Starting the Spices

One of my goals this year is to produce a lot of spices for my kitchen and my kids' kitchens. In fact, I finished a large batch of sweet onion powder just this weekend. Mmm mmm!

This will all sprout as Italian Basil. I can't tell you how much I enjoy homemade pesto! Not all of this will be for me. My brother the chef is asking for a couple dozen plants.

This isn't deep enough to do much more than just get the sprouts started here, but that's all I'm trying to do right now anyway. Many of these will go to my brother, and the rest to my own herb garden.

These trays are supposed to hold a dozen 2" pots, but I'm all out of them (I ordered more today: too late, really, but better late than never!).

In these pots, I'm starting a couple of things. The bottom third are all Lettuce Basil: a crinklier leaf, and reportedly a bit sharper flavor. We'll see. 

The top two rows are a variety of hot peppers. I actually think this is the leftovers from Ed Hume's pepper seed packaging line. I intend to dry the peppers and grind them for spices, so this will be yummy.

And these are some of the sprouts from the past two weekends. The top set is 2 weeks old; the bottom one is only a week or ten days old.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest sprouts (bottom left) are radishes. Also coming up in the ten day old set are the Alyssum seeds (second row from the bottom). Curiously, one of the Spinach pots is thriving, the other shows no signs of life.

The for sets on the left of the top are Broccoli (our own 2012 seeds) and Kohl Rabi. I love the former. My sweetheart loves the second.

And just to round out the documentation, here are my first attempts at starting Chrysanthemums from seeds. A couple of different kinds (one blue, one mixed). That's a heating pad they're on; they like warm soil to germinate.

Part of the big appeal is that Mums make great cut flowers.