I am officially naming 2026 as the year of the Coriander Forest.
In the past, I have tried, with minimal success, to grow coriander. I’ve gotten a couple of measly plants, which generally grew and went to seed before I could even use them. Well, not this year. Because this year, we got a coriander forest.
When the first tiny plants sprang up, I was confused. It looked like coriander… but how? So when it got a little bigger I had a taste and realised… it was coriander. So… I nurtured them. Because I love coriander, so I want as much as humanly possible.
And that’s what I got… a whole damn forest.
To the detriment of the other plants, in the end.
But it’s terribly hard to pull growing vegetables out. That’s why I always get a wild crazy of tomatoes, and this year, some mini cantaloupes, because even though I know that thinning them makes sense… I can’t always bring myself to do it.
I was trying to work out how I’d finally managed to draw the coriander jackpot, and then it came to me. Last year, at the end of the season I pulled the two plants I had grown out, but because there wasn’t room in the compost bin for a few weeks, the plants (with their seeds) lay there, infusing into the ground.
And that resulted in… a coriander forest.
Aside from that, summer was very hot this year. Like, way too hot. And it doesn’t really matter how well you water, a good rain soaking every now and again is necessary to keep a garden in top condition. So, everything this year was a bit… dry. It all grew, just not in the quantities it usually does. There is a good crop of pumpkins, though, which is nice. And the tomatoes, due to the lack of rain, didn’t begin rotting until well into September, so I made a lot of tomato soup!
And even though I probably grew too much coriander this year (I reluctantly cut it back a little in the end to stop it crowding the rest of the garden), I have set myself up for a mega coriander forest next year. Because it really was a bonus for all our Indian dishes and salads. But I will try to temper its growth just a little, now that I know how well it really can grow.
