My herb garden

So I've got on board with the Veg About being hosted by Bellgirl! I think this is a terrific idea (mostly because I had a few gardening posts I hadn't bothered posting yet, and this made me get my act together!). The spring whether has made gardening so exciting!

Here are some onions that started sprouting in the bottom of the cupboard that we decided to plant. It's ok, we didn't have that many onions sprouting in our cupboard, but we have been stockpiling a few sprouting ones on our back veranda for planting for a month or so now. Actually, a couple of these onions were from onions that sprouted in our cupboard last year which we planted. After a few months those onions grew into four new onions, and then we forgot to eat them after they dried out. They've been sprouting for a while, so we decided to plant them again. We have also tried growing sprouting garlic before, but the garlic always gets fungal problems and I haven't bothered to work out how to prevent that yet.

Yes, the tub is a little overcrowded. It'll do for now!

We've potted up a few new herbs and things in the garden recently, partly in preparation for Christmas presents and partly for ourselves.

A slightly overexposed photo of the oregano, sick parsley and thriving thyme. The oregano and thyme are growing fantastically in the spring sunshine.

Mint - this thing growing madly. I'm glad it is in a pot. Unlike the native mint...

This is our native mint. It has taken over the front yard. It's rather overpowering to use in cooking, and tastes more spearminty than pepperminty. It makes an excellent tea though. I think our native mint bush is a bit excessive if we're only using it in tea every now and again.

The story of the mint...

You can see one the left of the photo there is a little clump of native grass. Gib tells me that before the mint, the front yard was mostly native grasses (this was a few years before we were going out). Apparently the grass got a bit long. Gib and his big brother, who both have strong interests in Australian native plants and ecosystems, of course knew that native grasses regenerate well after bushfire. So they thought that it would be a great idea to clip back the native grass while at the same time encouraging future regeneration by... simulating a small bushfire in the front yard. Apparently it was all going quite well, smouldering away while they stood by with a few hoses, until they noticed that the fire was going in a suspiciously straight line across the middle of the garden. It was a plastic underground water pipe system that they had going through the front yard. At which point Gib's dad came home and did his nut, the simulated bushfire was extinguished and native mint planted instead.