A Beginner's Guide to Growing an Herb Garden

Discover the joy of gardening with our Beginner’s Guide to Growing an Herb Garden! This blog post offers easy-to-follow tips for choosing the right herbs, preparing your space, and nurturing your plants. Whether you have a small balcony or a spacious backyard, you’ll learn how to cultivate fresh herbs that enhance your cooking. Get ready to dig in and enjoy the rewarding experience of home gardening!

Growing your own kitchen herb garden is a simple and inexpensive undertaking that pays off big for your taste buds and your budget. Learn to grow your own. Save money on fresh herbs.

Spice Up Your Cooking: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing an Herb Garden

Growing your own Kitchen Herbs can be one of the easiest things for the budding gardener to do. Gardening can be fun and rewarding, and nothing beats cooking with fresh herbs from your very own garden. If you are new to gardening or growing herbs, it is best to start with a type of plant that is easy to grow and will guarantee success.

Herbs are easy to grow from seeds, and the home gardener can grow hundreds of different herbs. Most of my gardening experience comes from helping my mom with a garden when I was younger. As I grew older and eventually claimed the land of my own (with my hubby), I started experimenting with growing my herbs.

In the beginning, I experimented a lot. I had plenty of failures, but I also had great success with plants that weren’t even supposed to grow here in Upstate New York. Like Luffa Gourd or my Avocado Tree, who knew? I honestly think it must have been pure bad luck because the longer I gardened, the more I learned and started to figure out which herbs grow well and which do not.

About Herb Gardening

Herb gardening is different from growing a flower or vegetable garden. Most grow quickly from seed. Others will reseed themselves and will give you fresh new plants that will continue to grow over the years to come. Here are a few simple steps that can get you started with your very own herb garden.

1. Gather Your Needed Materials

A raised bed approximately 3-foot square, a garden bed 3 ft square, window boxes, containers, etc

Topsoil, soil mix & grit

Stakes for tall plants

Watering can

A Trowel or Small Shovel

Plant food (optional).

2. Choose Your Herb Garden Location

It is nice to have your Kitchen herb garden just outside the kitchen, but, ideally, you should have your herb garden in a spot where it gets some sun and some shade throughout the day – this will give you the right conditions to grow a wide variety of herbs.

If you do not have a raised bed or a large area to plant a herb garden, you can use containers, window boxes, or even gaps between paving stones – no rule says they should all be in a square bed!

3. Prepping The Soil For Your Herb Garden

Place a layer of grit in the bottom of the bed approximately 3 inches deep. Cover this with 6 inches of soil mix and fill it to the top with topsoil. If you are digging a bed in the garden, dig down approximately 12 inches and turn the soil thoroughly, making sure it is weed-free. If you use containers, place a little grit or some small stones in the bottom for drainage and fill with soil mix.

4. Decide Which Herbs You Want To Plant

When choosing which kitchen herbs you want to grow, think about what you will be more likely to use and how much space you have. Plant herb staples such as sage, parsley & thyme, but don’t forget to throw in some more unusual herbs such as lovage & fennel.

Just to experiment with. HEY!! You never know. Purchase a mixture of annual & perennial herbs and start your planting in mid-spring, after the last frost. Sowing/planting times are as follows:

Mid-spring

Rosemary – perennial

Lovage – Tall perennial

Sweet Cicely – perennial

Bronze Fennel – perennial

Thyme – perennial

Purple Sage – Evergreen shrub

Late spring

Cilantro – annual

Starflower – annual

Purple basil – annual

As you get to the end of the summer, you can plant mustard greens and arugula in the gaps left by the annuals. In the late fall, planted garlic cloves can be picked as leafy spikes in the spring and as bulbs in the summer.

5. Planting Your Herb Garden

Ease your herbs gently from the pots you have purchased them in. Dig a hole so that the plant will sit no deeper than it was in its original container. To help them establish, gently loosen their root balls before planting. Take care to plant the herbs that will grow tall at the back of the bed and space the herbs about 3 inches from the next one to ensure adequate growing space.

6. General Care Tips & Tricks

Trim your herbs regularly if you don’t use them in the kitchen. This will prevent them from flowering early.

Remove dead or fading leaves.
Keep the bed free of weeds.
Check for pests such as slugs and snails regularly.
Keep them well-watered.
Provide support for tall-growing herbs.

Following these simple steps, you will have a flourishing herb garden and be enjoying the taste of fresh herbs in no time. Now, aren’t you excited about getting started? Also, did you know some herbs keep better on the counter than in the fridge? It is true. Here is a good read for you –Foods that should not be stored in the refrigerator.

A Beginner’s Guide to Growing an Herb Garden