Red shiso...

My missus bought a red shiso plant some years ago...

And for all the following years, they have been self-seeding in our potager...

They are part of the mint family, so they have 'relatives' like the basil, sage, lemon balm...

Flowers are rather minute and quite pretty...

There are not many ways to use this herb...

I sometimes make juice out of it...
And occasionally, I boil them to use in our baths...  

The Japanese folks use them (together with salt) to preserve plums...
Of course, we do likewise too... with plums from our potager....

Tomatoes, cucumber, perilla, red shiso, rocoto, Japanese yam...

The rains continue to come...
Yesterday, we witnessed another session of blistering thunderstorms...

And yes, it is the season for tomatoes...
'Momotaro' is the strain...

And of course, cucumbers too...

Been chewing on these crunchies for some time now...

The Korean perilla has taken a really good hold on our potager... they are all over and the leaves are huge...
The 'ama-gaeru' (literally, rain-frogs) are also very comfortable in our garden...

My apologies to Green Dragonette for the long pause in responding to query on what we do with the red shiso...
The only two things we do with the red shiso are to use them as a coloring and preservative (together with salt) for our Japanese ume plums, and to make juice... 
The juice making is very simple indeed...

Ingredients:
red shiso 200 gm
sugar 600 gm
apple vinegar 1 cup

Wash red shiso well, use only the leaves
Put 6 cups of water and shiso into pot and boil for 20 mins.
Remove shiso leaves, squeeze the leaves and dispose
Add sugar and apple vinegar and boil for another 20 mins in low heat
Cool and store in clean flask or bottle in room temperature
Dilute accordingly, add ice or syrup, and enjoy

Grew rocoto chillies for the first time last year, with seeds given to me by a former student from Peru...

They are beginning to produce now...
The flowers are really pretty... the branches and leaves, hairy...

Am growing the Japanese yam again this year...
The root is a versatile and a lovely vegetable to eat... And the seeds ('mukago' in Japanese) that dangle off the vines also make good eating... we boil them together with rice...

Amaranths, peanuts, malabar spinach, shiso...

Thanks to the frequent rains, things are growing very well at the potager...

And thanks to Diana of Kebun Malay-Kadazan girls for sending the amaranth seeds...

Grew eight patches of these amaranth and had been eating them for a while now... they taste very good...



Meanwhile, the amaranth we had bought some years ago, self-seeded...

Am still keeping the packet, and the label says 'Perfect red'... they don't lose their color even when cooked... and the juice that oozes out of them is pinkish red...

The taste of homegrown peanuts is really 'out-of-this-world'... am I exaggerating?  :-)
Manage to grow about ten plants with seeds save from last season...

And Malabar spinach... ooh, I just love growing and eating them...
I germinated some of them although they do self-seed as well... 

An acquaintance of mine drove over to our house one day just to give us some seedlings...
Japanese shiso or perilla is shown in the picture above... she also gave us myoga ginger, and yellow tomatoes...