grow an herb garden

Thanks to not realising it was daylight savings, and turning up to my yoga class just as it was finishing, I was a little more awake (and in a slightly worse mood) than usual when I got home and watered my plants this morning.

Perhaps that’s why I noticed that they had been attacked by evil caterpillars!!

It was the mint that I first noticed. Mint is nothing if not hardy, so I was immediately suspicious when I saw that a few of it’s leaves looked a little moth eaten. Evil plans don’t just make themselves, you know.

Closer inspection revealed a couple of dark grey looking caterpillars. Ugh. After having lost a battle with caterpillars on my rocket earlier this year, I wasn’t relishing the though of having to repeat the experience.

Observation of my other plants revealed a similar invasion. My basil had been all but demolished by a number of the green suckers.

Despite the copious foliage, my tomato was also under similar attack by a mixture of green and brown suckers.

This particularly disturbed me, because the first of the plant’s fruit had just started to appear. I’m desperately hoping I get some edible fruit out of this plant before I got to Vietnam!!

The only herbs that are (so far) immune to the caterpillar’s attack are the lettuce, chilli and parsley. Fingers crossed they stay that way!

1. Lettuce, 2. Chilli, 3. Flat-leaved parsley

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to take this lying down. My rocket suffered a similar fate earlier this year, a battle I lost despite the use of slug and snail pellets, and a combination of soap, garlic and chilli (a method I devised, I must have read about it somewhere though surely?).

I was aware this wasn’t going to be easy, so I pulled out the big guns – Google – where I stumbled across this recipe for an organic bug spray. Deciding it looked suitably caterpillar-toxic, but person-friendly, I thought I’d give it a go. After all, I do want to eat this stuff!!

Spraying it onto the plants certainly had some effect. At least 10 caterpillars dropped off and died. The tabasco also went right up my nose, and a few hours later my hands and lips are still tingling.

The question is, how many caterpillars remain?

Need to do some stuff this weekend:

• repot the near-dead mint and try to revive it.
• throw out the dead rocket.
• ditto the dead echinacea.
• fertilise the basil, parsley and 2 pots of good rocket.
• repot the chilli

But all is not bad, look at the 2 chillis I picked last weekend. Nice and spicy. Mmmmm!!

The rain finally stopped today for the first time in what feels like weeks, but can’t be that long, can it?

Anyway my lettuce has officially died, but the rocket and all the other plants are doing ok (even the ones that still need repotting).

The coriander I had all but given up on has a few green shootlets now, so fingers crossed that’ll survive until the weekend. Hopefully the rain will stay away till then so I can give these plants some long-needed TLC.

Half of the rocket is now repotted. There’s actually a lot of separate seedlings in the little pot that I bought. I’ve used 2 long trays so far, will need another 1 or 2. Hopefully they’ll all survive and I’ll have rocket coming out of my ears.

Still need to repot my chilli, echinacea and mint now. Need to decide what to do with my coriander pot as well, I think its pretty much dead.

The basil is also getting too big for its pot, so while I’m at it I should put that in a bigger one so it doesn’t blow over in the wind again!

Today I bought some rocket to replace the stuff I had to leave in the OC. I also bought some common mint. It smells divine.

This weekend I need to repot these, as well as the lettuce, chilli and echinacea I already have. How exciting!!!

Brought most of my plants back from the OC – due tospace constraints I left my rocket behind (it got attacked by catepillars again) and one of my parsley plants.

New challenge is to repot some back here in Syd and try not to kill them here!!! :)

I’ve been a bit quiet about this one too!

For the last 3 months I have successfully grown coriander and basil. My rocket in that time has been attacked by catepillars, and I’m still not sure if I’ve managed to vanquish them.

I also have a beautiful echinacea plant and some cos lettuce that has survived about a month now, despite not being repotted.

Unfortunately my mini coriander and lettuce pots looked very sad when I arrived back to the OC this morning. Hopefully some TLC over the coming days will sort that out.

Other than that I’m pretty happy with my mini garden. I’d love to get some common mint and some peppermint too. Maybe then, and when I’ve successfully transferred this lot back to Sydney I can mark this task as complete!!

perpetual lettuce
rocket
continental parsley
mint