Hellllllllo Summer! I don't know about where you are but the weather here has been amazing. It's been the sort of weather that makes me cry a little that I can longer take the top and doors off of the jeep. Sob. I'm pretty sure Macie would love it but Quinn - not so much. Now that the summer weather has come (hopefully to stay), it's time for me to work on killing some herbs. Well, let's hope not.
When we moved back to the Carolinas from Maryland for some reason we couldn't fit my giant ceramic pots in the moving truck. They were the last things to get loaded and they just didn't fit. It killed me. As I stood there frustrated, hoping I could somehow will them into the trailer, our quirky realtor came and asked me what I was doing. She promptly snatched up my pots when I told her my tale of woe. Seriously people, this 65+ year old woman tried to pick up one of the giant pots and load it into her tiny pick-up truck. Alas, this led me to being pot-less this herb season.
Lucky for me Homegoods is the world's best place to buy giant ceramic pots. I am not even kidding. They are not paying me to say this (but if you work for them and would like to pay me, feel free!) they have a great selection and they are half the cost of the home improvement stores. Armed with this knowledge I drove my happy butt over there and made some poor high school boy move a ton of pots until he could find me the perfect one with no cracks or marks. He was pretty cool about it, I think I got him out of cleaning something.
This is the pot I found. Cute right??
Anyway - now to plant. I searched Pinterest for all kinds of knowledge on container gardening and what herbs can be planted together. What did I find? Confusion. It seems that people don't agree on what can go together and what should be planted alone. There is also confusion about if you can plant the herbs with your vegetables or not. After making my head spin a little, it was time to get to work. 
First things first. This pot is huge. Because of this, I filled the bottom of it with rocks for a couple reasons. One - drainage. The rocks will help the water get out and keep the dirt from getting too saturated and making the herbs rot. Two - dirt. No one wants to have to buy enough dirt to fill this whole pot. That's just insanity.
After adding my rocks to the pot, it was time for the dirt. I needed a whole bag of dirt to fill my giant pot. Because I'm putting herbs in here, I used an organic mulch from Lowes. Oregano and sage are perennial herbs and mine from last year had come back up without any issue so the plan was to transplant them into this pot and then add some rosemary (because it grows nice and straight) and thyme (because it crawls down the front of the pot), however, the roots from the oregano and sage were so packed into their pot that my only option was to transplant them as one big piece. If that hadn't been the case I think I would have placed the herbs differently. After all of my reading, I planted my basil with a tomato plant (yes, we have about a million as you can see from the pictures) because a lot of people say that planting them together will help the taste of the tomatoes -- we'll see!
My little herbs were lonely so Allen bought a couple hot pepper plants to go with them. I planted them in the little red pot just to get them out of the other containers, but I'm pretty sure they need to go in a bigger pot too. Time to head back to Homegoods and annoy the high school kid again....
