Anyone else do it?

I started an herb garden last year and the perennials are doing wonderfully. I just added in some annuals to help round it out, Thai basil, sweet basil, chamomile, dill, cilantro and flat leaf parsley.

The perenials I have are rosemary, 2 different types of lavender, thyme, lemon thyme, curly parsley, greek oregeno, 2 different sages, russian taragon. I just added in spearmint and peppermint this year too.

I filled in the rest of the bed with wildflower seeds, but now I'm wishing I hadn't done that and just added in more perenial herbs.

I've also started composting this year, right now it's just a heap, but I'll probably end up building a bin.

I read a book on seed starting and bought a ton of seeds and starter pots/ peat pots last night to try that. I got seeds for things I plan to do/can't afford to buy whole plants for this year. (Like an asparagus garden, I didn't know that was a perennial!) Some chinese and japanese wisteria to cover my wood fence, some lilac bushes and japanese red maples (both expensive if you buy started plants) and my annual herbs, as well as rosemary I really want to start a rosemary hedge, it just smells so amazing to me.

What about sprouts? I saw lots of mung bean sprouts kits to make your own organic sprouts at home, they were actually really cheap. To think, in a couple months when some plants mature, if I do the sprouts I'll have my entire pho kit from the garden hehe.

When I talk to MGB about this stuff, his eyes just glaze over and he teases me about him not caring!

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oh and I noticed the watercress I picked up a few days ago and didn't get around to cooking yet, is sprouting roots..I may try to container grow that.. I hear spangum moss in a tray of water works well for growing it!

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when my sons hampseter died last week i left the bedding and food in the cage....and yesterday a sunflower seed in the food bowl started growing...does that count? lol
actually...i grew up on a farm...i've tilled feilds and planted row after row of every kind of veggie you can think of, we also have an orchard with fruit trees that i have to pick them and can the fruit every year...oh yea...there's also chestnut trees i have to roast every year.
as for the herb garden thing-yeap do that too, for my potions on my website, if you need any advice let me know i'm pretty good at getting them to grow. one big tip i can give you is get some of those mirical grow steaks and break it in 4 peices (cuz its kinda big for a potted plant will burn the roots if u put too much) and put a peice in 4 pots. they grow super fast like that, i had a rosemary plant that was just itty bitty and within a week it was full blown adult.

as far as seeds (sorry i just seen that in ur post u couldnt afford full plants this year) get ya some plant trays- some nurseries sell them for 10 for a dollar or so. a bag of potting soil and then just drop 3 seeds or so per little tray peice. barly cover the seed with dirt or dont cover it at all then take a turkey baster and drop a little tiny bit of water just enough to wet the surrounding dirt and make it barly damp. they'll take off growing in no time- you'll have plants ready to plant in the garden within a week or two. you can get pretty cheap seeds at lowes or even walmart, i found some purple bell pepper seeds at walmart for a few bucks.

my herbs are in a bed, and I actually did it organically. I dug the bed out about a foot and a half and mixed in compost and well rotted manure.

Everything was seedlings last year, the rosemary is now about a foot and half wide and tall, i'm impressed! But I want a huge bush like at Nana's, one of MGB's and my favorite resturants, they have an herb garden all around the building and use the fresh herbs in the meals, anyway their rosemary bush is almost as tall as I am, and at least 4 feet thick.

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yea, rosemary gets big if its not in a pot, infact it can go kinda crazy on ya if you dont trim it...so can some others like belladonna (nightshade) i had it crawl up the side of the house once it was horrible to cut it down (cuz you cant touch your skin to it - it can be obsorbed through the pores) from then on i grew my belladonna in a pot where i could controle it haha

I want them to go nuts! The more I grow the more I can eat! The bed is actually pretty big, I started it in a small corner of the bed, but I'd like it to take the whole thing. I plan on doing some cuttings/splitting of plants to spread them out more after they get a bit bigger.

Well this is the original corner I did. It spans further now, but they are new plants so i didn't take a pic..there's a couple flat leaf parsley's in here that are new plants too

1. Russian Tarragon
2. Rosemary
3. Spanish Lavender (gonna have to move this one, rosemary is crowding it out already)
4. Parsley
5. Italien Parsley (flat leaf, new plants)
6. Bergamot Sage
7. English Lavender
8. Thyme
9. Greek Oregeno

There's some onion chives in there too, between the parsley and the sage. The tall leafy things are deadheaded daffodils. I let them come up through the other plants for some early spring blooms.

I think it'll all look better later in the season when it fills out and more than the spanish lavender and thyme are blooming.

Attached Images

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Wow MG you beat me to it....hahaha. That herb garden is going to be lush by aug...looks good

I'm a little behind this year. I'll have to go get some pics and post!

gimme little time please.

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"They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!"

Victor Schauberger





http://www.wiserearth.org

it's already lush, my parsley is shoulder high and about two feet wide, the more I cut it, the more it grows. The rosemary is huge, and is crowding out my lavender. Everything is really blooming right now, and I don't want to cut off the flowers right now, they look so pretty.

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my garden is really sad looking this year...portland weather is weird to say the least this year....

I finally got tomatoes on the vine and my zukes are 1/10 the size it normally is....this is weird....cold and dry for weeks and all of a sudden hot as texas...i'd rather be in texas then I can grow bananas...

did you guys know that you can save the tops of pineapple and grow that into a pinapple tree?

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"They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!"

Victor Schauberger





http://www.wiserearth.org