Gone to Seed/Next Generation

Mint gone to seed, even though it is a perennial & does sometimes die-back to the ground in zone 9 but I just leave the stalks to let me know where it was & each spring it comes back & spreads. There are many kinds of mint: spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, pineapple mint, Egyptian mint, etc. They can spread but they're not exactly ivy, I don't mind if the mint spreads, I consider it groundcover; I also cut a small bunch & throw it in the car, it helps with motion-sickness & smells better to me than any car "air freshener". The pic with a black background is mint catkins.

The next pic is of Italian oregano, there are many kinds of this as well. This is also a perennial, as opposed to annual-1 time. It has a wiry stem, so to use the leaves I tear them away all at once, the same way as for removing thorns from rose canes.

The purplish flowers are basil, I think it was a purple basil that reverted to green. The seeds even smell strongly like the leaves & are small, blackish, found inside round flat discs on the stem. They require bottom heat, I just use a plastic lid & put them on the cable box; you probably could use a heating pad on low for much less than the greenhouse version that sells for $60 to $70.

I miss my hollyhocks, I used to be able to buy seeds for the color advertized, but the last time I bought pink they were all white doubles. I also bought the more expensive orange bell pepper plants & when the time came-they were red. So I bought a few orange bellpeppers at the grocery store, scooped out the seeds & grew them from that. The reason why orange bellpeppers are more expensive is because fewer of their seeds sprout-even with bottom heat. Yellow peppers have a higher germination rate than orange, but red-nearly ALL of those seeds sprout, hence they're cheaper.

I looked at the back of seed packets & far too many are, you guessed it 'Made in China'. I think that's why my rosy hollyhocks were actually white doubles, & that's also why I bought plants I thought were orange bellpeppers-I paid for them-but those Walmart plants were just cheap red bellpeppers.
I am reminded of history, when the British were in China they were sold what they believed where tea plants, but they turned out to be just tea-roses instead. They had to wait till they matured & bloomed to realize this which was at least 6 months. The Brits kept going back to China, when all they had were those wooden ships, & the Chinese sold them all kinds of camellias, gardenias, magnolias-in an effort to prevent them from finding the real tea plant, which is I think a member of the camellia family. This link shows the history of tea-I was wrong, the British WERE LAST to go to China, Portugese were 1st!