Good friends & Marigolds

I had a great time hanging out with my friend Christina and planting a bit in her home garden. She got a few tomato plants and some marigolds. We planted the marigolds around the tomato plants to protect them from pests. In the photo here you can also see some alliums (which are really great for stopping pests as well as fungus),  fennel (i'm pretty sure) is allelopathic which means it generally doesn't like other plants and releases toxins that prevent them from doing well and in some cases causes them to bolt, and lavender (read some interesting lavender folklore here: History of Lavender.

 

What most people don't realize is that its not just the tomatoes that are edible, the marigolds are too. Here are a handful of recipes: Edible Flowers Recipes

Also, Christina is an amazing musician and recording engineer. You can check out what she does at christinapicciano.com. She's a great drummer, guitarist, songwriter and really fun to work with. I'm hoping to be playing more music with her in the near- future while I'm still living in her neck of the woods.

As a side note, if you can look past the pretty girl (Christina) in the photo, you'll find a giant swarm of mint in the left corner... that wild mint just grows and grows and will swallow everything around it. We've got the same 'problem' on the farm although its really not a huge problem, really. We usually dry as many of the leaves as we can and save them to use for tea or to put into iced tea but I have some thoughts about using them in a Permaculture design with a bunch of other things that you can't keep from taking over like strawberries for example. It would be like a celebrity plant death match. Or Manhattan.  I'll write more thoughts on that later though, gotta get to bed to make my flight tomorrow early. Thanks for reading and thanks Christina, for being awesome =)
-Jen