In my experience, rosemary is very easy to grow. -guess it depends upon your climate and soil. Anyway, I'd give it a try! Good luck on your herb garden!!
I live in a city, and I share the yard, so I can't be doing much in the way of veggies. My garden is fairly new (started putting it together in 2013) and purely ornamental. I started with 80 own-root band-sized roses, about 2/3 of which are antiques. In 2014 I added companion perennials, and clematis to fit accompany the roses climbing the side fence.
It's been an interesting endeavor, being as the yard (and soil) here were in such poor condition. In the Summer of 2013, while the baby roses were growing-on in their new pots filled with my own soil mix, I severely cut back an overgrown Callery pear to bring in more sun, and sawed its limbs into logs, which I used to build the edging for the raised beds. Cardboard was laid out over the grassy weeds, and that was topped with snipped up leaves and twigs from the tree. Then in October everything was covered with about 6" of composted mulch -- 15 cubic yards were delivered, taking me three days to spread out.
Over the next few months of Autumn, Winter and early Spring, I kept an eye out for online nursery sales and placed orders for anything that would fit into my "plan" and which was also marked down (most were 50% off). In Spring, a lot of composted manure from the local university's agriculture extension, as well as bagged organic fertilizer, was worked into the mulch to start the process of it becoming "soil" ready for the perennials. Then they got planted, and as they started to grow, I experienced my first rose flush from the roses planted the year before. Everything continued to grow and bloom in its time. By their second Autumn, it was hard to imagine my roses arrived in 3" pots only a year and a half earlier.
Then when the days started becoming cool, my order of bulbs arrived -- hundreds of bulbs. For early Spring, the low-growing mix is 100 each of Crocus tommasinianus 'Lilac Beauty', Iris reticulata 'Pixie', Chionodoxa lucilia 'Alba', and Anemone blanda 'Blue Shades. Poking through that will be 100 Narcissus 'Fragrant Mix'. Under some shrubs I planted 50 Hyacinthoides non-scripta (English Bluebells), and in a sunny bed went 100 Ipheion 'Starry Nights Mix'. For fragrance after the main rose flush, 25 each of Oriental, Trumpet, and Orien-Pet Lily mixes are dotted in the beds.
After the bulbs were planted, my last bit of gardening before Spring has been "putting the beds to bed." First I collected tree leaves as they fell on my street, and put a nice thick layer on the beds. Then my daily trips to Starbucks began -- I leave an empty 13gal kitchen garbage can with them, and return the next day to pick it up full and swap out another empty can for the next day. And repeat -- daily -- since Nov 14. It just so happens that there's one a few doors down from my job, so it's not going out of my way to make the trip. I dump the grounds in a wheelbarrow, pull out the filters for the compost area, and scoop the grounds onto the leaves about 2" thick. I think I need another two weeks to finish the last of the beds, then I'll take a break until Spring.
Used coffee grounds is simply too good to end up in the garbage. It has an N-P-K ratio of 2.0-0.36-0.67. True, that's "weak" as a fertilizer goes, but it makes great food for all the worms in the garden, adds bulk organic matter, and does add up as far as nutrients when applied as a thin top-layer of mulch. And the employees at Starbucks are more than happy that I'm taking it off their hands -- their garbage cans are much lighter these days.
I don't have much of a green thumb in any department. I'm hoping to get some veggies to grow this year though. Since I have bad luck getting or keeping anything alive I'm not spending much money on gardening this year, I'm buying some seed and saving some from produce I buy and trying that out... even if the food it produces isn't as good it will be good if I can get it TO produce!I met my first long haired weimaraner when I living in Australia. Apparently they weren't really bred in the United States since AKC considers the long hair a disqualifying trait. In the past few years though they've allowed the long hairs to be shown in field events and such (still can't show in confirmation events) so they are growing in popularity.
Awesome! I'm going to try crookneck this year, and we finally got a pressure canner so we're doing three times as many green beans and corn (i hate both of them frozen... love both canned)! We're also going to try an herb garden this year... cilantro, basil, mint, (maybe rosemary... i heard it was hard to grow?), chives, lavendar, sage, lemon grass... I'm sure more! Hubby wants to try strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, red raspberries, and to plant a couple apple and mulberry trees. The neighbor down the road has gooseberries... and they were not that great raw but were AWESOME jams.
I don't have much of a green thumb in the flower department though. They seem more temperamental than the veggies lol. The marigolds and sunflowers were able to take care of themselves for the most part!
Where did you order from?I should have been more clear -- I started ordering plants in Autumn and continued through early Spring, but all the plants I ordered were shipped in Spring. As things went on sale, I continued adding to existing orders. Planting in Autumn is fine as long as the plants have enough time to establish their roots before the ground freezes -- but that's not what I was doing.
Starbucks has a company policy of offering used coffee grounds to gardeners if asked. All I needed to do was provide a container, say "please fill this for me with grounds" and be sure to pick them up. I knew I needed a lot, so I bought two kitchen garbage cans. One I brought there on the first day, saying I'd come the next day to pick it up. And the next day, I switched out the empty one. And that's how it's continued -- I show up just before I go into work in the late afternoon, and on my days off I take a trip down at the same time. It'd be wonderful if I could get it in one huge delivery, but picking it up daily is how it has to work.
Here are our beds when we first put them in a few years ago.
Looking towards the raspberries.
Developing raspberries. (and a bee)
Chive flowers and a bee.
And we have countless other flowers throughout our yard and garden.
My husband mowed down my raspberry bush last year! I'm planting again this year and hoping for better lucky, and warning my husband!!!We have raspberries, loganberries?, 2 apple trees, 2 peach trees, and 2 cherry trees. The raspberries are pretty much a mess, but they are really good and it's fun to have friends over to pick them. The loganberries are at the bottom of the garden but we never really liked them so the will probably come out at some point. Our apple trees are quite big. The one closer to our house (and right next to the chicken coop) was WONDERFUL this fall. I think the chickens have given it a fair amount of fertilizer the past few years and ate most of the bugs and worms that get into the apples. The peach trees...well, the peaches are beautiful, but have never tasted good and the trees have been slowly dying for years. The cherry trees I got about 2 years ago before I found out that we probably don't have enough sun for them. However, they went through a huge growth spurt in the summer and are pretty tall now.
My grandma has pretty much given us a few tomato plants every year and they do okay. Between the chickens and the deer, we never got anything from the tomato's this year. We grew zucchini, cucumber, and sunflowers but, again, the DEER! We had a dog before that would for the most part keep the deer at bay, but even then, they were pretty fearless. I wish I could train the chickens to chase deer and other birds away! Anyways, it's nice to hear what other people have in their gardens.
