Its hot, and the herb plants are not!

The Herb garden as it looked today...nice!

We have been talking about this forever, and it seems that we are getting somewhere on this subject. We tried lawn sprinklers, soaker hoses, drip hoses, hand watering, hose spraying, all were minimally effective. But today Mr tried the big guns he didn't want to spend on at all...and you know what it is much better than anything else we have tried. I swear to the Lord and Mother Nature that those herb plants were smiling today! It is a beautiful thing, a sprinkler system bought at Lowes. It works great. We visited some friends last week and their perrenials in the garden were so big and tall you would have thought them a freak of nature, except of course they were magnificent. I queried, is this garden hooked up to your automatic sprinkler system that does your landscape beds? Nope! a separate system bought for $30 at Lowes. Guess where we took a field trip to three days later, and now two weeks later it is installed and successful thanks to Mr's willing labor and research. It is just great. Here are a couple of photos of it working.

Mr actually experiemented and created a hybrid system. He put pieces of the sprinkler system to the soaker holes and they are working off of the soaker hoses. It is working alright! In this photo above you can see a misty sprinkler that can change depending on how you set the amount of sprinkle you want.

Here is a close up of that sprinkler, but there is another kind too, which will be below. It spurts out a 360 degree sprinkle and I can see lots of use for that in our other gardens. Oh this is soooo exciting, and it makes me so hopeful that all of our work in the gardens will not be destroyed by lack of water. If you ask me that is the number one reason for failure in a garden, unwatering or overwatering.

This is soooo great! He also put spriklers in some of the hanging pots, and maybe yet to be in the patio pots. Below I will show you how happy the herb garden looks wet, and how great the garden is doing. It doesn't get a lot of sun, it gets a huge dose in a short period of time so this garden is really a risky proposition. For now it is looking ok, but what will happen later in the season is a concern. I will say I have some beautiful herbs going on here. If you look a couple of months back they were wimps, but they have filled out marvelously.  I am loving the fresh cooking herbs at my fingertips.

Tips for using herbs:
 try a few tablespoons of chives, celantro and parsley in meat and fish salads like tuna and chicken. Mine were teriffic with the infusion of fresh tastes and the fusion of those tastes. Love it!