Basil

The Tower Garden has been planted for over a month now and is growing like crazy. The lettuce is nearly at its end and new seeds have been started to replace them this week. The cucumbers are all full of flowers and baby cucumbers which is super exciting (yeah my life is pretty dull). When you grow flowering plants that need pollination indoors you don't have all the bees, moths and butterflies that normally do the pollination for you. So each morning I get up and take my small paint brush and brush the male flowers and then brush the female flowers. I had to watch a YouTube video showing me the difference between the two flowers but now have the hang of it. I'm excited to have fresh cucumbers to eat.

The four little chambers of basil I planted produced a ton of basil leaves. Far more than I use fresh in my cooking so I was trying to figure out ways to preserve the crop so it didn't go to waste. It dawned on me that I have a dehydrator sitting unused in the cabinet so, once again, I went to YouTube to learn how to dehydrate basil. It looked simple enough, put the basil leaves on the dehydrator trays and let it run at the lowest heat (95 degrees) for 12-24 hours.

I filled all 6 trays, cramming all the leaves in there. Twelve hours went by and they were just limp little leaves. So I left it going over night, the next morning still limp leaves. That next evening I checked it and it was still the same, limp not crispy. At this point it had been 36 hours and I was about to give up. I got online and found a site that said to just pop it in an over at the lowest temperature (which on ours is 170 degrees). I put them all on a cookie sheet and popped them in the oven for 20 minutes. They came out nice and crispy and beautifully green. I crunched all of them up and put them in an empty spice container. This is what a big mixing bowl of fresh basil produced.

I do have a newfound respect for the price of organic spices. :)