Herb Gardening for Beginners

Herb Gardening for Beginners: Herbs tubs are good for beginning herb gardeners, but they can look a bit bedraggled, following a winter of hard frosts and some recent heavy rains. Last year we did quite well for mint (six edible varieties, plus catnip in the hex-tub on the left) and in one hex-tub there was an assortment of sage (purple, variegated and lemon), along with buckler-leaf sorrell (which survived the previous winter to re-grow, so I’ve got my fingers crossed for that one) and the brown stalks were rumex sanguineous, or red-vein dock, which I’m hoping will have self-seeded.

The Herbs

One of my hex tubs containers has a curry plant in the center (does anyone know whether it’s actually edible or not?). I’ve heard conflicting reports) with a few varieties of marjoram and/or origanum for company. I have another hex tub with mostly chives (happily they seem to be resurgent already) along with some seed-grown russian tarragon and feverfew, both of which seem to be about to burst back into life (which is nice).

Some smaller pots include a few bay plants (I split a larger plant into several smaller ones last year, but they don’t seem to have grown – a lesson learned there), a Vietnamese coriander, a couple of rosemary plants, an English mace, a bronze fennel, lemon balm, that sort of thing.

Oh, and a few varieties of thyme, which seem to be thriving in the extremely stony soil I re-potted them into last year – the tip I found online about re-creating their natural Mediterranean habitat was definitely a good one.

Now I have plans to grow a lot more leafy herbs in tubs and pots this year and I’m going to wait a few weeks to see what’s survived and what hasn’t before I start thinking about replacing any of the woody herbs; I rather suspect that both my prostrate rosemary and upright rosemary have won’t winter well, alas, so they’ll be first on the list.