Thrifty Creativity – “A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.”

This kitchen garden includes both annual and perennial herbs, as well as other plants. The photograph was taken early in the growing season, so two non-herbs, lettuce and spring onions, abound. Both will be removed as they are used for salads, giving the slower-growing herbs more growing space. Mother-of-thyme grows between the path’s bricks; watercress is in the barrel under the spigot near the house.

Planning Your First Herb Garden

You can have a delightful herb garden the first season, but if you are a beginner, keep it small and simple. It will probably take three years before you are satisfied. There is no limit to the herbs you might include and the ways you could design your garden. What you grow should be determined by what you are going to use. For instance, if you like French food you might grow chervil and shallots. Italian food enthusiasts would include basil and oregano. Your local library has reference books with simple garden plans as well as step-by-step growing information.

Just don’t begin on too large a scale. You can have a productive outdoor herb garden in a space no larger than one square foot. Start with a small variety of plants, repeat those you like best next year and add a few more, and so on. If you don’t like something, don’t grow it again. The chart coming up in a later post has suggestions for beginners, but it is by no means complete. Consult other sources of horticultural information, such as your local garden club, for more information.

A garden like the one pictured above, located just outside the kitchen door, is often called a salad garden. To make a salad, you just pull some greens, snip some salad burnet (which has a fresh cucumber taste), cut a few culinary herbs, and you are nearly ready to eat. When you fix breakfast, you can snip some chives or chervil to give a gourmet touch to a simple omelette.

Herbs don’t have to be planted in a separate garden. It’s fine to mix vegetables and herbs in the same area. In fact, herbs are often planted among vegetables, since their aroma seems to repel insects. (This fact accounts for the success of the all-purpose non-toxic garden spray described below) Herbs can also occupy a sunny corner of a flower garden or edge a path leading across a lawn.

Non-Toxic Ail-Purpose Garden Spray

In an electric blender blend:
1 cup slightly soapy water
3 large onions, peeled and cut in sections
1 entire garlic bulb, peeled
3 hot peppers or 1/2 cup dried hot pepper.

Pour the mixture into a covered container and let it stand for 24 hours. Strain into a large bowl or container and add enough water to make 1 gallon. This spray can be used to repel insects in your vegetable and flower garden and is not poisonous. Bury the strained pulp under one of your favorite rose bushes.

 click on image for full size
Plan for a 6-by-8 foot kitchen garden, pictured at the top of this post, includes brick-paved paths so herbs are easy to harvest, even on wet days. The pear tree and blueberry bush (righthand bed) are espaliered—pruned and trained to grow flat against the house. Herbs are planted in 16-inch-wide raised beds—they need good drainage. Mints are grown outside the stone wall to control their weedy tendency to overrun everything else.