Frugal Pinoy

I’ve always dreamed of growing my own herb garden, especially since I love to cook and prefer to get herbs from my own yard rather than the grocery store. It’s rewarding, cheaper, and healthier (since I don’t use fertilizer or sprays).

Recently, I’ve taken a step towards this dream by planting some stuff. I already have oregano in my garden. Oregano is great with tomatoes and tomato sauce. Very easy to grow too. We just got a stalk from a neighbor and planted it.

We also have sili (chili peppers), which is all-purpose. We add it to vinegar, soy sauce, and dishes. I don’t know if it’s because I’m part Bicolana, but I really love spicy food. Because of this, having sili in my garden has been useful.

Pandan is also present in my garden. We use it to flavor poultry, sometimes for rice, and it will be excellent with buko for drinks and desserts.

As for my new gardening project, I want to plant more herbs from seeds or seedlings. I’ve started with cilantro and curled parsley. The curled parsley is notorious for growing slowly, but it’s very useful for many dishes. I imagine I’d be using it to flavor garlic bread, pasta, and even for garnishing.

My cilantro is growing a bit (see photo) . Cilantro is commonly called wansoy in supermarkets. It’s great for Chinese and Mexican dishes. I use it to add flavor to tacos.

I also want to add the following plants to my garden:

• Basil. Great with tomatoes. You can simply put basil with tomatoes and cheese on a sandwich and it’s absolutely delicious. My partner loves it
• Thyme. Generally used for soups, and is great with tomatoes or eggs. Also useful as tea for respiratory ailments.
• Tarragon. This smells really good. My mom worked in a restaurant/farm for the most part of my youth and whenever I was visiting the farm, I would bend down and smell the tarragon or rub the leaves onto my fingers. You can infuse it in vinegar to make tarragon vinegar, or in oil to make tarragon oil.

Do you have any gardening experience? If so, what plants do you grow? Feel free to share in the comments.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.