Herbs Gardening

Herb Gardening design and planning...

Plan and design your own herb garden

• To construct a herb garden you will need to decide the size of your garden, as this will depend on the amount of variety you want. You might like to grow some of the more colorful and frequently used herbs such as parsley and basil. Come out your design and plan, a drawing of the area and labels of the plant will also help in design and contruct a herb garden.
• When choosing the site for herb garden, you need to consider drainage and fertility. Drainage is the most important factor in successful herb gardening. No herbs can grow well in wet soil, if your garden area has poor drainage, you will have to improve it by any chance of success. Your herb garden soil does not not have to be particularly fertile, a little fertilizer is good enough. By adding some bushels of peat will help to improve soild condition.
• Almost all herbs can be grown from seed. Although rust inflects mints, very few diseases or insects attack herbs. Herbs can also grown in container, window boxes or hanging baskets. These method will require more care.

Where to grow herbs ?

• Herbs for damp soil
  Herbs that like damp soil will grow well in a naturally boggy area, you can create one by the edge of a pond and you will need to keep the water levels in the pond in dry summers.
• Herbs for a vegtable patch
  Leafy herbs such as chervil, coriander, summer savory and dill all enjoy the slightly richer soil normally found in a vegetable garden.
• Herbs in containers
  Many herbs grow well in containers, which is a good way of providing suitable conditions if your soil is not ideal. Use any container with drainage holes and a minimun depth of about 25-30cm. Fill broken crocks at the bottom layer of the container and then fill it with general purpose potting compost. Check moisture levels at least once a day in sunny weather and water if necessary.

Herbs propagation

Propagation herbs is not a complicated skill, from a successful seeds and cuttings you can produce a ne plant. Simply watch and replicate the natural cycle, leave them outside in the container to expose to the natural environment to grow. Look for the first sgin of weeds growing. as soon as weeds appear you know it is time to propagation.
There are five key techniques used to propagate herbs, it individual techniques you choose is depend on the plant grow cycle and time.

• Seed: Any herb that produce flowers will produce seed. For perennial herbs, seed is not the best way of propagation, as it take longer time to established plant from seed than from acutting.
• From soft or hardwood cutting: softwood cuttings are taken in spring and hardwood in autumn. Softwood cuttings are successful way to propagate herbs, it is good for those seed is germ-free or slow develop from seed.
• By layering: Layering is one of the oldest forms of propagation, it is base on observation of plants propagating themselves. Herbs that can be successfully propagated by layering are sage and rosemarry.
• From root cuttings: depending on type of root one of the three methods is used: for tap roots, a slice of root is taken, for creeping roots a thin piece of root with two growing nodes, and for roots that have both, a piece of root is sliced off with growing node.
• From root division: it involves digging up the root ball and breaking it up to produce a smaller plants. This way of propagation create more plants quickly and it frees up space in the garden and it encourages new growth.

Herbs Garden planting tip

Here are some of the Herb garden planting tips.

• Space out the plants, placing them exactly where you want them before actually digging the holes and put them in. You may over positioning them correctly and it is good to do it at the begining stage and it will save your time overall.
• Always allow for expension, don't underestimate the extent to which plant will grow.
• Water carefully at planting time and when plants are in danger of drying, all the way through their initial season, as it is important.
• Contained plants can be bought and planted at any time, but wherever possible, plan to do the bulk of your planting in autume or early spring, if possible as this will help them to get off to a good start.

Common herbs

• 
  Rosemary: with its spiky leaves, soft blue flowers and aromatic scent, rosemarry is a valuable evergreen shrub in it own right. This is an important culinary and medicinal herb.
• 
  Peppermints: is the quintessential herb. It has a uniquely clean, refreshing flavour. It has been used medicinally for many years.Today peppermint oil is found in indigestion table and confectionary.
• 
  Parsley:parsley is a more-ish herb, if you want a good supply, grow it from seed and if you follow the simple technique, you will find that it is not as difficult to grow.