If you like to make your own soup there is one ingredient you really need to give your soup a taste boost and that is LOVAGE (levisticum officinale), by preference fresh lovage but you can dry it too for Winter as it disappears in late Autumn with the first frost. It is a tall herb, grows up to 2 meters high but you can keep it small by cutting off the highest stalks, new shoots keep comming up and they are the ones you use. When you buy it in Spring in a plantshop it looks like nothing and it is small, you can never guess it will grow 2 meters (6 to 7 feet)in a short time. You don’t need much of it, best is you do some experimenting and see what amount of it you like. I use a leaf about 25 cm ( about 10 inches) for 2 liters (half a gallon) of soup.
When I was working in the garden this afternoon I saw my lovage was comming up, the first thing I did was cutting the biggest piece for my stew, you can use it for all sorts of recipe’s of course but using it in soup is magic for your soup. It does get flowers, yellow flowers on a huge stalk but I always cut them cos they take a lot of power from the plant.
GWENNIESGARDENWORLD 
Lovage is one of those plants I know the name of but not the taste of. I really must try to grow it!
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It really is a tastefull herb and easy to grow.
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We can’t really plant until after Mother’s Day, but we do. We can still have frost and sometimes we lose flowers, if we don’t wait, or can’t bring them in, but we’re all ANXIOUS to get started!!!! Thank you for the new ingredient.
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We too have to wait with planting untill after May 15 th but that is only for the tender plants, everything that is winterhardy here we can plant as long as the ground is frost free. Here too we are all anxious to start in the garden 😀 We have had many sunny days this year and everything is in bloom earlier than usual so we have butterflies and lots of bee’s in the garden.
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