Video of herb/pollinator garden

In the Garden

Right outside my kitchen, I have planted an herb/pollinator garden.  I have my bee waterer located in here.  I took a quick video of the herb garden this morning...

I like how the herb garden is coming along.  I still have lots of room to plant more.  I am still working on getting shavings down over the hay and I will also put wood chips down on top of that.  I am going to try and dehydrate some more of the herbs this fall.  I have been able to dry some basil, oregano, parsley, sage, feverfew, chamomile, calendula, mint, and catnip thus far.  I want to look up some recipes for herbal teas to make this winter and use the herbs for these teas (and for cooking too).  Now that we are finished with the Farmer's Market for this year and the boys are going back to school, I should have time to focus on the drying.

Another thing that got put on the back burner was the compost piles/bins.  Finally this past week I was able to get in there and turn all of them.  I have 3 big open piles made out of pallets (actually, it is really 4 piles because I ran out of room and had to just dump some grass beside the pallets) and 3 covered bins up close to the house.  The more open piles had gotten pretty dried out and you need moisture for the microbes to do their job.  The great thing about compost is that you can just leave it and it will eventually work down but it goes faster if you can get in there and turn it.  I was able to harvest out 2 garbage cans full of compost!  In addition, I put a good 5 inches of compost in the blueberry raised beds and covered that with shavings.  That should really give the blueberries a boost.

Harvested compost in garbage can.

~Denise