I have dreams of spending my evenings canning pickles, tomatoes and making pounds of pesto… which is exactly what I’m going to do later this summer. I have started my santo cilantro, genovese basil, little leaf pickling cucumbers and gilbertie paste tomatoes and they’re growing so fast!

Cucumbers, hanging out in mini cups. Joe and I were “pranked” on April Fools Day… someone put roughly 200 little cups half full of water in front of our door. Sadly, our door doesn’t open up outward so I just opened the door in the morning, grunted and raised and eyebrow as I neatly stepped over them. We left them there for a few days until we hunted up a big bowl to pour the water from each cup in to. Now we have 200 little plastic cups, some of which are being used and reused to start the cucumbers because they are a bit too big and their roots too impressive to pop into egg shells very neatly.

Do you remember those wee seedlings I showed you? The ones in the eggshells? Here they are! The basil in the middle flat are the ones from the photo, but all of these were seeded in eggshells then transplanted once they got their first set of adult leaves. These are recycled salad containers I found in the office recycling and they make pretty perfect medium containers for the tomatoes (left) basil (middle) and cilantro (right) once I punched some holes in the bottom for drainage. The lids they came with are parked underneath to catch any water that might make it all the way down through the soil and out through the holes.

Up close basil babies…