Keeping Up With The Garden - Basil and Upside 2-Liter Containers

It’s so hard to keep up with basil!  If you don’t keep it from flowering it gets all bitter tasting, plus cutting basil back makes the plant grow bigger.  And since I put basil in the top part of over half of our upside down 2-liter containers, we have a lot of basil!  So I had no choice but to take some time and make a huge batch of pesto!  Just look at all that basil.  And that is the biggest bowl I own!

I used my PurpleShisho Pesto Recipe as a base, substituting basil for shisho of course and eliminating the cheese.  I would have added some pine nuts if I had any, and I tried sunflower seeds a couple weeks ago and it turned out great.  But all I had was basil, garlic and olive oil.  I also decided to use a blender this time, which was way easier than a mortar and pestle and creamier.  A chunkier pesto is still awesome though, just more work.  I basically just blended the basil, added garlic and oil till I had the taste and texture I wanted, which means super garlicky!  And I mostly harvest our Spicy Globe Basil which made for an amazing pesto pizza!

Also here is an update on some of our 2-liter containers.  Everything is doing pretty well, other than a couple of the tomatoes that have outgrown their containers.  And I used a natural twine to hang some the 2-liters, which is beginning to rot out (one fell already, but survived!).  So next time I will have to stick with the nylon macramé cord I started out using.  The peppers are doing great; creating a beautiful, spicy canopy over the bench in front of the hoop house.

And I excited about our cucumbers!  I really want to make pickles this year.  So we have Russian pickling cucumbers growing down out of the containers with some dill on top.  And then some massive 18 inch long Japanese slicing cucumbers growing up out of the ground.  They are starting to get intertwined and producing a few baby cucumbers.   We’ve already had some cucumbers come out of the hoop house so I hope these are soon to follow!

Purple Shisho Pesto Recipe

I bought this amazing purple shisho at my neighborhood farmers market the other day.  We have green shisho plants growing all over the yard, but I had never seen purple.  It's a beautiful herb, often referred to as japenese basil.  So it was perfect for a pesto.  If you've never heard of shisho you should check this link out.  It has a nice overview of how to grow it and what you can do with shisho.  It's super easy to grow, and does great in containers if you don't have much space.

This was also my first time making pesto.  It seemed easy enough, but for some reason I just kept buying those little expensive jars at the supermarket.  But not any longer, here is what I did...

INGREDIENTS : 4 oz. shisho, 4 garlic cloves, salt, 2 tbsp parmesean cheese, 1/4 cup olive oil

STEP 1 : I roughly chopped up a small bunch of shisho (about 4 oz. or so) and 4 garlic cloves, and added pinch of salt.  Using a pestle and mortar, I ground it up into a paste.  You could also use a food processor for this.

STEP 2 : I transfered the paste to a bowl and gradually stirred in 2 tbsp of parmesan cheese (you could use more cheese of course!).  Then I mixed in 1/4 cup of olive oil. 

And that's how easy pesto is!  We couldn't wait to eat it so I cooked some pasta, drained it and threw in a little more olive oil to coat the noodles.  I added about half the pesto for a meal for two.  It was amazing!  Especially with a big chunk of italian bread.  I think I might make a little pesto pizza with the rest. 

I can't wait to make a big batch of pesto this summer when all our shisho grows in.  I'd like to try experimenting with other herb combinations too, maybe throw some oregano or savory in with the shisho.  It's an easy way to preserve the herbs and still keep that fresh taste!