Garden Recipe: How to Build Roof Tile Raised Beds

When we moved into our house in September, we had a roughly square area of grass in the middle of our yard. I'm not a fan of grass in California gardens--still in a drought, despite El Nino--but I am a fan of edible gardens. Duh. So the plan to swap one for the other was obvious.

After having a mixed garden of perennials (artichokes and blackberries--yes, what was I thinking? O how much I've learned) and annuals at our last house, we wanted our annual edibles to be separate from our perennials. Annuals and perennials need different things (soil tilling, fertilizer, and watering schedule to name a few).

Recipe: Borage Pesto

With the borage growing like crazy in our garden, I needed to figure out how to do something more with it than just add the flowers and smallest leaves to salads. I'm a big lover of any kind of pesto and think it's important to always have a jar of pesto on hand. Pesto is delicious on almost everything from the obvious pasta to potato salad, thinned out as a salad dressing, on pizza, in sandwiches...well, you get the idea. I couldn't really find a solid recipe for borage pesto, so I experimented and came up with my own recipe--it's a nuttier, deeper version of the traditional pure basil pesto. 

Garden Update: New Raised Beds and What's Growing this Summer

A few weeks ago, I took two days off work to build four raised garden beds that would become our annual kitchen garden. I'll write more about my process of building these raised beds, but in the mean time, I wanted to share how our garden renovation is progressing.

Plant Profile: Borage

Whenever I see my borage plant growing in my garden, in my head I sing the words "My borage brings all the bees to my yard" to Kelis' Milkshake. Seriously though, this plant is a bee magnet. Whenever I walk by a borage plant in bloom, there buzzes a bee. 

Beyond bringing bees to your garden, what can borage not do? You can eat its flowers and leaves, it's a fantastic companion plant, and, if you're particularly crafty, you can make an oil from its seeds that's high in omegas. Also, it's incredibly easy to grow from seeds. For the most part, I use it for it's delicious, cucumber tasting flowers, to attract bees, and sometimes to companion-plant. I find it thrives, despite my ignoring it for much of the spring--only recently have I started trimming and watering my borage.