Succulent & Herb Garden

Gardening.  It sounds so cool but takes so much time.  Living in Arizona makes it an even bigger challenge.  It's so hot and dry and that's in the shade!  Things fry in the sun.  Yet some people manage to do it well, even growing vegetables.  I'm not ready for that, but a couple of months ago I started my own container garden with herbs and succulents.  It was a labor of love.

The first stop on the project was my favorite store - Goodwill.  My daughter and I found lots of inspiration in the most stocked area of the store - the shelves with assorted containers, vases, pots, mugs and other glassware.  It was so hard to choose the cutest stuff, but we managed to find some tiny teacups and small glass containers.  I should probably offer a disclaimer here that if you plant a small plant in a tiny container, you will always have a tiny plant that will need to be watered more often.  Also, plants that thrive in well drained soil will not do as well in containers without drain holes and you will need to make sure they don't get root rot.

After picking out about ten containers, it was off to Home Depot for plants.  The succulents were the easiest.  We saved some money by buying a big pot of mixed succulents.  We paid for the "display" aspect of it, but this was a great way to get a bunch of small mixed succulents.  We also "harvested" a few from existing plants.  Succulents and cacti are very hardy and can easily be transplanted.

We moved on to the herbs and picked sweet basil, thyme, peppermint and sage.  We also thought we would try our hand at germinating herbs from seed so we bought some coriander, catnip and mint.  I had no idea that coriander seeds produced cilantro!!

After planting in our treasures, I stepped back and admired my little baker's rack garden on my patio.  I love looking at it every day.  The cilantro was prolific from seed, but we didn't have as much luck with mint and catnip.  I'm sure it won't be too hard to try again.