While picking up the odd herb plant in a supermarket can help to add one or two varieties to my herb garden it’s not really going to work if I want to really expand the range of herbs I have growing. Supermarkets will generally stock mint, basil and maybe one or two other varieties of herb. They’re not going to have a full range of herbs for you to choose from.
But a decent garden centre will.
So this afternoon I ventured out to the Arboretum garden centre a few kilometres outside Carlow town. It’s a big garden centre, which offers a very broad range of plants from seed through to fairly big trees. They’ve also got a good range of pots, planters and all the other gadgets and gizmos you could want for your garden.
I didn’t realise there were so many varieties of some common herbs like mint.
I quickly filled my trolley with a good selection of herb plants including marjoram, oregano and mint. Whether they’ll all survive and even “blossom” in my garden is anyone’s guess, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.
Mint is a bit of a menace. If you’re not careful it will takeover your entire garden, so I got another couple of planters for the mint and some of the less robust plants. The mint needs to be “imprisoned”, but the other plants might end up being planted out once they’re big enough.
Here’s how it turned out:
That fennel doesn’t look to happy at the moment, but I remember as a child coming across fennel that had done almost completely wild and it had grown to be huge.
Over the next couple of weeks hopefully all the herbs will take root well and contribute to my culinary experiments!
If nothing else a bit of fresh mint will go well with my gin and tonic!
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