My wife is STILL trimming rosemary - more than a pillowcase would hold!!!

[HopeHoops]

The bush got HUGE this year (as did the lavender). She even brought the pruning shears into the kitchen to deal with the harvest. We're going to have to make a SHITLOAD of soup this winter!!! The entire kitchen has been eaten by "The Rosemary Harvest From Hell". At least it tastes good. We'll dry most of it - we have two dehydrators, one 12 tray and the other 20 tray. It might take more than one pass through each.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I was amazed that rosemary and lavender grow so well this far south.

figured the heat and humidty would do them in.
but we have sandy soil, I neglect the hell out of the herb plants and am rewarded with good size perrennial plants.

[HopeHoops]

4. I put in a good soil mix (16x4 box) and everything grows well.

We've got enough basil to have pesto well into next season.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. we have a huge rosemary bush - and also a 6 foot tall bay tree!

[HopeHoops]

3. The herb bed I built (16x4) isn't containing them anymore. They're fucking WEEDS now!

[Gormy Cuss]

9. I love being able to pick bay leaves fresh from the tree

and I dry lots of them to give to family and friends. As for rosemary, around here (Zone 9 CA) it's a common hedge plant. I have more of it than I could ever use. I love the luxury of having fresh rosemary available year round.

[JDPriestly]

5. I put some rosemary in almost every dish and soup I cook.

I suppose that one of these days we will tire of the taste -- but that is a long way off. I just love it. And my husband has not complained yet.

[HopeHoops]

6. It's great as long as you don't overdo it. The same is true for sage...

...
Shortly after meeting my wife, I decided to woo her with my wok skills and made saged chicken. Now, if a little sage is good, a lot is better right? That's true for marijuana, must be true for sage too! The sage was so overpowering that neither of us could eat it. We still laugh about that. She married me anyway.

[luv_mykatz]

7. This reminds me of a story from the early days of my own marriage.

My former husband wanted to make his mother's recipe for dressing for Thanksgiving that year. He got the recipe from her, and we went to work on making it. However, we didn't realize that there would be a huge difference created by substituting my dried homegrown sage for the ground boxed sage his mother used in her recipe. Oh, my...that dressing would've worked great for clearing out a sinus infection! Yummy, it wasn't. We figured out later that homegrown and dried herbs can be much stronger than ground up (powdered) herbs in a box from a supermarket.
It is funny to think of it now, but we were sure surprised and disappointed, all those years ago.

[HopeHoops]

8. That's why we grow our own. I've got a chive colony we started in 1987.

That colony has been split many times, made it through several moves, and a lot of the clumps have been given away. There's NO COMPARISON between fresh chives and the paper rings they sell in little bottles. Oh, and I remember looking at the unit cost for chives about 30 years ago and it was $270/oz. That's more than the best pot on the market! I realized then that you aren't buying the chives - you're just buying the bottle they come in.

[RomneyLies]

10. We were still cutting rosemary from the container grown plant on our back porch to season

our Christmas turkey.

In NorthEastern Illinois!