The Herb Garden

The healthy looking avocado tree.

The planting along one side, herb garden, chives, lettuce, strawberries,
dwarf rhubarb, garlic and the kaffir lime.

It seems as though establishing the herb garden and the decorative floral border around the Kitchen Garden has been my way of procrastinating over how to actually start the kitchen garden. I'm not sure why I feel ill-equipped to set this up, but I need to hit the gardening books and sort out a design pronto because after clearing the it out completely, all I have managed to do is plant down one side and if I don't get to putting in some actual garden beds soon the weeds will devour the cleared ground all over again!

Still, I now have the beginnings of a lovely Herb Garden.

After another visit to the Diggers Club shop at Heronswood I came away with:

- Rosemary (plant)
- Thyme (plant)
- Lavender (plant)
- Moroccan Mint (plant)
- Spearmint (plant)
- Stevia (plant)
- Wildflowers for Bees (seeds)

I also had a sad looking basil plant from the supermarket to put in the ground (not sure if that will live) and 8 cuttings from blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes kindly given by a friend. What these even look like as plants is beyond my knowledge at this point as right now they just look like sticks, but I looked online to find out how to plant them and now they are in the ground along the same fence as the blueberries and raspberries.

The modest beginnings of a herb garden, hopefully it will fill out a bit in spring.

The herbs are all planted in a sunny corner of the kitchen garden. The mint plants I put in a pot on the advice of my lovely mother in law, as they will apparently run riot and take over the garden if you don't keep them contained. The rosemary, thyme, stevia and basil went in with the continental parsley, coriander and oregano that I had already planted.

The decorative border, before...

...and after! With the succulents and flower seeds all tucked in.

The decorative border outside of the garden, which already had some flowers planted, was overgrown with weeds too. So we cleared that out and put in more plants and flower seeds to attract bees and encourage 'helpful' bugs. I planted the Diggers' wildflowers for bees mix (conflowers, dill, poppies, flax, salvia, pincushion and coriander), Flanders Poppy, Aquilegia (which I know nothing about, but my Aunt gave me seeds saved from her old farm), Nasturtium Ladybird (which you can eat in salads), and lavender.

I also managed to get the lemon tree and all of the succulents saved from our last house into the ground, then added to the main garden the kaffir lime and a dwarf rhubarb. Closer to the house I added a small persian rose bush called 'for your eyes only' to the garden and I planted the coffee bush, which wasn't looking particularly healthy (though that could just be the cold), near one of our water tanks which is prone to overflowing. Apparently coffee plants like plenty of water.

New plants :)

The fruit selling is going well, not yielding hundreds of dollars yet, but giving me enough to purchase some starter plants. After saving all profits for a few weeks I went and splurged at the local nursery and bought:

- 1 Avocado tree (Hass) which is about 5 foot tall and should be productive within 2 years
- 2 Blueberry bushes (Northland and Denise)
- 7 Raspberry canes (Nootka, Autumn Heritage, Chilliwack)
- 11 Strawberry plants
- Peat bricks (for planting the avocado tree)

The Strawberries like to be planted on top of a mound and then mulched with straw, or in my case, sugarcane mulch generously left by the farm's former owners.

Strawberry mounds, mulched well with Sugarcane mulch

Northland Blueberry

It might sound incredibly ignorant, but I didn't even know that different varieties of the same type of plant fruit at different times of the year! So the idea of buying several varieties of berries is that they fruit at different times of the year and you get fresh fruit for longer periods.

Denise blueberries will fruit early October to January and Northland will fruit for a different and longer period, December to March. With a bit of luck we'll have blueberries for 6 months of the year!

The same applies to the Raspberries. These I had to plant in a particular way, along a supporting fence oriented North-South for even sunlight. I needed to dig a trench along the bottom of the fence and add manure and peat to the soil before planting. The peat I bought at the nursery and the manure I was lucky enough to get for free from a neighbour with horses :)

Blueberry bushes and Raspberry canes planted and ready to go!

Woohoo! Free horse poo!

The Avocado tree needed special attention, apparently my usual method of planting trees (just sticking them in the ground) wasn't going to cut it.

So I chose a nice, sheltered spot with at least 4 hours of sunlight per day. There is a slope to the site to aid drainage as Avocados need well drained soil. I dug the hole and added peat to the bottom as per the advice of the lovely lady at Town Centre Nursery in Mirboo North then popped in my new tree, built a mound around the base, dug a channel on each side to hold excess water and hoped for the best!