Your Very Own
Herb Garden
You don't need any outside space at all to make a beautiful herb garden. Trust me.
With no yard or patio space you can create a lovely Kitchen Garden.
Or, with a small outdoor balcony or patio you can grow a Potted Herb Garden.
In our case we have a medium patio and have made a Border Herb Garden augmented by a few potted plants.
Of course if you have a yard, your possibilities are limitless.
There are two primary factors to consider to guarantee success. The first is the soil and the second is some sunshine (or a grow light for Kitchen Gardeners.)
For the soil, go to www.greengourmetgardener.com, and click on Perfect Soil Mix for simple instructions on mixing up your batch of perfect soil.
For the sunlight, you're on your own.
The Kitchen Garden
A Kitchen Garden can be as simple as purchasing a few herbs from your local nursery or from a nursery online, and placing them, as is, on a sunny window sill.
Or, they can be transplanted into pretty pots for a decorative look. Cutting them for cooking purposes will encourage growth.
This is certainly an inexpensive and simple way to get your fresh herbs growing. And the fragrance? Simply wonderful.
The Potted Garden
Pretty pots, clay pots or painted clay pots (pictured) are a fantastic way to grow your fresh herbs on a balcony or small patio.
Mix your good soil, transplant your starter plants, place them in the brightest, sunniest place on your balcony, water them as needed and watch them grow.
We have successfully grown rosemary, thyme (pictured), basil, and strawberries in a pot. You are limited only by your imagination and the plants' root needs.
We have even purchased a small lime and a small lemon tree to grow in a large pot!
The Border Garden
As mentioned above, our garden falls into this category. We once had flowers along the border, motley usually and really strained and stressed ourselves trying to keep the soil in good shape and the weeds pulled.
Unbelievably, once we started our border garden (Square Foot Gardening) with raised beds (please don't panic, they are so simple to do which you will see below as I journal our progress)we no longer spend hours weeding and our plants are gorgeous.
Last year (our first) we wouldn't have believed it either!
We started with just two boxes (one on either side of a small fountain) which contained 8 square foot spaces. We planted a little of everything: lettuces, parsley, rosemary, basil and even bee balm (although for the life of me, I don't know why bee balm?)
soon enough we figured out that while that was plenty of space, with the mis-positioning of our plants it became overgrown (all gardeners should have that problem, right?) and we were hooked on the fresh lettuce (something we really had never experienced.)
This picture is our first effort; I think we were too embarrassed to snap one after a month when all the beautiful herbs and vegetables kind of grew together (too messy, however we did get to eat our overcrowding errors. mmmmm)
So, we added a small box with 4 square foot spaces for herbs and concentrated our efforts on the lettuce in the boxes. That explains while some of our fantastic aromatic herbs are in pot!
Adding an Herb Border is the next step.
If you are interested in the steps to building simple raised bed herb boxes please follow my link,
Herb Garden Boxes
or, Back to Herbs and Spices