Garden Centre

Monday, August 4, 2008

When is a garden not a garden?

When it’s a herb garden! I was lucky enough to find an absolutely brilliant herb stall at a local fair and came home with two bulging (recycled) carrier bags full of plants and seeds.

There’s a real advantage in growing herbs – you get to eat or otherwise use the produce from your garden. There’s also a disadvantage though – many herbs are annuals so there’s quite a lot of work to be doing in sowing seeds and digging up old plants that are past their best, and also that gives you some bare patches at different time, although you can always plonk down a potted plant to cover the bare earth.

So, on the perennial side I already had: bay, lavender, rosemary and angelica (okay, not perennial, but biennial and self seeding, so all I have to do is dig out the old exhausted parent plant every four years or so and let a youngster fill in the parent’s place) and some chives (both ordinary and garlic). I bought lemon verbena (a windowsill plant, but worth it for the glorious scent and to make lemon sugar for baking and a couple of leaves will scent bathwater as nicely as the most expensive bath oil) and a couple of self seeding salads like orach and mizuna which should just keep filling up their space year after year. And I fell in love with chocolate mint – which doesn’t taste as good as ordinary mint in cooking but smells like chocolates and is great in summer drinks and cocktails.

On the annual side I have now added dill, chervil (same family) basil and oregano. The problem is … where am I going to put everything!

Labels: angelica, bay, herb garden, lavender, lemon verbena, mizuna, orach, plant sales, rosemary

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:42 AM

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