Hi. I’m Amy Stewart with Project Wellness. Today, we are going to talk about what to do once your garden has started to thrive. When do you use this stuff?

Well, my garden was just planted. However, these are fairly well established plants so I can give you a few tips on when you can start sort of pulling your harvest. I will tell you that basil—this basil can grow to probably the size of this pot. So this can get huge. The rosemary and the oreganos are going to travel on the sides. The parsley is going to multiply as well. Everything is going to start growing together and you’re going to have this beautiful verdant green fragrant garden. And once that happens, you’re going to of course want to be using it because as you are caring for this thing on a daily basis with water and everything like that, you want to start using it.

So you probably recognize this herbs looking very similar to the ones that you find in the grocery store, except of course, you’re growing them so they’re much better. If you like, you want to kind of start small if you’re plants are small. You’re not going to kill them by pulling leaves off. In the case of rosemary, you may just want to sort of take two or three leaves off and this could be used in marinade or whatever and you can chop them up really fine. Now once this thing starts going, you can start cutting off entire stalks and those are basically called rosemary skewer. Sometimes you’ll find them in the stores.

Basil is an interesting one. This will actually start to flower and I like to keep my basil growing. So I’ll pinch the flowers off as they grow, and we don’t eat those. But once they really start to multiply, you can start to pull basically whole chunks of your basil off just by simply pinching them and you’ll just have massive amounts of basil to make into pesto and whatever. And I take my harvest and my word up in the food process or put them into ice cube trays and I have what I call pesto cubes, so now you have a recipe. The same thing with oregano, you want to be able to pull off the leaves and use them on salad dressings, recipes or whatever. And if you don’t have quite enough yet, you can mix dried herbs that you may already have in your cupboard with herbs that are grown fresh and they’ll all taste that much better.

In the case of parsley, I definitely would love this sort of get to multiply a little bit more. I can use this much parsley on a salad for myself because I love it and it’s loaded with nutrients so I would definitely like this stuff to take off a little bit. So that is how you start to harvest your garden.