Weeds & Seeds Swap

What a cold Spring day it is today here in northern NJ, but that isn’t stopping the high tree pollen count as the trees begin to bud, and the growth of my tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinths, crocuses and other assorted spring bulbs.  Many of my perennial herbs are coming up as well.Today I want to share with you a list of plants and herbs in my garden that come up faithfully year after year, and are hard to kill.  If there is a blog post with more information about the plants, such as how to grow or medicinal properties if they are herbs, you can get to it by clicking your mouse on the name of the herb or plant:

1. Sage - This is a perennial, that means that you plant it once, and it comes up each year.  In fact, in spite of the cold, when I removed the pile of leaves I had over this one a week or so ago, most of the leaves from last season were still on the plant…and this is after a COLD winter.  You do have to replace this one as over time it gets “woody”, I tend to cut it back quite a bit for as long as I can and see if it will put out new shoots.  This is a wonderful medicinal AND culinary herb
2. Lily of the Valley – This comes up every spring, it is a little early right now where I live, but in only a matter of weeks the plants will put up their shoots.  I have the pink variety, which is somewhat less common than the white, so each year I sell batches of it on eBay in the spring to thin it down to the nice patch you’ll see in the picture if you visit the link.  It will be interesting to see how it has spread it’s runners over the winter and how many plants will be available to sell.  I love this plant, the smell of the flowers is just wonderful.
3. Day Lilies (Daylilies) -In our front yard the shaft to our water well comes up out of the ground and is capped, around it I have planted Daylilies, the double orange variety, and made a garden in the area.  These bloom later in the summer, and are just beautiful.
4. Comfrey - This one grows in the same garden as the Daylilies, and can become rather large and shrub-like.  It has pretty purple flowers.  It has the reputation for being a hard one to get rid of if you don’t want it somewhere, because even the smallest piece of a root left behind will form a new plant.  I chose to put the Comfrey in the same garden as the Daylilies because the soil is not the best and it takes a bit of work to take over the garden, so I haven’t had a lot of trouble.  I haven’t done a post devoted to Comfrey yet, working through the alphabet backwards for the most part as you can see in the upper right, but will one day.
5. Oregano - This favorite culinary herb is so easy to grow, and I have an abundance of it each year.  I do snip the ends to keep it from flowering for part of the summer, then later in the summer, let it go to flower as the bees just love the flowers, and happy bees are so good for my garden as well as surrounding gardens.
6. Mints - The mint plants are best put in a somewhat contained area, I let them spread and just pull up and use or give away what wanders out of the area it should be in the spring.  I love putting mint into my iced tea while brewing…just clean it well (small bugs like my mint too), then roll the leaves on the stem together between your palms (hands) to release the fragrant and flavorful oils, then put in your steeping tea. I sweeten mine with another herb called Stevia
7. Catnip - another one like Oregano and Mint…in fact all of these plants are “related”, part of the same family, so have similar growing patterns.
8. Lemon Balm – Another like the above, have had these coming up in my garden for so many years now I’ve lost count.
9. Chives - A wonderful culinary herb to add onion flavor to anything.  I use the greens throughout the spring and summer…they are already out of the ground.  Here’s a minor caution for you, each year mine gets pretty purple flowers on it.  My first year with the plants, I clipped the flower tops off when they died, then clipped a bunch of the chives to take in to cut into my salad…not realizing that the flower stems are terribly hard, and inedible.  Be sure when you remove the flowers to take them from the base of the stem so you don’t make the same mistake.
10. Strawberries - I have these in an old antique ceramic-coated wash basin on our deck.  These amazing plants had leaves from last season that remained for much of the winter, and are already putting out their new leaves.  Very hearty, and I look forward to a better crop of berries as we have more sun on the deck since they removed a couple of trees to install our new septic system.

These are just a few of the things that grow on my property, maybe you can share some of your favorites in a comment.

I post regularly to this blog, but today, this post was done as one of the lessons in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge.