Tour de Basil

 Time to make my salad dressing again. Friend Margaret dug up a whole basil plant that was flowering and sent it home with me. She says she's done all she can possibly do with basil for one season. Today, I picked off all the leaves that were still good and froze some for future batches of dressing.

Meanwhile, let's talk about the basil plant, Ocimum basilicum. I'd never really thought about where it fits taxonamically. Would you belive it's a mint? It has pretty white flowers (but that means the end of harvesting it for a herb. Some varieties are tender perennials, but Margaret says not these ones. She's tried.

There are several varieties of basil, and I don't know which this is, but here is a stem with whorls of seed pods forming below the budding stalk along the square stem. That's a big clue that it's a mint.

This stem has broken off and you can really see the shape of the pods although they aren't ripe yet, and that the stem has four sides.

Here's a stalk just starting to bud. I love the telescoped layers of baby leaves.

Now I'm practically high on basil from harvesting all the leaves!

In other news: no walking happened. I stared at the computer so long my eyeballs ache, but I got a lot done.

See Is it Easy Being Green?