The Herb Garden

Did I mention that we had absolutely gorgeous weather last week during April vacation? One thing I love to do is to stroll around nurseries looking at all the plants they have, and it was a lovely week to do it. We don't need many flowers (although I still like to look), but I was on the hunt for the perennial herbs we have planned for the back row with the grapes. Although I was sad to find that my heretofore favorite nursery is shutting down, I found a great new (to me) nursery in Haverhill that might be my new first stop on future plant hunts. Cottage Gardens is a great little family-run place on the Haverhill/Merrimac line, and you should definitely check it out if you live in the area. They had lots of flowers, a solid culinary herb selection, and their prices are great. I quickly filled up a flat of four-inch pots, including … 


The basil and cilantro I mentioned before. These will give us something to munch on while we wait for the seeds to pop up and become harvestable plants as well. I'll plant these two herbs in succession for a continual late spring and summer harvest.


Here we have parsley: two flat leaf in the foreground and two curly leaf way down the row at the other end. Peas will be up on the trellis behind these in spring, and the rest of this row will hold other annual herbs grown from seed: chamomile, dill, fennel, and borage. Parsley sometimes overwinters, but it's not a sure thing, so we are treating it is an annual.


And here is the big herb row. In this photo I am standing in the center brick path looking down a 27-foot bed toward the swing set. From front to back are oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, mint, and chives. If you can picture in your mind turning around 180 degrees to face the other direction, you would see the same mirror-image row stretching down the other side of the garden. On the other side are some different varieties of some of the herbs: Greek oregano on one side and Italian on the other, for example. Not every spot is filled, so I will have to look around for some of the less common herbs we have planned for (like pennyroyal and lovage, for instance). But this is a great start.


Finally, along the garage I planted 14 sweet woodruff plants. This is one of my all-time favorites! It grows in shade, will spread to a ground cover it gets enough water, and it smells fantastic. We had them under hemlocks at the Red House, but I never really got to see them fill in as a ground cover. These are traditionally used in England as "strewing herbs" (thrown on the floor to be walked on to smell good and discourage pests) and in Germany as an ingredient in Maiwein, which we will have to try soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more