It was a few years ago that I made my first attempt to create a home herb garden. A strip of my garden about 10ft by 2ft, separated from the the rest of the garden by the concrete path.  It was an isolated area especially for my herb project. I visited the local garden centre to explore what was available and if memory serves me right I purchased parsley, sage, basil, thyme, curry plant, rosemary and mint.

After planting these herbs rather randomly in a good quality compost, I simply made sure they had enough water and left them to their own devices. They all did marvellously at first, the only one to suffer was the curry plant, I have no idea why but it started to look rather limp and wasn’t sprouting new shoots all over the place like all the other herbs. I used a few of them in recipes that I cooked but only used them fresh, I didn’t harvest them and use them dried, frozen or preserved in salt or vinegar, I think it is fair to say that I was a rather lazy herb gardener!

The herbs flourished really well with little to no attention, they survived over the winter (although it didn’t look like they had). Sure enough in the spring they would burst into life again, sprouting all over the place. The mint in particular was growing very aggressively, I had planted it in the far right corner, but it very quickly started to spring up across the whole area and I think it started to suffocate the other herbs. I had been warned about this problem by my mother and grandmother, they suggested it might be better to grow the mint seperately in a pot. I should have listened to them, I realize that now. The herb garden was looking overgrown and untidy and all you see was lots of mint!

I decided, with much prompting from my husband, that it was time to clear the area and do something different. I gathered as much mint together as I could, made mint sauce from some of it and sent the rest to my mother to be distributed to any friends and family that might be interested. My husband then proceeded to dig up all the roots and stems etc., fresh compost was put down and we left it at that until we decided what to do. I still wanted a herb garden really, and maybe I would do it again soon, but definitely grow the mint in a pot! Incidentally it took us ages to get rid of the mint, it kept growing back, so we treated the whole area with Weedol, and it was still growing back, we finally killed it off by covering the whole area with black plastic sheeting weighed down with bricks – not pretty but it eventually worked and the area was clear.

I will most likely begin a new herb garden in this area, we have not used it for anything else since and I do love herbs, mostly for cooking but I am interested in other benefits too, like healing and maybe herbal teas. For now I have bought a large garden pot and have planted a few herbs in it to gently ease me back into herb gardening. You can see this in the main photograph of my blog, I have planted broad leaved sage, chives, coriander, curled parsley, rosemary and alpine strawberry.