Sometimes planting just doesn’t work as out as you see it in your head. When we had the path done last summer I felt we needed something alongside the chicken’s dandelion strip to edge the new path.
I planted mint knowing that it spreads but that it would be contained to this strip. I thought it would stay low and I had read that chickens like to eat it so it seemed the perfect thing to put in here.
Well nobody told that to my girls! They do not like it at all and refuse to touch it. As they love dandelion leaves which are bitter in taste I am guessing that they don’t like the smell of the mint. I know chickens have a good sense of smell.
The mint soon smothered the dandelions and it grew very tall which I hadn’t expected. We have had to keep chopping it down as it blocks light to the run. This just wasn’t working. It wasn’t pleasing me or the girls. It had to go.
Yesterday we went to the garden centre with a voucher I had and bought a few compact, cushion forming plants. We pulled all the mint out revealing the girl’s strip of dandelions once more. I planted the new plants and a few bits that I pinched from around the garden.
It will take a bit of patience for the strip to fill in but I am feeling much happier about the result. This will leave the girls their dandelions and add different colours and texture rather than a swath of one thing.
This used to be the girl’s dandelion strip
It has now turned into a mint strip
The mint is only half the height it was before we clipped it.
The newly planted strip
The dandelions beside the bricks have now been uncovered
It does look a bit bare at the moment but it will soon fill up. I feel happier with it than the mint. The mint was a mistake but sometimes gardening is all about trial and error and patience.
A week later
I wrote this post just as all the problems started with Rusty and it got sidelined. I have since added a few small plants that have self seeded around the garden.
Chicken strip a week later
It doesn’t look that much different but it is filling in a little. I will continue to add small plants here until it fills up.
Click here to see the history of my flock.
I take inspiration from these posts. We are totally novice gardeners, we bought two small greenhouses this year and planted some stuff in pots. It’s all gone wrong and most of it died. I don’t think we were watering it enough.
The thing about pots in a greenhouse is they do need regular watering. We don’t have a greenhouse. Gardening is something that you learn as you go along and it is always evolving. We have had loads of plants die in this garden because they didn’t like our chalky soil. Over time we have found which plants like this garden and we stick with those. I feel there is no point making it hard for ourselves so I stick to the things that do well. Having said that the dandelions in my chicken strip have proved more difficult to grow than I thought they would. You would think a weed would thrive but they look a but straggly at the moment. There again I am constantly picking the leaves and feeding them to the girls. A few people have said that they haven’t come across anyone growing dandelions before. The things we do for our chickens!
Your mint was amazing, Ours grow very slow, It has been there for 16 years,
We do get enough for us, we love mint sauce with new potatos, even with out lamb.
so we do use a lot. I do have to put new soil on it every year. but it never grows like yours.
I must have bought a particularly fast growing one. It almost grew before our eyes. It got really tall and we had already cut it down four times this summer. The runners were going through the weld mesh about two feet long and I had to keep cutting them. I got fed up with having to keep on at it all the time. I used to have mint in a pot and it never grew like this one did. It also swamped the girl’s dandelions. They will take a while to recover. I am glad it’s out now. I should have known not to put it the garden, I think it needs to be contained in a pot.