Tuesday, June 21, 2011

My herb garden!

So a few days ago, I decided that I wanted to plant my own herb garden. It sounds fun and easy, plus what's not to love about having fresh herbs to pick from your own garden when you're making dinner? The idea of it seems so "homey" and I love being in touch with my food and the ingredients I cook with. Yea, I've always been a total country boy and that's how I'm gonna stay!
So anyway, I've had past mishaps with herb gardens, mainly because I've had no clue as to how to plant one. Plus, I don't have a backyard per say...I live in a second floor condo, so I have a deck, which is perfectly acceptable, but still, I've managed to kill several herb gardens, a cactus, and somehow, some fake houseplants.
All that notwithstanding, I decided to do a little homework and take one more crack at it, because I want fresh herbs growing on my deck so badly!
After some internet research, here's what I did:

I got three 25 pound buckets from the supermarket (you know, the big white ones the frostings and glazes come in they use in the bakery
Then I went to Lowe's and got: 
A Big Bag of Miracle Gro Potting Mix- this stuff is supposed to be good because it comes with the plant food already in the mix and feeds plants for up to six months!
Herbs!
I started with just a few basics that I knew I'd use a lot: Rosemary, Basil, Oregano, Thyme and Mint.

So when I got all this stuff home, I drilled several holes in the bottoms of all the buckets for drainage (something I previously didn't know to do) then I filled em up with the potting mix, dug little holes for my herbs, loosened the root balls on the bottom of the herbs, plopped them in, covered em up and fed em some water :-)
Now, supposedly this is supposed to give me herbs for the rest of the summer. We'll see. I have a bit of an issue with getting a lot of direct sunlight on my deck, but I read that west facing late afternoon sun is good for herbs (which is what my deck gets) as well as watering them every 5-10 days, depending on how dry the soil gets. I might actually re-pot my Oregano because the bucket I got for it was too big and I didn't have enough soil to put in there, so it's kind of trapped halfway in there :-/
I'll let you know how they wind up doing, but so far, I'm on the right track and hopefully my little garden will thrive!
 Come on, guys! Grow!! :-)