Rip and Tear

globe basil
It's that time. I feel like such a lazy gardener. My herb beds are a mess. That's a week of off-and-on rain and a month of light maintenance but no real back-breaking work. It can't be avoided now. There are so many chores I hardly know where to start. The nut grass has invaded my original thyme bed, the violent storms have whipped around the globe basil, and the borage really needs to go...which is sad. It was so beautiful. But a life cycle is just that; I think the borage got too wet, probably with the flooding from the pond. The lower stems were positively gross and black - rotten. Oh well, there's always next Spring for borage... not everything is a mess, though.












The lime basil is looking fabulous. I wish it dried well, but it doesn't...not like Italian basil. Both the lemon and lime basil smell like dust when they are dried.















It's too hot for parsley now, so i will pull it up, trim it, and dry it in the herb dryer. We had a customer drive up a while back and exclaim, "I HAVE to have parsley!", whereupon she tripped out to the garden to clip some. If I knew how to get ahold of her, I'd call her up so she could get her last fresh parsley experience of the summer.This parsley we planted last fall, and it exploded in the spring. I think I'll do that again. It made such wonderful globes, and made a home for many caterpillars.



Here is the yarrow, mowed down a month ago; we need to till this area for new fig trees, and the yarrow was in the way. So I waited until new growth popped up, and now I'll move it to it's own personal yarrow bed in the herb garden. Will thinks that's a bad idea...'It'll spread everywhere!" he says. Yes, well, many of the herbs 'spread everywhere', but I want the yarrow. I'm not sure exactly why, but I do.





Yarrow