The Herb Garden

A highlight of early evening is a walk to the herb garden with a timeworn basket and bonsai scissors ready to clip herbs needed to make our dinner. The scent of fresh cut herbs is delicious!

Here in the Texas Hill Country, our land is quite rocky. In our area there is an abundance of limestone, and blue-gray leuder. These stones are fairly simple to move by hand or in a wagon, wheelbarrow, or bucket. People use them to slow erosion on slopes, to edge garden beds, and in terracing with low walls. When our house was under construction, we asked the builder to pile up all the large rocks and boulders unearthed during the process. Our first outdoor project was to build a raised bed of stone for growing herbs.

My initial thought was to divide the bed into sections using trimmed boxwood plants. After measuring the bed, it occurred to me this would leave hardly any room for the herbs themselves. The land provided a resolution in the form of baseball to softball sized blue-gray leuder rocks. It is fascinating to me what resources are readily available if we continue pondering a problem.

The rocks are beautiful and can be rearranged as needed depending on what herbs we are growing. We grow only the herbs we actually use in our cooking; basil, sage, cilantro, parsley, thyme, oregano, and tarragon. Rosemary serves as an herb and a shrub outside the raised beds.

The sage and French thyme lasted through an unusually cold winter and are continuing to grow this spring.

There are deer, coyote, rabbits, armadillos, and other animals interested in what we grow. It seems they don’t like the smell of the herbs, particularly oregano. For this reason, oregano is planted as a border around both raised gardens. This is both attractive and sustainable as the plants die back in the winter and return to full growth after a spring clipping.

After creating a rectangle of native uncut limestone from the land, we lined the bed with weed cloth and then added topsoil.

In the second year we created a smaller raised garden of stone in the same area. In anticipation of having a garden I discovered and began reading the online blog, Gardenista, several years ago.  An article of particular interest is the one on hugekultur, a no dig, drought-tolerant, raised bed technique for creating rich soil. Essentially, you use materials you probably already have in your garden to fill a raised bed. We started with tree branches and semi-rotting logs gleaned during our first pass through the land cleaning up fallen debris and shaping the native trees. We did not use our cedar as cedar, like black locust and black cherry takes a long time to decompose. We also did not use our black walnut as, according to Gardenista, it “contains natural chemicals that prevents plants from properly growing”. Next, we added clippings raked from the grass fields we trimmed and leaves both dried and green. Finally, we covered the pile inside the raised stone bed with organic compost. The materials in the hugulkultur further decompose and you have a rich, homemade soil! According to Gardenista, the decaying materials provide plants with the nutrients they need so you don’t have to fertilize. The rotting wood and branches hold water and increase the drought tolerance of the bed.  

One day at the local garden center they were giving away a tomato plant with each purchase. This is a photo of the amazing Red Snapper tomato plant – my first ever edible crop. The plant grew voraciously. Seeking a way to support it in a naturalistic way, we were able to use wine vines and cedar sticks off the land to create our own tuteurs. This method proved somewhat delicate for the task, so in future years the tuteurs have been made of taller cedar sticks pushed into the soil and tied with hemp twine. There are more complicated methods of constructing long lasting tuteurs, but this method allows you to pull them up and stack the sticks at the end of the season.

You may be wondering about the rabbit in the garden. Of course, there is a story! When we were first married I saw a similar rabbit during a tour of spring gardens in Houston. My husband found this heavy leaden rabbit and gave it to me for our first garden in Sugarland, Texas. The rabbit has traveled with us and, even when we lived in a downtown condominium without a garden he was there, waiting for this herb garden.

So, instead of a scarecrow made of straw, we have a rabbit made of lead guarding the parsley and thyme. Thinking of Beatrix Potter’s character, Peter Rabbit, this seems quite appropriate. Happy gardening!