Borage

The Borage is in blossom.
With its beautiful blue flowers, this herb is a wonderful addition to your collection!
Besides, it's super easy to grow and makes tons of babies that you can share with other gardener friends :)

We sell the dried leaves at the shop, it's very popular for treating styes & other ailments~

Happy Gardening!

RHUBARB PUNCH RECIPE

I used a clear glass bowl inside this old enamel pot that belonged to my significant others grandmother. This punch is so good and easy to make. Please visit my blog (hennypennyscountrystore.blogspot.com) for the recipe. I also have diced rhubarb fresh frozen in 2 lb. packs for sale in the shop. I have rhubarb punch made to sample in the shop this weekend, June 26 & 27, and next July 3 & 4. Hope y' all can come by and visit.

OH NO!

My thyme plant has a lot of blossoms but it is very spindly. I better amend the soil---just wait til you see the next picture. And I'm wondering where all the bees are! I want to do a flagstone path around the shop and fill in-between with thyme (mother-of-thyme?) plants and never did because of the bees. I won't have to worry about that now, will I?Here is that other picture I mentioned above! What a sorry sight. This is really a tomato plant.
All there is is a stem and a yellowed leaf and a tomato. I wonder if it is safe to eat! I planted 4 tomato plants in this garden and 2 look like this. The other 2 look a little better but not much. I'm wondering if the mulch I put on is too strong. We got a huge load of horsemanure that has wood chips mixed in. Maybe it needs to age more. We have had the manure for a good 9 months now, and I thought that would be enough aging time. Oh well, garden and learn---I always say!

Comfrey & Lovage~

Your Comfrey & Lovage Plants bring back memories!!
My mother is a medical herbalist and I grew up with lots of common (and not so common) herbs growing in the gardens~

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) has always been a very important herb for healing. We've used it for over 30 years in our "Magic Healing Salve" and mom always brought in a few leaves to her students for herb identification. She would show them a Comfrey leaf and a Foxglove leaf and see if they could identify which one was which. Most students couldn't tell the difference~ Her point was that if you mistake Foxglove for Comfrey you could become very sick. She would tell the story of an old couple that thought they were cook'n up a big pot of Comfrey tea, when actually they were using Foxglove leaves and they both died.....Don't know if the story was true but it always got thru to the students how important Herb identification is :)

Mom had a Comfrey plant growing that was actually named "Humpfrey"
If your going to plant comfrey you better plant it where you want it to grow forever because you can NEVER transplant it! It will always come back in that original spot~
Humpfrey was dug up many times and still managed to pop up again, the only thing that stopped "him" from growing was building an addition onto the house and covering him up for good!
Poor Humpfrey :)

GARDEN WALK

This is my son Cody the Snakehunter. Our old farmhouse sat empty for 9 or so years before we bought it and there are a few old gardens scattered about. I have been trying to clear them out little by little, looking for salvageable herbs and flowers. I found lemonbalm, grapevine (there's even an arbor), elderberry, daylilies, daffies and a snake in this one. This snake is probably just a common garden variety, I didn't get a good look at it, but I'm guessing it's 3-4 feet long. Well, the plants are 2-3 feet tall and Cody is using an old garden tool moving the plants around trying to find the snake. It must have slithered away---we never saw it again. So anyways, when we first moved here a small snake used to sun itself on the backporch which is only 4 feet from the garden. My guess is that this little snake has grown up. I also found (in another garden) raspberries growing wild in with my feverfew. I don't know what happened but the feverfew has grown 4 feet tall this year. And in yet another wild garden, the church groundskeeper did some weedeating and chopped 15-20 berry plants down to the ground. Well, they grew again and I dug them up yesterday and will make a new berry patch somewhere else. A row of bright yellow yarrow ready for cutting and drying. These will also rebloom again for more dried bunches.

I love this herb, its called comfrey. Russian comfrey to be exact. It bushes out at the bottom and makes a nice clump. Then the flower spikes grow another foot or 2 taller. I have used this plant as a hedge around an herb bed before.

Has anyone ever used lovage? This herb is the PERENIAL answer to celery. It grows as a big clump and then the flower spikes grow to 8 feet tall. The flowers look like the wild carrot flowers that are blooming now along the roadsides. The lovage leaves are great to use for celery flavor in soups and dips and on sandwiches. Sometimes fresh herbs are too strong to eat whole leaves but not lovage. If you use the leaves in soup, you have to add the leaves towards the end of the cooking time, otherwise the flavor cooks away. The stems are real thick and hollow, they make great straws (especially in Bloody Marys). This spring I didn't have a chance to pot any babies to sell----but----its not too late yet. I am going to transplant this big plant soon and will pot some up then.

IT DIDN'T RAIN TODAY.........YET

Sorry to be such a downer but geez oh man.....enough with the wet stuff! The yard has deep ruts in it where the mower wheels just sunk into the mud. The herbs (and weeds) are growing TOO FAST - except my dill.....I don't think he likes this weather at all. AND poor Rosemary - she doesn't like to get her feet wet as it is....and is standing in puddles!!! The only good thing is that the weeds will be easy to pull out!!!

I love your Lady's Mantle Andrea....I think Ginny has a nice patch planted too.....I wanted to get some plants this year and completely forgot....I think the flowers are so beautiful...the color is so unique..a pretty yellow-green...and what beautiful "herbal bouquets" they make !

The wild "tiger lilys" are blooming all along our roadsides and I think they love the rain!!!

I started to harvest some of the herbs from the garden at the store.....I love this herb rack that Tony made ( I have them in the store for sale)...it was on the cover of the October, 1983 Country Living magazine and I fell "ga-ga" over it ! Tony made me one for the house (way back then) and now I have some at the store....!!!

Lady's Mantle

Morning Everyone~

Love the "Fairy Dust" Judy!

I was out in the Gardens this morning and thought I'd share a few pics with you~

The Lady's Mantle is is bloom~



This herb looks beautiful cascading over a stone wall or edging a Garden! I use it a lot in the background when I'm taking pictures of my Beauty products. It reminds me of something you'd see in the old Victorian Gardens~ Real easy to grow too!

Here's another herb that I absolutely LOVE! This Thyme is called "Ruby Glow"~
This is the second year it's come up and so far it's been very hardy, filled with compact leaves & FULL of bright "ruby" colored blossoms~



Thanks for letting me share~
Andrea