Stone Herb Spiral

The flock and I spent some quality time pulling weeds from the herb spiral, which lives near the back door.  If you remember, this was once a pile of topsoil from our swimming pool excavations.  It's taken me a few years, but I think I've finally arranged the stones so that they create a layered and raised circular garden bed.  

Last summer the spiral was cram packed with basil and holy basil plants, which nearly shaded out all the other herbs.  Turns out, a family of two can't consume enough salad dressing to use a dozen basil plants! 

This year, I'm trying to encourage myself to thin more aggressively so that some of the less bossy plants, like sage and thyme, have a fighting chance.  I made chicken soup recently, from chickens we raised, using fresh green beans from the garden, and flavored with thyme and sage from the herb spiral.  

The wild milkweed I transplanted to the top of the spiral last spring sent up numerous shoots this year, which are popping up throughout the spiral.  I trimmed out a few of the stalks that fell over and were smashing their neighbors, but there are still plenty to feed the butterflies.  I saw a monarch visiting.  Hopefully she was laying some eggs.  

I wasn't sure putting giant sunflower plants in the herb spiral was such a good idea when they first started to dominate the scene, but now I've come to like that they add some height to the spiral and the space near the back door.  Before the sunflowers, the stones of the spiral seemed so large.  Like stonehenge, just feet from our doorway.   A friend of mine once said he could always tell who was a hippy, because hippy's always have sunflowers in their gardens.  Ha!  

Here you can see the large dark green leaves of the milkweed on the left, and the small pale green leaves of the sweet basil in the center right, and the row of small marigold plants growing on the west side of the spiral.  All of the herbs and flowers were started from seeds, in our greenhouse.  

The only plant that survived the winter and the chickens dutiful excavations was the oregano, in the foreground, in front of the small sage plants.  I offered a friend some oregano plants once and she said she didn't need any because oregano came up like weeds in her garden.  I've been waiting to have oregano weeds in my own garden ever since.  Hopefully next year it will be so invasive I can pull it out by the handful.  

The pretty purple plant in the center is a type of basil too.  I started most of the bigger plants in the greenhouse, but you can see the tiny basil volunteers that are sprouting from seeds dropped last year.  I didn't even start holy basil in the greenhouse because I knew that if any of the herbs could reseed themselves, holy basil would.  There are dozens of plants.  Let me know if you want some for your garden. It makes a nice hot tea.

I think we have thirty tomato plants.  I haven't fertilized them with my magic compost and manure tea, like I did last year, and the plants are smaller and not as leafy as they were this time last year.  Some are already loaded down with small green tomatoes though.  If you remember the massive tangle of tomato vines and cages we had last year, you can see why we dedicated so much of the garden to tomatoes this year.  We put six feet between each plant in all directions, with the hope that we can more easily harvest the fruits without crawling through the jungle of vines.  Each plant has a ring of old hay to suppress weeds, and Brandon used the weed eater to trim the pathways between the rows. They are also protected by the garden fence, so hopefully the chickens won't be able to help themselves as easily.  If we get a good crop, I want to make some sauce, and use up some of that oregano.