Create your own aromatic herb garden
Organic Growing
Hans Wieland
What amazing variety of plants can be easily grown by children, beginner gardeners, people with no garden at all, food lovers, chefs and commercial producers? Herbs. They also provide year-round produce for culinary, medicinal and cosmetic use, and make every patch of garden look – and smell – great.
How to get started
Creating your own herb garden is an adventure and a wonderful pleasure. You can decide whether you want it formal or informal, totally culinary or medicinal. As herbs are basically ‘wild plants’ it makes sense to grow them in conditions comparable to their natural habitat.
Herbs can be grown from seed indoors in a seed tray using a good seed compost. You can also sow outdoors once the soil has warmed up in late spring.
Buying herb transplants is an easier but more expensive start, or you can now try softwood cuttings to propagate rosemary, sage and thyme. Cut a shoot from a non-flowering tip of the plant, remove the leaves from the bottom third of the cutting, make a hole in the compost, insert the cutting up to the leaves, water and cover with a clear plastic bag.
My suggestions for a basic culinary herb garden are coriander, chives, parsley, mint, thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano and marjoram. Basil can be grown under cover or in a polytunnel.
A word of warning: Don’t buy herbs that you will not use as you will neglect them and they take up space you could use more productively. Also, it’s well worth it to get a good reference book, like Jekka McVicar’s ‘New Book of Herbs’. One of my favourite pocket books is the Collins ‘Herbs and Healing Plants’.
You could also go on a course and learn from the experts, or join a gardening club – you’ll get free advice and cuttings galore!
Hans Wieland is training manager at The Organic Centre, Rossinver, Co Leitrim, which offers courses, training and information on organic growing and cooking, and runs an Eco Shop and an online gardening store. For more information or to download the centre’s free 2013 Course Programme and Seed Catalogue, visit www.theorganiccentre.ie. Gardening questions or comments? Feel free to contact Hans at living@mayonews.ie.
