Many people have memories of four-o’clocks in their family garden. These beautiful flowers have been popular plants for generations.

photo Renees Garden

Four-o’clocks (Mirabilas jalapa) self seed. Often you can find them still growing in a long-abandoned garden spot. It’s an old Southern tradition to plant them near the front door. These jasmine-scented flowers will greet your guests.

In South America, where these flowers originated, four-o’clocks are used as a dye. The root is used medicinally and is said to be a hallucinogen. In herbal medicine, parts of the plant may be used for diuretic, purgative or vulnerary (wound-healing) purposes. I can’t speak for any of these herbal or medicinal uses—I have only enjoyed the flowers and their fragrance.

I’ve also read that the flowers are used in food coloring. The leaves may be cooked and eaten as well, but only as an emergency food. An edible crimson dye is obtained from the flowers to color cakes and jellies.

Four-o’clocks are also also known as the ‘Marvel of Peru’.
Photo courtesy Renee’s Garden

Four-o’clock ‘Broken Colors’ are a special variety with starry, 2-inch blossoms that are beautifully splashed with showy, contrasting colors. Their delicious jasmine fragrance floats on summer breezes. These flowers are both easy to grow and reliable. You can find the seeds on Renee’s Garden’s website for $2.79 a packet.

Before planting, soak the seeds in water overnight to speed the sprouting. These flowers are trouble-free, love full sun and have only moderate watering requirements.

Your four-o’clock flowers probably won’t bloom at exactly 4 p.m. Mine bloom at about 6 o’clock. The blooming time depends on your time zone and the plants’ exposure, but whenever it blooms it will stay consistent. You can count on your flowers to bloom at the same time every day. However, if it is cloudy or rainy, it may throw their solar clock askew.

My garden is bursting with the main ingredients for Ratatouille, a chunky French stew. While you may not be thinking of stew in the heat of the summer, this rich vegetable stew will warm your soul this winter.

What to do when the garden explodes

Ratatouille is a delicious way to preserve a lot of produce fast. It is even more flavorful reheated the next day. Use the following herbs and vegetables.

Herbs: rosemary, parsley, thyme, oregano, bay, garlic

Vegetables: onions, bell peppers zucchini, eggplants, tomatoes

Herbs are a must for Ratatouille, especially French thyme.

Basic Ratatouille
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 large bell pepper
• 1 medium eggplant
• 2 or 3 large tomatoes
• 2 zucchinis

1. Coursley chop vegetables into bite-size portions.

2. Saute onions in a little olive oil, then add garlic.

3. Add bell pepper, eggplant, tomatoes, and salt and pepper to taste.

4. Cook for 15 minutes.

5. To preserve, divide the remainder of the stew into quart freezer containers, label, cool and freeze.

Tips For Cooking Ratatouille

Fresh herbs add sparkle to ratatoille

+ I have plenty of fresh herbs at the peak of summer so I like to add a few herb sprigs to the dish early. Just remember to remove them before serving.

+ Add zucchini or another summer squash to your stew for something a little different.

+ Cook covered over medium heat for about 10 more minutes, or until vegetables are done to your taste. Remove from heat, salt and pepper, and add fresh chopped herbs.

+ On the first snow day of the winter, put a quart of frozen ratatouille in the crockpot on low. By dinner time, your house will smell like a French restaurant. Being snowed in with a big bowl of rich, summery Ratatouille is a privilege for any home gardener.

+ My basic Ratatouille recipe is under-seasoned. To spice it up, season it with Herbs de Provence or add a combination of rosemary, parsley, thyme and, maybe, a cube of your frozen homemade pesto.

+ In my basic recipe, I add several whole cloves of garlic, which is different than the traditional French version. If this isn’t your cup of tea, add a variety of squash, peppers or eggplants instead.

Add a variety of peppers for flavor.

+ Serve as a stew with crusty bread, or, for a hardier meal, serve over rice, egg noodles, pasta or a baked potato.

+ I like to make a large batch of this stew and turn off the heat when the Ratatouille is slightly under cooked. Then I add fresh herbs, stir and cover it for 10 minutes.

Patsy Bell Hobson is a garden writer and a travel writer. For her, it’s a great day when she can combine the two things she enjoys most: gardening and traveling. Visit her personal blog at http://patsybell.com/ and read her travel writings at http://www.examiner.com/x-1948-Ozarks-Travel-Examiner.

Chard is becoming a favorite summer green for home gardeners. It’s beautiful! And, long after the cool season, when greens such as spinach have faded from my Zone 6 garden, chard is the one that steadily produces fresh greens for my favorite salads.

Make tomato and swiss chard soup this summer.
Photo by Robyn Lee/Courtesy Flickr

Grow and Cook with Swiss Chard

Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’ was honored as an All-America Selections (AAS) winner in 1998. When buying herb and vegetable seeds, I look for seeds that are AAS winners, which are selected based on their superior performance. AAS winners will also grow most anywhere in North America. The All-America Selections® logo tells me that I can grow this plant easily from seed.

Swiss chard, or chard, is a beet that is usually selected for its leaf production, not for its root formation. Plant chard seeds a week or two before your favorite salad greens, such as spinach, bolt. When you pull up these greens your chard seedlings will be well on their way. Also, by the time tomatoes are ripe and ready, lettuce will be long gone from your garden. Instead, grow young chard leaves as a lettuce substitute. I use it in the summer’s best sandwich: the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, or the BLT.

Many cooks remove chard’s colorful stems, which can be yellow, gold, orange, pink, red or white, and cook them separately before adding greens to the mix. (The stems take longer to cook.) Cut off the outer leaves 1 1/2 inches above the ground when they are young and tender, which is when they are about 8 to 10 inches tall. Larger leaves can be cooked and used as you would use spinach. If you like spinach, you will like this hardy and more earthy-flavored relative.

Fill your garden with Swiss chard whereever you find an empty space. It grows well in containers and is pretty enough to grow in a flower bed. Swiss chard is loaded with vitamins A, C, and contain vitamin B, calcium, iron and phosphorus. Like most greens, chard is very low in calories. And unlike most vegetables, it has a slightly higher sodium content than most leafy greens.

Seed Packet Giveaway!

Burpee has generously agreed to give away three seed packets of Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’ to my Herb Companion readers. Winners will be selected at random. Details below.

• Post a comment below: Share your experience with Swiss chard. Do you currently grow this plant? What would you like to use it for? 

Best known for pickling, dill (Anethum graveolens) is also a good herb for succession planting. If making dill pickles is on your Summer To-Do List, try this variety: dill ‘Dukat’. This variety, which is bred in Denmark, has finely cut leaves that stay fresh longer than other varieties.

Hanging herb garden hung by the window to grow in Brooklyn.
Photo by Dory Komfeld/Courtesy Flickr

I like this newer variety of dill. It is pretty enough to plant in a sunny flower garden and it’s more compact than taller, older varieties. This is one of the few herbs that I enjoy to use both the ferny leaves and the seeds. Those beautiful lacey leaves are often referred to as dill weed. After this member of the carrot family has bloomed and set seed, cut it and hang it upside down in a paper bag to collect seed.

While the black swallowtail butterfly is a caterpillar, it feeds on dill.
Photo by Ken Pomerance/Courtesy Flickr

I suggest that you start this plant from seed—it has a long tap root, which means that transplanting it will have limited success. Plant a few seeds every two weeks to extend your season of fresh dill and to grow more than you need to share with local butterflies. Grateful butterflies will enjoy finding this smaller, more compact variety in your garden and caterpillars will appreciate its ready supply. It’s a well known fact that dill (as well as parsley and fennel) will attract butterflies to your garden.

To preserve, freeze your dill plant by cutting the branches into sections short enough to fit into heavy plastic freezer bags. Do not chop the leaves into bits until it is ready to use. This will brighten the fragrance and flavor when you use it in any recipe. Dill will keep in the freezer for about six months.

Use dill and garlic to make homemade pickles.
Photo by Sarah Reid

Use dill for more than pickles and dilly beans. Try a little dill in a favorite biscuit recipe. If you are serving pre-made biscuits, brush a little dill-infused butter on them. Also, I couldn’t make potato salad without dill weed.

This dill seed is easy to find. I bought my seeds at Renee’s Garden, Burpee and Nichols Garden Nursery online catalogs; several other companies also sell dill seed. But if you don’t want to find them on your own, enter my garden giveaway!