Promises

The weather is finally promising that spring is no longer teasing us.  It has been above freezing during the day consistently now and we even hit the low to mid 50's this past week! We, like most everyone else in the states, are colder than normal this time of year and I've so badly wanted to start growing something....anything...

I read an article sometime this year that said you can grow new lettuce from the lettuce core and I thought, WOW, that is cool. So I tried it with my romaine lettuce core in February and low and behold, I started growing lettuce.  In a cup! Then in mid-March my honey and I went out of state and I asked my oldest kidlet to stop by the house and water my plants.  I forget to tell her about my lettuce start.. in a glass... on the kitchen counter..... not where my other plants are.

We came back to find shriveled up lettuce leaf starts sitting in a dry glass. (Insert sad face here).

BUT! I remember reading that we could do the same thing with celery too!!  So I finished up the few small pale green stalks of our latest celery stalk and immediately plunged the core into another clear glass container and filled it up with cold water.

And waited.

A whole three days.

Then amazingly I saw one tiny shoot come up out of the base of this cut off stalk. (Insert leap for joy here!)

Less than a three weeks later, this is what we have now.

Can you believe you can grow celery this way?  How cool is that?!!  I've never been successful with growing celery in the ground and here I am growing it in a glass!

 Look how pretty those leaves are!

So, with this new found burst of excitement (I'm so over the dead lettuce) I started a few plants. I can hardly wait to put them in the ground!

Here is Thyme.

Curly Parsley

And I made my husband fall deeper in love with me by starting Cilantro. He LOVES cilantro!

I'll be writing a book about cilantro in my future. "Men are from Mars... How Cilantro Brings Them Back to Earth"  I just need to approve that with my editor, but I'm sure it will be a Best Seller!

Here is a basil that I bought at the grocery store.  You know the ones you buy in the produce department that always look so scraggly, but you usually use them in one recipe and then they die?  Well, I potted mine in a bigger pot.  And guess what.... It didn't die!  I've used it a few times already and it keeps on growing (so far without those stinkin' white flies that always seem to haunt my house herbs)

It really seems to be thriving. You should have seen this when I brought it home. I wasn't even sure I'd get enough leaves for the one recipe I bought it for.  I think it was the runt of the litter.

Another herb I've had for over a year now is my Bay Laurel.  I bought it at a nursery last year, white flies and all (yeah, discovered that AFTER we brought it home). After many home remedy dousing's of alcohol and dish liquid, and all summer outside, I thought I had killed it.  All the leaves dried up (which promptly went into a mason jar for seasoning with later), I thought for sure I was done with it. 

But once again I was pleasantly surprised over the winter that new growth started to appear!

And now I have several new shoots starting all with a good amount of green leaves on them. I'm so excited. (insert happy dance here)!

I'll be starting my cold weather seeds outdoors soon, in the dirt. 

With the sun staying longer in the sky each day, these seeds give me a promise to start sprouting.

Stick around and see what starts growing. It all begins with dirt and some seeds!

And sometimes, a cup of water...