Kitchen Herb Garden

For the past several weeks, we have been adding a semi-formal herb garden right outside our back door. Herbs and edible flowers and veggies like onions will literally be 15 feet from the kitchen sink. That's fresh cooking! The beds are ready for planting, and we have transplanted a few herbs into one of the sections. I now have lemon balm, lemon thyme, chives and crocus. As it gets warmer, I will transplant more and then of course, we can seed directly into the bed. I'll try to post pictures as things progress. I raided the creek bed for the rocks, and we will get some additional sand to fill in around and level off the rock paths. I'll top that by sweeping some mortar mix around and then wetting the mix to seal the rocks in place. It may be a few weeks yet until we get around to getting more sand-we are often slow on project completion-too many irons in the fire, so to speak. We have the cypress mulch for the beds, but obviously, I want to plant them first. For the soil in the beds, we basically tilled in the grasses, removed the large rocks and added about 100 pounds of additional topsoil along with about 100 pounds of sand. If you notice, the first bed, the one with the greenery, has a slightly darker soil color than the other three. That is because I added some leaves and leaf mold to that mix. I did not feel that we really needed it, so I did not add it to the other beds. The existing topsoil there was above average, and of course most herbs like poorer soils, so I thought it was best just to add the sand and omit the leaves.