Herb update

Well a week or so ago I shared how I grow my herbs for my kitchen windowsill. There have been some fun little seedlings emerging over the past few days and I wanted to share them with you! Here is a picture to show you the forest of seedlings:

Unfortunately those are all weeds. If you look down closer to soil level, you can see the chubby seed leaves of the basil seedlings just starting to unfurl above the dirt.

Last spring, when I was starting my seeds, I spread my good, weed-seed-full, garden dirt out on baking trays and baked it in the oven for several hours on low heat to kill all the weed seeds. It was great, especially for the seedlings that I wasn't positive I would be able to distinguish from weeds! For the basil though, I wasn't worried about being able to distinguish the cute chubby seedlings from the tall skinny weeds, so I wanted to leave any helpful soil organisms (including those mycorrhizae I keep hearing about lately) intact in the soil, so lots of weeds and no oven.

Oh, and here is my creative solution to keeping the moisture in, an empty cereal bag. I usually use veggie bags from the grocery store, but I couldn't find any around the house, so cereal bag it was! It actually worked quite well, letting some light in, keeping the moisture level up, and best of all, because the cereal bag is a little sturdier than the bags I usually use, I didn't have to put any toothpicks in the soil to keep the bag off the seedlings - perfect!