A herb rockery made with... sinks!

This weekend we used the four sinks we had collected to make a herb rockery.

We had no plan or any idea how it was going to look or even how we wanted it to look. Which was a bit daft really. We started with 3 metal sinks, one ceramic, two bags of flamingo gravel, 10 red bricks and 10 breeze blocks. Oh and a small bag of ready mix cement. We decided it would be positioned at the front of the plot, right behind the small she'd but visible from the main path and right next to out path, for easy access for picking

Mr Allotmum and myself spent a good half hour arranging and re-arranging the sinks into different positions, muttering to eachother about how we had no idea what we were doing. It was rather comical. We'd never built a rockery before, we obviously thought we knew how to but every time one of us thought the layout looked good, it was dismissed as looking a bit rubbish by the other.

Eventually though, we agreed on a layout and set to get it all stable. We dug the ground a little way down to make a stable base for the sinks. As we laid each sink we filled under and around it with loose soil and packed it down. We also used whole and smashed up breeze blocks to wedge under them to stop them from moving around. Oncw all 4 sinks were in position, we edged around the base using some red bricks (which cost 20pence each from the local builders merchants). I planted some flowers in the ground around the sinks and then covered that with flaming stones. They're rather pretty stones of irregular shapes and different colours.

Once that was complete, we filled the sinks with compost and planted mint, thyme, marjoram, parsley, dill, chives and garlic chives, as well as some spinach beet seeds for good measure. I'd started these plants off as seeds some weeks back and they weren't too happy getting parched in the greenhouse.

I'm happy to say that they are doing much better outside!

All in all this project cost us around £20 and it's a nice addition to the plot.