bags of soil, which was more than I needed, although I think they only cost $3 a pop. Time well spent.

Learning my lesson, I then hopped into my Zipcar (Yuppie, a-way!) and went to Grand Street Gardens.

This place was exactly what I was looking for. I should write a good Yelp review, but usually I try to only write reviews for places that I can complain about (it’s cathartic). The size alone makes this place great, but the motion of the ocean was what got me. A wonderfully helpful young lady recognized I had no idea what I was doing, held my hand, and got me to spend way more money than I meant to. She sent me packing with seven new plants (to go with the three at home), more soil, pots, and a trowel.

I bought pots because in my enthusiasm for the customer service, my project ballooned to the point where my herbs wouldn’t fit in a window box. And anyhow, the parsley should be by itself for some reason, and certain herbs would be better off being with some and without others. I guess.

Here’s the big pot in my backyard.

Clockwise from one o’clock (in the photo below): Sage, chives, basil, rosemary, and mint.

Here’s parsley, the loner bad-ass of the bunch:

Here’s my window box. From right to left, it’s thyme, marjoram, dill, and cilantro.

By the way, this picture was difficult to take because I live directly across the street from a school and I wanted to avoid the following exchange:

PARENT, WALKING CHILD TO SCHOOL: Hey, what are you doing up there?

ME: Taking pictures for my website!

To avoid such confusion, I took the pictures out my front window early in the morning, when the only people out were those manning the garbage truck. Those photos you can see on my other website, www.sexycityemployeez.com.

If you’re still reading this website, let’s take a closer look at the window box herbs.

First, there’s the thyme. This guy has been growing pretty well, but it just doesn’t look like the thyme I buy at the grocery store. I can’t quite figure out what’s different. It looks fresher or the leaves are bigger or something. I haven’t eaten any yet.

Here’s the marjoram. This one is really doing well. It’s definitely my most noble looking herb. I haven’t eaten any of this plant either.

But something sinister is happening in the left side of the window box.

In the close-ups below, you can see that it looks like someone’s been sitting on the dill and cilantro when I’m not around, or maybe it’s that I have no idea how to take care of plants.

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO TAKE CARE OF PLANTS

Here are my issues:

• I think I’m supposed to cut these plants back to help them grow, but when? Where? How often?
• Buying ten plants seemed like a good idea at the time, but getting myself to walk down three flights of stairs to get to the herbs in the backyard has severely limited how much of them I eat.
• I’ve only eaten the dill and the parsley. What am I waiting for? I’m waiting to know whether cutting them this early would be good for them, and I’m waiting to know where I should cut them.
• My rosemary should be taller, shouldn’t it? How can I make that happen?
• I was trying to think of issues involving the plants in the back yard and was having trouble remembering what was planted there. Then it occurred to me that I was too lazy to even scroll up to look at the picture. Those herbs just aren’t going to get eaten.
• Besides the problem with my dill and cilantro, it appears that someone or something has been digging a hole into the center of the large outside pot. Could it be the same party responsible?

An already thick plot will undoubtedly thicken as spring shivers into summer, so stay tuned for more exciting plant adventures.