The Herb Garden Replant Plan
Even herbs can succumb to unusual weather – here’s my plan to replant the herb garden after a particularly hard winter.
Hello, friends! I recently began the replant of our back door herb garden that was pretty much decimated by our -10 degree weather we had this last winter, and I thought I’d take you along on a little tour with some details of the replanting plan.
I actually was pretty surprised at the losses, since this herb garden is located up agains a southern-facing wall of the house. But the only things that survived without any damage were the chives (and really, what can kill them?) and a variety of low-growing thyme called Lime.
Just to help you feel my pain (ha!) above is a look at the garden last October – lush and slightly overgrown. After cutting back and looking at everything, here’s the final tally of the perennial herbs that were lost:
- Two 5-year old rosemary bushes
- A 3-year old French tarragon
- Two French lavender plants
- A 4-year old lemon verbena
- A potted sweet bay (this was iffy – not surprised by this)
- Two spearmint plants
Herb Garden Replant
I was able to cut back and replant a start from the huge oregano plant, and it’s doing well, and I’m attempting to see if the common thyme and variegated thyme will regrow from the two sad-looking partial plants above (the Lime thyme is in the foreground).
Looking at this picture, though, makes me think I really just need to replant these, too. Sigh.
The Updated Layout
As long as I need to replant, I’ve decided to go with a different layout, which I’ve tried to illustrate in the picture above.
The biggest thing I want to do is to find a fountain that is self-contained because when we removed the huge deck we found a pipe for something in the ground under the terra-cotta lid you can see to the left of the middle pot (which is just there as a place marker). So, no planting there and no diy bubbling pot fountain like I thought we’d do. UPDATE: Go here to see the herb garden with it’s fountain!
I want to provide some vertical interest with a couple of small trellises in the pots where I’m growing spearmint and peppermint (I learned many years ago to NEVER plant mint in the ground…). I’d also like to get some narrow lattice for the side of the deck and house foundation, which I’ll just lean it against to cover the not-so-nice stuff going on there. UPDATE: check out the garden tour here with finished deck sides.
And of course I’ll need to finish purchasing the replacements. The garden center where I bought the mint, sage, parsley, and lavender did not have any rosemary or Italian parsley. I have three basil seedlings hardening off this week to fill their spot and I would like to find a small herb to plant in front of the future fountain – do you have any suggestions for me?
Beautiful plan, yummy herbs, sorry you are starting again. I’d include some cilantro and some dill somewhere. I use those so much. Would cilantro go in your empty spot? I also love grilling lemon thyme chicken each summer so lemon thyme is one of my favorite plants I use often. Most springs I heavily trim my sage and thyme plants so I can’t see why your little guys won’t make a good comeback. I live where it regularly gets very cold and I just trim back all the scraggly frozen stuff in early spring and it all comes back. I can’t see why yours wouldn’t, with regular water and some good sunlight. You will have a great herb garden, your plan is lovely!
Thank you, Melinda for the encouragement – I sure hope they’ll come back. I’m not a big cilantro fan and I’ve let the dill reseed in the main veggie garden, so I don’t need it here. I do like lemon thyme – that’s a good suggestion and a low-grower, right? May be just the thing for in front of the future fountain. š
Your herbs got hit hard. š My spearmint and peppermint survived along with the greek oregano. But sad to say the chives didn’t make it. I know, it’s hard to believe. I had a thyme plant that looked like yours and it limped along for a year but then died. I hope yours does better than mine. I have parsley, thyme, and catnip to transplant to a pot, once I get them hardened off.
We are in the process of replacing our rotting boards for our raised beds. Not the best timing I know, but it really needs to be done before they collapse. Last weekend we managed to get one replaced and we are hoping to tackle the next one soon. We have three beds so it’s not too bad but we want to salvage the huge screws to hold them together which has turned out to be a bigger task than we anticipated.
Wow, I am shocked about your chives, actually – ha! And we really need to replace raised bed boards, too, Shelly, but REALLY don’t want to, so we keep adding pieces of wood here and there as a stop-gap. Not pretty as you could probably guess! I hope you’ll blog about it, ’cause I’d love to see your strategy. š
Happy cooking!