Peas off

Early in this year (warm day in February) I planted pea seeds because I heard that they are pretty cold hardy and you could plant when the ground was workable. Apparently what I think is workable is not the official gardening definition of workable. But baby, I did work it. I was full of excitement, planting the various garden, sugar, snow and etc peas here and there, some on one side of the trellis, others on the other side and lovingly covered them up and went my way.

Some days later I was listening to NPR and they were singing the praises of advances in the understanding of genetics and Gregor Mendel. At his name, something twinged in me. I felt myself transported to some point in fifth grade…I saw the squares and the capitalized and lower case letters flash before mine stupid eyes when the realization dawned that I would not be getting the expected snow/sugar/garden peas. My peas would be miscegenating! I did a mini scream in the car when this occurred and smacked my forehead a few times. Before deciding that there could be worse surprises.

Shiso Fine

sSo I have this plant called Shiso, Purple Perilla, Beefsteak plant, what have you, and it’s lovely. Except for the fact that it is, shall we say, a rolling stone? It’s actually quite funny, I had previously bought Shiso seeds prior to attaining this plant, with the thought of some exotic herb growing in my garden. I never saw one seedling come up from it and was not very happy, cursing the lack of the exotic to my garden. Since I was not so quite up to date in the gardening world (aka, did not research/was not observative) I did not notice the striking similarities between the Botanical Interests packet’s lovely, artistic rendition to my real live Perilla plant.

The perilla/shiso/beefsteak plant got huge and I separated it, moved bits and pieces of it around, pulled it up and moved and its various selves to approximately 80 different locations in my yard. Little did I know that that was not enough for my little Shiso. She is so everywhere. In the garden path (HOW?) ALL around the raised bed my husband and I made around the tree (she was only in 3 different places too!) Admittedly the purple, green, gray seedlings do look great with the Japanese painted lady fern and the other various coincidental purple flowers that sprung up around it, but have mercy… my perilla from last year got to be at least a foot and a half tall from one plant. And now I have literally hundreds of them everywhere.

I have been doing great amounts of research into what I can cook these into, from pesto to wrapping them around meat bits. (why do I always seem to write double entendres? Better yet, why don’t I edit them out?)

So, hey, if anyone wants to horror/glory of this plant, please, contact me. I have a few to spare.