The Greening Time

Today I nipped out of the house for a couple hours to go shopping for herbs at the annual Toledo Herb Society plant sale at the Toledo Botanical Garden.

When we moved last year, I left behind established herb beds, developed over 13 years of hard work. A veritable mini-Provence of purple, pink and white lavender plants; three different kinds of thyme; oregano; St. John's Wort and more. Now I'm starting all over again, but it's not so bad because I have a lot more room to work with, and the soil around here is soft, sandy, and easy to dig. Not like the hardpan clay soil of Medina County!

Not sure they'd have boxes there, I took one of my big, flat Longaberger baskets and I must say I was quite the fashion hit of the sale! Everyone commented on my basket overflowing with herb plants. I came home with:

Lavender (I brought one with me from Medina, but it's not doing well)
Creeping wooly thyme (3) to plant in my stone circle
Sweet woodruff
Orange mint (yay!!)
Spearmint
Columnar basil
Lemon savory
English thyme
Prostrate rosemary
Lemon balm

Most everything except the woodruff and the lemon balm are going in two huge galvanized tubs filled with potting soil on the back patio. These were left by the last owner of our house, and they are very handy and hold water better than the sandy soil around the house.

I'll corral the mints in one of the pots - they don't play well with others and need to be contained or they'll run wild.

I took a stroll around the herb garden (pictured above) at the Toledo Botanical Garden and just drooled the entire time... it is beautifully landscaped and though it is early, it promises to be spectacular later on this summer.

Well, those are my garden notes for today. Time for me to go find my garden gloves and get to work!