How to Setup A Herb Garden In Your Backyard?
A herb garden can make it easy to add fresh herbs to your food. What’s more is the feeling of pride each time you use these herbs in your cooking or for medicine. Herb gardens not only provide you with a supply of free and tasty plants they are also beautiful and can brighten up the landscape while leaving behind tantalizing scents.
Many people will find that having many different herbs surrounding the bottom of their trees looks great and it also helps to encourage pollinating insects. Though before you start you need to decide if you want a cooking herb garden, ornamental, fragrant, medicinal, colonial or a windowsill. You can also have all of these if your backyard is large enough.
Preparing the Soil and Location
The great thing about growing herbs is that they are fast. So, you don’t have to wait long till you start tasting the herbs of your labor. However, depending on the herbs you plant some thrive in the shade others in the sun. The majority though require at least six hours of sunlight every day.
One of the best and most convenient locations is near the kitchen. A couple of herbs near your kitchen makes them easy to reach and harvest as required. Once you have decided on a location, the next step is to check the soil. You’ll always want to ensure well-drained soil, a regular watering routine and a combination of fertilizer and compost.
Check to see if the soil has a lot of clay. If it does then add more compost to the mix. Compost is something you can never have enough of even if your soil is good. After all, herbs need that nutrition to grow.
We would like to caution you to avoid using composted manures in a herb garden. These happen to have high nitrogen content which can help the herbs grow faster but at the expense of their flavor.
Planting and Growing the Herbs
Choosing what herbs, you want is down to personal preference. Almost every herb will grow for at least a single season and may continue to grow each year. Though some of the most common and useful herbs are basil, dill, chives, rosemary, oregano, and sage.
Herbs can be planted as either seeds or plants. If you want to hit the ground running, you should plant a mature plant. Though if time is something you have a lot of then you can save some money by planting seeds.
Once the herbs are planted, they will require 2 inches of water a week. They may also need to be harvested on a frequent basis. There is no such thing as harvesting a herb plant too early. Regular harvesting will do more good than any perceived harm. Harvesting a herb plant encourages it to produce more foliage which will increase how much you can harvest in the future.
Conclusion
Setting up a backyard herb garden is simple and cost-effective. However, apart from the steps above you are more than welcome to experiment.