It’s two days before Christmas, and I have officially brought in my last handful of tomatoes from my garden.  I’ve been waiting to post that for almost two months, but mild weather and a crop of strong producers has kept me in tomatoes.  Many of the ones I brought in today will have to be pickled green, but a few will still ripen into tasty red grape tomatoes.  Not as good as those I picked ripe over the summer, but still far superior to what you get in the store.  Most of my garden is looking withered (I’m still looking in my gardening books to see if it is better to wait until I need to plant to pull the old plants, or if I should do it now), but my borage is enormous, and green, and still flowering.

“What is borage?”  I get that a lot, I guess it’s not a common herb in the US.  It is a Mediterranean herb.  My sources all say that it is an annual, but I’m guessing it’s pretty hardy because I’ve lost my basil and my tomatoes, but this hasn’t been touched by either of the light frosts we’ve had.  Borage has a cucumber-like taste when the leaves are young, it is hairy so it is usually only served in salads when it is very young.  Otherwise, it can be boiled and sauteed with garlic like any other green.  I have eaten the leaves raw, but I haven’t yet tried cooking them.  The flowers are blue and star-shaped.  Supposedly they are sweet and are used to decorate desserts.  Again, I haven’t tried it.

I planted it, not as a food plant, but to ward off pests which it is supposed to do.  Whether it did or not, I can’t tell you, not having anything to compare it to.

The onions and garlic I planted this fall are starting to send up shoots.  I thought they weren’t supposed to do that until spring.  I hope the warm winter doesn’t turn on them.

The clover, by the way, are not weeds, they are adding nitrogen to the soil over winter.