Herbs

Okay, so you take the plant, which is growing quite nicely in the garden now that summer's here, trim the outermost leaves, dry them carefully (on newspaper, turning/stirring, every few hours) and remove any contaminants. You will be consuming this stuff later and you want the resultant product to be nice and clean.



I hope you clicked on the picture to enlarge it and realized that we are talking about thyme - - not that other "herb" you might have been thinking of.

I bought a thyme plant for the back porch a while back and you have to keep trimming them to keep them from getting scraggly. The result is that you quickly have about a 12 years supply of fresh, home dried, thyme on your hands. Boy oh boy is it ever more fragrant than the 2 year old bottle of (very nice, top quality) thyme I last bought in Paris.

Thyme: Tomillo

Found the camera.
Here's the picture of the back porch. Yes, it's made of granite blocks. That's a grape vine on the left of the picture. Those are wrought iron chairs and that top left is a cast iron table with a marble slab for a top. In back of the orange & yellow flowers is the parsley.
I put the thyme in a old sort of broken pot just because I thought it looked more rustic.

Hi, Elizabeth: you might want to put some kitchen planters on your back porch. They'd look great.