Tagaytay City

On a Christmas Bazaar at the Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, I saw potted herbs being sold at P75.00 each. Each pot contain herbs thrice (or more) the amount of those being sold in the groceries for P50.00 or higher per pack. Since I’ll be cooking chicken roast for Noche Buena, I asked my wife to buy the potted ones instead of those from the grocery. That way, I could still plant them and have them grow for future use. My wife told me that we could find cheaper ones at the back of the vegestable section of Mahogany Public Market.

True, we found more and more herbs at the Mahogany Market. The owner offered us four pots for only P100.00 so we took Thai basil, eucalyptus mint, peppermint and tarragon pots. I alredy paid for the four herbs but my wife still won’t stop bargaining so we were also able to get a pot of thyme for an extra.

That afternoon, I planted the four herbs in a wooden trough I prapared earlier. The thyme had to stay in its pot because I thought there is no room left in the trough.

One and a half weeks later, we were so excited to see that, despite the fact that I already used most of their leaves in preparing our Noche Buena, the small buds from both basil and tarragon had started to bloom. Flowers mean seeds and seeds mean more herbs. However, because the trough’s current location receives strong winds directly (we’re living on top of a hill in Tagaytay so you could imagine how strong the wind blows in here), most of the basil flower were already missing so I had to move to a more covered location for the flowers to survive until they could develop and produce matured seeds.

Today, I transfered the thyme in the plow so they could grow too and even planted a branch from the basil. I don’t know if they’ll grow that way or if I will have to create another phlough. We’ll see in a few more weeks.

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