Basil harvest

I put up the basil yesterday. First I give all the basil plants a serious pruning. I’ve heard that the way to keep basil from senescing is to keep it from setting seed. In the Darwinian sense, the purpose of all living things is reproduction. Once a basil plant has produced seeds, ensuring the survival of the species in general and its own continued presence in the gene pool, it has fulfilled its function and dies back. By this time in the summer, the pruning gives me a huge amount of basil. I use only the perfect leaves. In the picture it is hard to tell the difference between the stems before (on the left in the green bin) and after (on the ground to the right) I have done the harvest. The bowl in the middle shows the leaves I have removed.

Left to right: basil before I take the leaves off the stem (green bucket), harvested leaves (blue bowl) and rejects (ground)

After I have picked off all the perfect leaves, I wash them, blanch them (to keep them green), and make pesto. I freeze the pesto in ice cube trays for use during the winter. I find that the frozen pesto gives a fresher and stronger basil flavor to sauces than dried basil. Whether drying or freezing, the time consuming part is the harvest.

I took a picture of Hilda with the chickens this morning. She still has a round robin with a few of her college friends. For those of you who are not in your 80’s, a round robin is a mechanism of sharing news among several individuals through actual paper letters. The round robin comes to one person with letters from all others. That person removes her previous letter from the collection, puts in a new one, then sends all the letters along to the next person on the list. I’m sad that the round robin has gone out of style. How fun to get letters from five or six friends all at once! Anyway, the round robin is on its way to Hilda, and she wanted to have some pictures of the chickens to include.

Portrait of my mother as a chicken lady. She is holding Ellie as Ina stands on the cage and Bridget climbs the ladder. Giada (left) and Ingrid (right) look on. 

We ended up looking through the whole blog and marveling at how little our chickies were when we got them. It seems so long ago. We gave the girls some Happy Hen mealworms today so we could get everyone in one picture. While we were at it, I made a video. If you listen carefully, you can hear (in addition to Hilda calling them) “the gentle cooing and soft growling of chickens at peace” (Bailey White, 1994).

Our girls enjoying dried mealworms.