30 Days Wild: Day 22

Repotting some herbs

For day 22 of 30 Days Wild, I was in the garden once again. I've been so busy recently it's difficult to get any further without rushing around! Our herb garden was in need of a little care, since the sparrows have absolutely decimated it. Not only did they enjoy the early shoots of our various herbs, but once they'd eaten everything they then used the dry soil for dust bathing! Little buggers!

So late this evening I spent a bit of time planting some more herbs from our kitchen, and sowing some seeds. I've also come up with a way that I hope will mean we wont have to worry as much about watering the herbs, especially given the non-stop sunshine we seem to be having over the past couple of months.

Our herb garden has space for eight removable 11cm herb pots, which each sit in another 11cm pot which is permanently in the ground. The idea being that, when the winter comes, we can move the herbs into the greenhouse and/or the kitchen (depending on how tender a plant it is) and we'll have herbs throughout the winter. As well as saving us money as we don't (usually) have to buy prepared herbs from the shops, fresh ones straight from your own garden taste much nicer!

I removed all the herb pots and emptied the soil out. Then I placed pieces of sponge at the bottom:

The sponge will should retain water so in period of drought, the herbs wont require watering as often. This is especially useful as different herbs require different amounts of water, so they can just take what they need.

I repotted the coriander and parsley from our kitchen:

Then I sowed seeds for the rest of the herb garden:

Left to right: parsley; chives; coriander; dill; marjoram sweet;
basil genovese; thyme; parsley Italian giant.

I've also placed some gravel on top of each of the pots, to hopefully keep the sparrows at bay! It should also help with moisture retention. Once these were back in place, I removed the chocolate mint (it mint that smells and tastes like chocolate!) as it was past it's best and replaced it with some standard mint from the kitchen (main photo). I've put gravel on top of the soil here too.

It has started to go dark at this point, when I noticed some splashing from the pond. Our resident female popped up to say hello:

The green stuff is algae, which I've treated
naturally and should hopefully go soon!

 Then our resident male also made a very brief appearance:

He seems to prefer staying at the bottom of the pond, well hidden. In fact, at one point we thought he'd left us altogether!

Tomorrow's post wont be garden related! Yay!

You can read all of my 30 Days Wild posts here!