Anjali’s herb garden packed with herbs that we can cook with to our hearts content has been the envy of mine for years. Her herb patch always looks full and lush and always and I mean always looks happy 😊🌿🌱🌿.

 

Then a couple of years ago I snuck in a mint plant into her herb patch to complete the herb selection. Anjali wasn’t happy about that and told me that she was worried mint would take over and that I shouldn’t have done that. But I love mint; I absolutely love the way it grows freely and how the leaves look green and lush all the time. I even wrote a poem in honor of mint, I’ll have to post it so people can shake their heads and disagree about the virtues of mint running amuck. I apologized to Anjali for encroaching on her herb patch and told her I would keep mint contained. Well, two years later mint has taken over Anjali’s herb garden and that’s all we saw growing earlier this spring in her herb patch. Anjali’s herb patch had become a mint garden. In fact this particular variety of mint was even growing like ground cover under and around the raised bed.

Feeling thoroughly guilty about my mint intrusion, this spring I dug up the entire herb garden including all the mint, all the soil, and just in case mint wanted to come back into the herb patch, placed some landscape fabric and mulch at the bottom of the bed and then added 2 feet of fresh soil. Gosh I hope this works in keeping mint away from Anjali’s herb patch. Then when I went veggie seedling shopping recently Anjali came along with me to the nursery to choose all the herbs she wanted in her newly refurbished herb garden. Next was the fun job of re-planting Anjali’s herb patch.

Interestingly, though Anjali was very happy with how her herb patch looked before, she felt it was mostly in shades of green. This time she wanted her herb patch to have some color with butterfly, honey bee and hummingbird attracting flowering plants to add color contrast to the green herbs. You see, Anjali’s herb patch is the first raised bed one sees when we enter our veggie garden and she wanted folks to see some color pizzazz and butterfly/hummingbird action in her herb patch to get people excited the moment they walked in. Sounded like a great idea, so in addition to a slew of herbs, Anjali also picked up a few flowering perennials known to attract butterflies and hummingbirds – plants such as agastache, salvia, and bidens goldenspark.

Among the herbs that got a new home in Anjali’s herb patch were cilantro, chives, three varieties of thyme, basil, dill, parsley, trailing rosemary, and Italian oregano.🌿🌱. No mint 😊.

All new plants need a good soaking after they are planted 🌨.

Anjali’s new herb patch. 😊🌿🌿🌿🌼🌻

The joy of herb gardening 🌿🌱🌼

The Joy of Herb Gardening