How to Start Your Own Herb Garden

Herb Garden PictureThere are tons of different home gardening tips, indoor gardening tips, organic gardening tips, vegetable gardening tips - no wonder you can find it so overwhelming to figure out just which specific tips are going to be most useful. If this is your situation, you should know that out of all of these, there are a few home gardening tips in particular that are going to be useful for you to learn.

Why would you go for an indoor garden?

It will make your house look nice, and you feel good. You'll almost never need to brave the harsher weather elements that nature will throw at you for trying to compete with her. And ultimately in the grand scheme of things, it's good for you.

It's difficult to imagine how indoor gardening could be good for you, but really it has nothing to do with the gardening itself, more with the plants instead. If you hark back to the good old days of high school and peer pressure, you might just remember vaguely hearing something in science class about plants and photo-something-or-other.

Just to remind, it's a procedure called photosynthesis, where plants remove carbon dioxide from the air, and release oxygen into it instead, thereby removing pollutants from our environment. If you're living in a jungle there's not too much of a problem with that, but living as we are in our singular little houses, indoor plants are the next best thing.

A simple and easy place to start with would be try your hand at herb gardening. Simple to grow, useful in the kitchen, and best of all not the prima donna type.

Gardening, of any kind, just doesn't get any better than indoor gardening.


Best of the Primary Home Gardening Tips

  1. Easy maintenance and low costs are the main advantages of herb gardening. If you opt for indoor gardening, make sure you choose appropriate pots or containers.
  2. First you’ll want to choose the herbs that you’ll plant. You might have a hard time doing this because of the huge scope of herbs available. When I got ready to start my herb garden, I took a look at the spices in my kitchen cabinet and decide which ones I enjoy the most. I made a list of all the herbs my family and I enjoy and those are the ones I planted in my herb garden. By planting your own collection of these herbs, you can save money on buying them from the grocery store while having the added benefit of freshness. Some of the herbs you might start with are listed in cooking herbs,  medical herbs and tea herbs posts.
  3. When getting started your herb garden, you should remember that the soil should have extremely good drainage. If the dirt gets watered and stays completely saturated, you have no chance of ever growing a healthy plant. One of the best ways to fix the drainage problem is put a layer of crushed rocks at the bottom of the pot or a container you are going to use. This will allow an extra water to escape, thus saving your plants.
  4. Ensure that the soil is of very good quality. In fact, if the purchased soil has organic matter added to it, so much the better; the herbs will grow faster. If you feel that soil quality does not matter, then you should not worry about the quality of your herbs either!
  5. Grass
  6. Indoors or outdoors, no plant can live without sunlight. Most of the herbs need to be under direct sunlight; so placing them near windows is best. But it would be wise to keep the plants a few inches away from the window and not in direct contact with the window glass or window sill. During winter months, the temperature near the window is much cooler than the temperature a little inside the room.
  7. The plants in your indoor herb garden need trimming from time to time. Otherwise, they may become too big for the containers or pots. Trimming should be done with a pair of sharp scissors, never with a knife. A knife can damage the plants because a pulling motion is used.
  8. When you are ready to begin planting your herbs, you might be tempted to buy the more expensive plants from the store. However, with herbs it is much easier to grow them from seed than it is with other plants. Therefore you can save a bundle of money by sticking with seed packets.
  9. One of the often overlooked gardening tips by the new gardener is not paying attention to the proper time to begin seed starting. One of our tips is gardening by the phases of the moon. Gardening by the Moon is another option to introduce into your gardening to give you a bit of an edge when failure is NOT an option.

    There is nothing like fresh herbs and especially, if you are the one that grew the herbs. So if you enjoy herbs or gardening, or both, then you should probably consider setting up an herb garden. It might require a little bit of work at first to set it up for optimal drainage, and pick what herbs you want to grow. But after the initial hassle, it’s just a matter of harvesting all your favourite herbs

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1 comment.:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful article on herb garden.

I found this website useful for Herb Gardening tips http://www.herbgardeningtoday.com. I think you guys will find it interesting too.

Thanks,
Peter - Herb garden plants

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