L'amore di vita!: Dirt bags.

We use a ton of fresh herbs when we cook.

Have you seen the price of fresh herbs at the grocery? Almost $3 for a small container. We use what we need from the package, but a lot is left over. We try to use the rest in salad dressings, herb butter, teas, or other recipes, but it doesn't always work out and the remainder ends up brown & withered (which only takes a few days, really). In the trash it goes.

So when the developer of our condo said he would carve out a piece of property for residents to start their own urban garden, many of us jumped on it. I guess there's about 30 or so plots.

The developer amended the soil perfectly. If you live in Virginia you know all we have is red clay, so amending the soil with organic matter and top soil is absolutely necessary if you want anything to survive.

He also installed two spigots for hoses. Bought the hoses. Bought trash cans. And did various other sundry things. Our developer is awesome.

So now we have our own little urban garden. Lot 25.

We went on a shopping spree at a local nursery and picked up every herb we might use. Most of them, except for basil, are perennials so they'll come back year after year (so we didn't mind the initial expense since this will be the only time we have to do it).

We piled everything up in the SUV the next weekend and headed out to the plot where we spent an early morning of perfect spring weather planting and digging around in the dirt and hanging out with our like-minded condo neighbors. One neighbor gave us tomato and pepper plants. So we planted those too. Yum.

Then it rained on and off for the next three days. Perfect timing, and thank you, Mother Nature.

I do believe this is a garden we can manage.

We planted mint in the long pot on the wall. Mint is uber invasive and will literally take over if it's not put in a container. But we noticed the garden next to us had it's mint planted directly in the ground so we'll probably end up getting it in our garden anyway.

Picked up these lovely copper plant stakes and wrote the herb name in pen. I etched the name pretty deeply. I'm hoping they'll weather to a nice patina and still show the names clearly. I've tried a few different stakes over the years - wood rots, plastic breaks, ceramic cracks - and usually the words get so faded after one season that it's impossible to read them.