After finishing, I helped myself to a healthy snack, homemade pico de gallo and a small bowl of corn chips. The pico was made the day before, from the good solid harvest of tomatoes in the front yard. The 'maters have grown like gangbusters this year, and even though I put 60% fewer into the ground, I'm getting triple the yield. Better airflow and less density (coupled with the dryness) have meant an absence of fungal blight, which I'll remember for future years.
I'd hoped, or so I recalled as I ate, to use some cilantro I'd planted in my herb garden to give that lovely floral flavor to the pico. But it matured too early, as this summer got waaaay to hot. After bolting, the plant was done. Cilantro doesn't like being transplanted, so I figured I'd need to grow from seed if I tried it again.
That stirred something in my mind, so I wandered out to look at the remnants of the cilantro, which was...as expected...little more than dry twigs. But that "little more" included scores of plump, round, striated seeds, grouped into sprays of a half dozen or so.
"Oh, right," I muttered to myself. "There it is. Coriander." I knew that cilantro and coriander are the same thing, leaf and seed of the same plant. But for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't growing cilantro this year. I was, instead, growing both: 1) a functionally different herb, and; 2) ample seeds for multiple subsequent plantings of cilantro.
I harvested the plant and returned to the kitchen, where I laid out newspaper and spent another ten minutes teasing the coriander seeds off of their branches. It was, as process, quite different from gathering bean seedstock, but no less gratifying, as the coriander fell with a soft percussion against the newsprint.
One of the great delights of the garden is that it offers up new things, even when one isn't expecting them.
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