We spent a few hours today working on the herb garden:

We need to fill in the gaps, but we got all the weeds out and the mulch layers renewed.

The mulch in the pathways is “popcorn tree” chips from some of the trees we cut down and chipped last fall with the help of my friend Erick’s tractor and its industrial chipper attachment.

This is how the herb garden looked in Septamber:

That was in the middle of a drought.

It looks like this last June, before the drought hit:

It looks like the dahlias died on us, and the moringa tree bit the dust. They really don’t like our freezing winters combined with the soaking cold rains.

However, we have lots and lots of cool plants in the greenhouse now, thanks to all the propagating we’ve been doing for our nursery sales, so the next step is to plant up all the beds with some interesting things.

We added a trellis/arch we found elsewhere in our yard, and I need to figure out what to plant on that.

We threw a lot of coffee grounds into these beds before mulching them, so I bet we get some nice growth from our herbs as the weather warms up. We also planted various flowers in these beds to make things beautiful and to bring in some pollinators.

The African blue basil was our prize-winning pollinator plant in the herb garden last year.

It died in the cold, however, so I’ll have to put in a new one. The picture at the top of this post is the “lion’s ear” herb, which also bit the dust. Plant, plant again.

Happy Monday, everyone. I’m off to work in the nursery.