Yesterday I made potpourri. I didn't plan to. It just happened. All I intended to do was water my houseplants and then go on to another Need-To-Do on my internal list. But I decided to clip the dead and dying bits of my herb plants before watering them. These are the annual herbs that I managed to keep alive over the summer and brought in this fall to over-winter. They had been erratically watered - poor things - what with one thing and another - it's called life, I suppose - so most of them had lots of dried out leaves on them. I wanted to cut all that off then water everything thoroughly. It was a highly scented procedure as only a feather-light touch on most herbs brings out their scent. The rosemary in particular smelled so strongly still that it seemed a waste to discard the dried out needles, so I decided to put them in a bowl instead of tossing them out. I could at least enjoy its pungent scent even if the dried out leaves were probably not of cooking quality.
There was a lot of rosemary that needed to be removed. My poor plant is now looking rather skeletal, but I think it's salvageable. There are still healthy green needles on it, and I watered it well. It's on the south-facing living room windowsill – no, it’s actually on the bookshelf in front of the windowsill, the windowsill itself isn’t wide enough - where the hot sunlight blazes in through the big windows onto the plants, after the lilacs outside have lost their leaves. And they have. That combined with the heaters under the windows causes them to dry out quickly, and they need to be watered every four days now. I had been letting it stretch to seven or eight days, which was obviously too long between waterings.
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| Pippin Cat and some of the indoor garden. Yes, those are a couple of my to-be-read piles on the right. |
After salvaging the rosemary, I went on to the orange mint, the strawberry mint, marjoram, lemon basil, sweet basil, and lemon-scented geranium. Except for the sweet basil, the other plants' leaves are tiny little things, and cutting off the dried and dead bits was a long, finicking process, which left the kitchen island a mess of leaves and twigs. After watering all my plants (trying to count them in my head now, I think there are currently 29 or 30 inside. Yikes!) it was time to go on to the next part of the process, stripping the leaves and needles off their stems and putting them into the bowl, mixing as I went. Did I mention how itty-bitty most of the leaves were? And the tiny needles of rosemary had to be picked up between my fingernails. That seemed to take forever, and I had to stop and walk away a few times because the scent of the rosemary and basil, the two strongest scents, became overpowering. My eyes and nose watered, and my head felt odd. The small of my back ached because I kept forgetting to stand up straight.
But, in the end, it was worth it. The bowl of kitchen herb pot-pourri is sitting beside me on the octagonal Burmese table as I write, and it smells heavenly. The herbs I thought I'd wasted through my own carelessness were used, not dumped on the compost heap. I actually used the herbs I’ve been growing, inside and out, over the last however-many years, but have never used on any consistent basis. And I got to be creative and make something, instead of just thinking about it and deciding I’m not crafty.
Now I need to put the lavender I’ve been drying into sachet bags.
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| Sad looking lemon basil, exuberant new French lavender. |
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