Thyme is on your side: Update on patio crabgrass

I tackled the patio crabgrass again last weekend. It's slow going so there aren't enough photos for a decent post. This is the part of the summer when its hard to keep ahead of the crabgrass. It grows like, well, like a weed. The thyme on the other hand, doesn't.

My strategy, for about a year now, has been to remove the crabgrass, mostly by hand, and substitute thyme. My last post on this topic is here.  Since that last post, almost a month ago now, I also planted three new kinds of thyme and a creeping shady creature called Corsican Mint. In this post, I'll show all four, and my method of planting.

Here is Corsican mint. It likes shade and moisture, and since I have an abundance of both in certain spots in the patio, I added it to my arsenal. It seems to be doing well in the month since I planted it.

More of the patio, though, bakes under sun and especially in the dog days of summer has very little moisture. Thyme loves those conditions, and so I'm trying pretty much every version of a creeping thyme I can lay my hands on, without special ordering. Here is a variety called Pink Chintz Thyme. It is a faster spreader than the others.

Here you can see how I take a small pot and cut it into sections with scissors. How big they are depends partly on how much root there is and how big the cracks that I want to fill. I cut the pots down to plug size.

Here are the resulting plugs of pink chintz thyme:

Here is one planted:

Here is minus thyme:

Here is Wooly Thyme. This one mounds too high, really, for the patio, but I put it over in a corner where we don't walk much and where a higher, faster growing thyme might be better competition.

Next up, how these fared in the latter half of June and first half of July, during a heat wave with  no rain. For the full series, see the topic "Patio Crabgrass" in the list of topics on the righthand side of the home page.