Yesterday, my neice and I visited an herb farm. She’s into making herbal things like soap, body rubs, lotions and all that stuff and was having a hard time finding what she wanted. I just like to grow things… and I’ve been looking more and more at herbs. I’m learning to use them in cooking at this late stage in my life and of course, I simply love the smell when you walk through the garden and brush against some of them.
We found (and purchased) prostrate rosemary. I have a nice “regular” rosemary plant but it grows upright. I saw the trailing variety at the Flower and Garden Festival at Epcot recently and just fell in love with it. And we found (and again, purchased) a perennial basil. “African Blue Basil” was written on the tag. I need to do some research into that one to see just how hardy it really is. There was a very nice variety of herbs available, many I’d never even heard of before.
I got everything potted into larger clay pots yesterday evening and put them in a semi-shaded area so they could adjust to their new home. They came from a very shady place, one with lots of big oak trees in addition to the shade house itself. Here, they just have the shadehouse. Most herbs like sun but I don’t think they need it all at once.
I put a fennel plant in the back part of the half-barrel planter out by the end of the driveway. It should produce a nice tall and lacey background for the lower growing plants that are already there. I saw a lot of containers at Epcot that used fennel as the tall accent in a grouping. Let’s see if it will work for me.
Today I have to find a home for a second fennel and two un-named lavender plants. I wouldn’t have bought those if the lady hadn’t shown me some mature plants near her house. On the table in the shadehouse, these little things were downright puny and very insignificant. The mature plants, however, were simply lovely.
I promise to get some pictures posted later today or maybe tomorrow. You know how it goes around here. Even the simplest of chores sometimes takes an entire day or longer!