Herb Garden after rains and flooding

Too much water + herbs = never a good idea.

With all the 2008-2009 heavy rains and flooding in parts of the Midwestern USA (where I live) something had to give.

What gave? My concrete garden beds…and the roof on the goat shed you see on the right. Attractive tarp, no?

Yep, my back herb and veggie potager was flooded.  In fact it flooded many times over the last year.  Each time the garden got worse looking until I knew that the whole thing needed to be redone.

In this 75′x20′ odd space, I built raised block beds to keep my herbs up out of the wettest soil during heavy seasonal rains, and it worked pretty well for 10 years. Oh sure, I occasionally had a plant heave up out of the soil during the winter and croak, but this concrete block bed system really worked well in this lower part of the garden.

The problem/blessing is that we have flatland. It’s great for livestock, soybeans, corn(maize), and wheat- but water just stands, loitering on it.

This is great when the weather has been dry, but when the ground is saturated the water has no place to go, so we slog around in 6″ of water. This  plot is in the one area where water from the yard and barn flows to lower ground.

This herb garden was also once home to a small barn. The previous landowner burned the old barn on the spot, so there were lots of nails and glass shards that surfaced after every rain.  In order to use this bit of land, we laid a double layer of landscape fabric down over the whole thing, then laid gravel paths between the raised beds.

Now only the front part of the wide gravel paths remain intact, the rest has washed away. The solid pavers that graced the top of the beds also washed away, but many were reclaimed to make high and dry islands for the goats to stand on in the worst flooding.

The garden lies between a dog run and the buck goat pens. Perfect for keeping wild bunnies out, not so good when someone forgets to lock the gate and those ornery boy goats get loose in the garden!

I don’t mind overhauling the garden so much( OK, well actually I do) but what really slayed me was the gorgeous three foot tall pile of aged compost at the back of the garden. It’s mostly washed away. What is left is useless now, full of weed seeds and who knows what.  Do you think me silly to mourn my compost? Yeah well, it’s a gardener thing.

Never fear, there is more where that came from and the bunnies, goats, and chickens are hard at work for a new pile in time for me to use this fall. Horse poop goes to the pasture to improve the soil there.

I am considering putting in plain old untreated wood beds. What do you think?

That way I can anchor the wood and not have them shift around should it ever rain for 7  months straight again. In such an event there is the added bonus of having  the wood handy for building an ark!

If you have ideas, please leave me a comment! I would LOVE some ideas for my garden and want to know what works in your gardens.