Me, the slack gardener.

As the weather getting more wintery, sweet basils and chives are on their way out of the growing season.

Last week, one of the basil plants started to flower and now I’m waiting for it to start producing the seeds.
With chives I don't even have to worry about getting seeds.
I know that from my experience. I grew some chives in my backyard 3 years ago for the first time. It was around the end of summer I sewed the seeds.
They grew healthy and produced a good amount of crops, which I enjoyed using in many dishes until they mysteriously disappeared in winter.

I panicked at the seeming ‘death’ of chives at that time, telling my hubby the story who was equally disappointed to acknowledge it. Well, he was none the wiser when it came to gardening – I should’ve asked my mother-in-law about it.

Then 3 months later, when spring came, I saw something appears to be baby chives.
At first I didn’t believe that they are, so I pinched the tip off a leaf and sniffed it. It smelled like chives. Still skeptical, I tentatively put it on my tongue. It was chives.

Then I did Google search and found out that chives shrink to form bulbs in winter. And then new seedlings sprout in spring.
'Sounds like an ideal herb for a lazy gardener like me!' I fell in love with chives instantly.

I didn’t have much luck with rockets this season, though.
I decided to grow them from seeds instead of seedlings, because my past few attempts of growing them from the seedlings were unsuccessful.

The germination was early enough, and they had been growing quickly until one day, I found some leaves suddenly gone. Damn!
And then I found the culprit. There was a fat caterpillar stuck to the back of one of the leaves. I reluctantly used pesticide (natural one) to control it, which didn’t work well.
I guess it’s too gentle on the likes of them (caterpillars)!!

However, I decided not to kill them. I took them one by one and released them...but they kept coming back in spite of my ‘generous’ mercy of sparing their lives!
After a while I lost my motivation to look after my garden.

At least, corianders and parsleys have been kind to me. Despite my negligence they are thriving unaffected by any of those nasty pests.
Corianders are amazing! I use them to add to salad or use some leaves to garnish Thai curry. I absolutely love the extra flavour it gives to these dishes!

But with veggies...I really don’t think I can grow any.
The grass popping out everywhere in the garden bed, with the roots so deep and wide spread that it seems uncontrollable.
Before planting the seedlings in spring, I dug the soil deep and made sure I removed every trace of grass as well as weeds, but after about a couple of months they came back.

It’s the fight that I can never win. I can’t remove grass without removing veggie plants nor can I stop their invasion into the garden bed either, can I?
And weed killers are toxic and I don’t want to use them at all!

I got an idea.
Invent some super veggies that are even stronger than grass and weeds!