Evolution of An Herb Garden

One of the things I'll be doing this coming Spring is re-vamping what used to be my herb garden.  Into...not one.  I haven't yet decided what I'll do for an herb garden next, to be honest; but I know the space it was in before is shabby and overgrown and defunct. Part of the process of spiffing up the lawn includes returning to lawn to that space.

But first...

This was the first herb garden I built in my "new" house in 2004.  It doesn't look like much - this pic was taken in 2007 as I was demo-ing the whole thing to make way for the new patio project.  Plants are gone, pots all over the place, soaker hoses all wonky.

But before this, it was a pretty little semi-circle of fragrant forest to sit behind on a cool day on the back porch.

The patio project was a 152sf Quikrete Walkmaker project - not only was the slab surface covered with cement "cobblestones", but also a 9x12' area on the ground in front of it, to make one large surface.

The dip in the center is where two photos were spliced together, sorry. :)  An 18" border wrapped around the entire thing, and this is where I planted my herbs:

Summer, 2007.   Little did I know at the time that it was going to rain every single day from February through mid-August.  Those orange Cosmos in the back corner (hiding a compost bin) got to nearly twelve feet tall!

You can see here, it wasn't long before weeds starting breaking through the mortar.  I'd mixed my mortar with sand by half, like you're supposed to...not realizing that the mortar mix I bought was already sanded. Oops.

In 2009 I took up all the stones, chipped the mortar off of them entirely, and replaced them in a different pattern - concentric circles which I hoped looked like ripples in a pond.  I also created that wee round garden with the Buddha statue in it as an island in the patio surface.

A year later, the Martian Death Fungus hit; and the year after that, that soul-sucking damned drought.  My fluffy little fence of herbs around a pretty patio was no more.

This is what it looked like as of Fall 2012.  A single white Yarrow survived both the MDF and the drought.  The lawn doesn't look like much in this shot, but trust me, this is greatly improved over the previous year, and a pretty good-looking lawn for a woman who has three mid-sized dogs as well, I think.







So what's next for this space?  More lawn.  Sounds boring, I know, but I have a plan.  It involves moving a LOT of cobblestones.  Kill me now.


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