Even though wet and cool weather has put the vegetable-growing season behind schedule, it has accelerated activity in established herb gardens. When May rains come close together and keep us from working in the vegetable garden as we would like, herb beds grow bushy and are happy to absorb our otherwise idle attention.

In my own herb garden, the parsley already has bolted and the thyme and sage have been in full bloom for a couple of weeks. Some volunteer cilantro is about ready to pick, and everything else is lush and green.

The reason that herb gardens are thriving right now is simple. Most herb beds are planted around perennials that resume their growth as soon as the ground warms. The intermittent, ground-soaking rains we have had over the past month have turbo-charged the spring growth of the perennials in these beds.

Despite some sharply cold wind chills during the winter, some perennial herbs do not die back completely. Some varieties of sage and thyme quickly leaf out on old stems, for example.

Many herb gardens also are set up more as flower beds  within a narrower space that is accessible by arm’s reach. We usually don’t need to walk around in our herb gardens, which means that we can weed and fuss over our plants even when the ground is muddy.

When we incorporate annuals into the beds every year, we don’t have to till up the dirt as we do in a vegetable garden. Because the soil has not been compacted by foot traffic, we can get away with seeding small areas or simply setting in bedding plants. This means we never have to disturb the perennials.

The rains also have been extremely timely for newly seeded herbs. The soil has remained steadily damp, which is excellent for germination. Every year when I replant cilantro, I simply take a couple of swipes across the soil with a cultivator (that claw-like gardening tool), toss down the seeds, sprinkle a little dirt over the top and then water lightly every day. This year Mother Nature is taking care of the watering for me.

The rains also have germinated seeds produced by herbs in previous years. I always get a fair number of volunteers and the most prolific reseeder in my herb garden is lemon balm. I had to chuckle a few weeks ago when I saw a flat of lemon balm for sale in four-packs in a local greenhouse. Just the previous day I had pulled lemon balm up by the handful from between the bricks in the sidewalk along my herb beds.

Every time it rains, I have to weed the sidewalk where seeds have been dropping for years. Judging by the price of herbs in greenhouses, I probably throw a couple hundred dollars onto the compost pile every spring.

I also still get a good sprouting of the Mexican herb epazote, which I haven’t intentionally grown for several years. But my most interesting herb volunteer phenomenon this year has been the chamomile that popped up in our gravel driveway.

A couple of years ago I set some plants in between bricks in the sidewalk. Chamomile is a low-growing herb with feathery leaves like dill and is resilient enough to withstand being stepped on if placed in a low-traffic area. I had read about people who planted chamomile in their lawns so that the fragrance of the herb would be released every time someone walked across the grass.

Chamomile is a self-sowing perennial herb but it did not return in the sidewalk and, frankly, I forgot about it. Then this spring, there it was, all over the driveway. Now, instead of just walking on it, and tracking it all over our own yard, we’re also rolling our cars over it and spreading the seeds on down the road.

 When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.