Repurposing from a Rock to Herb Garden

Despite me preaching about gardening constantly and how you should do it 24/7, I have let my gardens get a little out of hand in the past couple of years. One tiny example of this insult to the world is the rock garden along my patio.

I know what you are thinking.

“But Winky! You are my garden guru. How could you betray me like this?”

Well, I did and now it is time to fix it.

Why Turn a Rock Garden to an Herb Garden?

When I was plotting my big gardening plans this spring, I looked for common needs of the herbs that were most practical for me to grow and use. The main characteristics were rocky, well drained soil and full sun. Seeing that most of my gardens border forests and woodlots, the ex-rock garden (which was just a mess at the time) was an ideal spot.

Plants that needed less sun, I could easily plant under the dappled shade of the pear tree and ones that needed more could be planted along the edges of the garden.

Since it was an old rock garden, the soil was rocky and well drained, perfect for my oregano, thyme and rosemary. Although mint usually needs more fertile soil, it is so adaptable it still grew with the other herbs. In fact, it was good for me because typically, they grow a little too invasively and I have to pull some out! This way, they didn’t have the resources to spread as well.

Challenges

Boy oh boy there we were a lot!

Mostly, it was distinguishing what was a weed and what was just a decorative perennial that had one too many years without a prunning.

Turns out, a lot of it was the later. Most of the not so pleasant plants were invasive species that I needed to remove anyhow. Once I did that, I had to control all the decorative grasses and bushes, sometimes reducing them to half the size (which was still twice the size they were originally suppose to be). It was labour intensive work to say the least and I spent many afternoons sweating buckets.

The thing about pulling stuff out in a rock garden, is that the ground is almost gravely, damaging your shovels and once in awhile, you’ll hit a large rock that was buried after years of neglect. I ended up having to remove much of the soil to let the larger rocks show so that they could do an effective job of keeping my plants separate.

The soil was also super dead. When I was digging, I did not find one earth worm!! That is a major red flag for any gardener. So, I displaced some of the dead gravel with fresh compost. The dead soil I would use as a layer in my compost to keep pests away and bring the dirt back alive!