Digging a herb garden

I dug a new herb garden today. Well, I say I dug it, my husband dug it for me because my back and hip problems mean digging isn't practical for me. Even the planting I did was pushing my luck a bit. Anyhow, what we did was turn the grass over, then I stabbed it a fair bit with a small spade to break it up (a big spade would have done the job just as well, but isn't really compatible with my back problems). After that I added some composted manure, then marked out where I wanted to plant the herb seeds.

And planted some herbs I already had in pots (the chives were in with my mint, so there's a danger I may get rampant mint taking over the garden if I didn't manage to clean all its roots out.

Another potential issue with the herb garden is that the turned over soil contained quite a lot of grubs. I suspect them of eating roots, so I killed as many as I could see, but I suspect there were more. I definitely saw our local robin get one. I think he's rather fond of them.

Here are before and after shots of today's work:

Before

After

In other news, slugs and snails have been eating all my seedlings. Basically, if it's not covered by a cloche, it's being eaten by snails. I went on another slug and snail killing spree today, but I didn't find very many. Fortunately then I remembered my copper slug rings and beer traps.

I hope it works, it's bad enough when they decimate your radishes, but they nibbled every single leaf off my kohl rabi and they were heading that way with my broad beans, and I don't have enough of those seeds to keep replanting.

Only things under the cloches are unnibbled.