Everything on the back steps is yellow right now. The pine pollen settles on the railing, the porch screen, the dog, and the six terra-cotta pots lined up along the bottom three steps. Lila wiped one pot with her finger this morning and showed me the green-gold smudge like she had discovered gold. Then she watered the basil, the chives and, for good measure, a little of her own shoes. Our herb garden is two weeks old, and I am already more attached to it than is reasonable.
Why the steps
We have a half-acre, so the obvious question is why I didn't just dig a bed. The honest answer is that I have dug beds before, and I let them go to weeds by July every time. The lawn here is hard red clay under a thin layer of topsoil, and the two pecan trees shade a lot of it by early summer.
The back steps come down from the screened porch and face roughly east. They get bright sun until about two in the afternoon and then fall into pecan shade, which is close to ideal for most kitchen herbs in our heat. More importantly, I walk past them several times a day. A garden I can see from the kitchen door is a garden I will actually water.
What we planted and what it cost
I bought starts rather than seeds, mostly from the Saturday farmers market, where a woman with a folding table and a truck full of flats sells them for a few dollars each and tells you exactly how she grows hers.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Six terra-cotta pots, 8 to 12 inches | $38 |
| Two bags of potting mix | $16 |
| Small bag of perlite | $6 |
| Basil, two plants | $7 |
| Rosemary, thyme, flat-leaf parsley, chives | $14 |
| Mint (in its own pot, always) | $3 |
| Total | $84 |
The pots were the biggest cost, and I could have done it cheaper with plastic. I chose terra cotta because it breathes and dries out between waterings, which matters in a place where the air itself is damp most of the year. Rosemary and thyme in particular sulk if their roots stay wet.
The soil mix
For the Mediterranean herbs, rosemary and thyme, I mixed about one part perlite to four parts potting mix so the water runs straight through. Basil, parsley, chives and mint got plain potting mix. Every pot has a drainage hole, and I set each one on a couple of pebbles so it isn't sitting in a puddle on the brick.
A few things I'm doing differently this time
I once killed a grocery-store basil on our kitchen windowsill in about nine days, and I have thought about where I went wrong. Mostly I watered on a schedule instead of checking the soil, and I never cut anything because I didn't want to "hurt" it.
- Finger test before watering. If the top inch is dry, water deeply. If not, walk on by. In April that's every two or three days. By July it will be daily.
- Harvest early and often. Basil gets pinched just above a pair of leaves so it branches instead of shooting up into flowers. We have already had basil on one pizza and in a tomato salad, and the plants look better for it.
- Mint in solitary. It is a lovely plant with the manners of kudzu. It has its own pot and will never be allowed to share.
- Rinse the pollen. Every few days I give the leaves a gentle spray to wash off the yellow film. The plants don't seem to mind it, but it isn't pleasant on the parsley we eat.
Lila's part
Lila turned seven last month, and she has taken on the chives as her personal responsibility. She has a small green watering can and a strict belief that the chives prefer to be told good morning. I haven't argued. She snips a few with kid scissors for scrambled eggs on Saturday mornings and announces it to the whole house.
Pepper's part is mostly lying across the bottom step in the sun, which means I step over a beagle to reach the thyme. He is old and slow and entitled to that spot.
I don't know yet which of these will make it through August. The parsley may bolt, the basil may get leggy, and I fully expect to lose something to a heat wave. But tonight I cut a sprig of rosemary for the chicken, stood on the steps for a minute in the cooling air, and it felt like the beginning of something that might actually last the summer.
