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Rosemary, basil, parsley, mint: all useful for summer cooking. Buying herbs can get expensive, so wouldn’t it be easier to just grow them yourself? It can be difficult if you don’t have a green thumb, but with these tips you’ll be sure to succeed.

Use An Egg Carton: Planting your seeds in a paper egg carton is a good way to ensure that your seeds can germinate and get everything they need to thrive as a plant. Punch holes in the bottom, put in the soil and seeds, and leave the carton in a place that will allow lots of light. When you see sprouts, you can just bury the carton in the ground along with the sprouts (leaving them above ground, of course). You can also transfer the herbs into pots to keep by your window. The paper will biodegrade and your plants will continue to grow in your garden!

Know What Herbs to Grow: Bringing a plant to life and keeping it alive can be hard if you don’t know what you’re doing. Some plants are tougher than others. You also don’t want to choose herbs that grow very wide or tall if you’re keeping them inside. Some good ones to start with are basil, mint, and parsley.

Use Organic Fertilizer: Fertilizer is a good way to ensure that your plants are growing up healthy and strong. It can also exceed the lifespan of your plants if you’re forgetful about watering them (like I am). For a plant that you’re later going to eat, however, you don’t want to introduce any chemicals to them that you wouldn’t want in your body later. Use compost or store-bought organic fertilizer with your herbs!

Choose the Right Time to Harvest: The best time to pick the leaves off of your plant is right before its flowers bloom. This gives them maximum flavor, whether you choose to use them fresh or dried. If you want to dry them, you can do so by hanging them upside down in a dry place or putting them in the oven at 150 degrees for three hours.

Happy gardening!

Avoid this situation with WCS: The Great Outdoors

In the event our Worst-Case Wednesday posts haven’t been helping you out much, Amazon is currently running an awesome Big Deal promotion, offering up a bunch of eBooks from $0.99 to $3.99.

Included in this batch of books are the Worst-Case Scenario Almanac: The Great Outdoors, the Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Man Skills, and the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks for Golf, College, and the Weird Junior Edition.

I’ve got all the books and links rounded up below. Check ’em out. The promotion ends June 24th, so get them while you can!

After an amazing signing and sampling at Parnassus Books in her hometown of Nashville, TN, Lindsay Landis is packing up some books, some cookie dough, and heading off to Aspen, Colorado for an event at Explore Booksellers.

At the event this Wednesday, Lindsay will once again be signing cookbooks and dishing out delectable samples. At Parnassus, she whipped up some classic truffles, whoopie pies (referred to as "food of the Gods" by a bookstore employee) and special Mexican Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles (you can grab the recipe off her website!). Guests can look forward to similar treats, no doubt.

Come out, say hi, eat some cookie dough. You know you want to. Nom!

Lindsay Landis @ Explore Booksellers
Wednesday, July 20th, 2012

Explore Booksellers
221 East Main Street, Aspen, CO 81611
(970) 925-5336
www.explorebooksellers.com

The Library of Congress has 34.5 million books, but the writers in the Publishing Office only used a select few sources from the Library's 838 miles of bookshelves.

In spite of the size of our book collection, the books we used from the Library's collections for the entries featured in Presidential Campaign Posters only occupied one small shelf in our conference room. Yet these books and the facts held within their pages helped all of our writers craft captions that were both fun and factual. Most importantly, the books helped us tell the story behind the posters and the election it commemorates.

Photo via The Queen’s Notebook

Some recipes should be prerequisites to entering the adult world. From Recipes Every Man Should Know, this is definitely one of them.

Here at Quirk we sure do love infographics and flowcharts. Links to the fabulous literary infographics that Flavorpill posts and Bookriot's Flowchart Friday are regularly forwarded around the office. And as much as we love them, we were jealous. We wanted one! 

So in honor of our Ten Year Anniversary, we made our own.

In our infographic, you'll learn all sorts of fun, appropriately quirky facts about our publishing company. How many employees have, at some point, lived in the Quirk office building? How many parties do we throw? If you stacked up all the copies of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children in print, what mountain would that pile be taller than?

Answers to all these questions and more await you below. Enjoy!