The number one lesson I have learned the past couple of months in my garden is to label my seed trays. I figured I was only planting a few different things, and I’d be able to tell what they were when they sprouted, so it was fine.

Narrator: It was not

I now have several nice little seedlings that I can’t identify. And I have bigger plants from earlier, like those pictured above, that I STILL can’t identify. I planted both broccoli and cauliflower. When I google what the plants should look like, they look pretty much the same. So I guess until these start to flower, I won’t know which I have. Maybe I have both? that would be cool, but I doubt it. The plants all look identical and I’d expect at least a little variation if they were different.

For a month or so I thought I had several mint plants coming along nicely from seed. Now that they’re a little bigger, I think I have no mint plants, and in fact I have several sage seedlings. They smell much more like sage than mint to me anyway. That’s great. I’ve never been able to keep my sage alive when I bought a plant from the home improvement store, so that’s why I thought these were mint. I read that mint is super easy to grow. Perhaps sage just likes it better outside than in my kitchen window? Either way, I now need to try again to get some mint started.

I did luck out that both my spinach and kale came up and they look nothing alike, so I know which is which. So maybe I can get away with no labels as long as it’s a plant I know I can identify and I have grown it before. Everything else – I must learn to label.

For Christmas, my daughter got me a set of herbal tea seeds, and – you guessed it – I planted a bunch without labeling them. Most are still super tiny and I’m (perhaps mistakenly) optimistic I will eventually be able to identify them when they get some more leaves in. However, the one below is nice and big now and I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t look like the photo on any of my seed packets. It is closest to the lemon balm, so I’m going with that for now, but the leaves look rounder on my plant than the seed pack picture. If anyone is good at identifying plants, I wouldn’t mind your guesses in the comment section.

Perhaps I am very carefully tending a weed for all I know.