More Living With Living Things - Part II

The Kitchen, Porch or Plot Herb Garden

In the last post I talked a bit about planning to use your yard space in such a way as to minimize expanses of lawn that serve no purpose other than making you mow them regularly. Before getting into the fine points of ‘naturalizing’ your yard space, I wanted to talk a bit about planning your herb and kitchen garden.

This is the most fun and useful bit of growing green things any homesteader can do, and it will add a great deal of pleasure to your living space with wonderful scents, beautiful plants and flowers, and the tastiest fresh herbs for your cooking that you could ever find anywhere.

In addition to culinary herbs that you’ll use a lot of, there are some handy medicinals that can also be grown in a yard-based herb garden, and more herb seed and plant suppliers are offering these usually wild-growing seeds, roots or plants for home gardeners and yard ‘naturalizers’. Which means you won’t have to displace any wildings in your area in order to grow your own supply conveniently to your kitchen.

Some will find it easier to begin with potted herbs on a shelf or sunny sill in the kitchen proper, then add to the collection with pots and stands arranged on the porch. Or you could grow your herbs in pots on the porch and just move the most commonly used into the kitchen during the winter. Some will want to plan a formal or informal herb garden to take up a significant portion of the yard, with raised beds and walkways covered with fabric and mulch, pebbles, flagstones or bricks - no mowing, and weeding raised beds isn’t too much of a chore.

I’d go ahead and advise collecting the herb seeds and plants you most want to grow from a supplier and starting them in pots even while you’re planning and constructing a more formal garden space in the yard. You can always get more later, and the root-propagated herbs you’ve already got growing will just keep on multiplying as you get more and more accustomed to dealing with them.

Choices should not begin with anything particularly exotic, just the basics that a homesteader will use a lot. Parsley, thymes, basils, rosemary, sage, chives, tarragon. Be wary of the pretty herbs you’ll want to plant in your garden but tend to become invasive - the mints, nasturtiums and wormwood are the worst offenders. Even out in the garden it’s a good idea to keep these crops in containers. Otherwise they’ll grow right past your bed confines, into your paths, into other beds, and show up in places you don’t want them and can’t seem to get rid of them.

When you plot the garden - even if it’s all in containers - be careful of the height requirements for the different herbs. Things like dill and fennel are tall and gangly when they’re grown, not really strong enough to hold themselves upright and more than three feet tall. If you plant them close to the path border they’ll fall right over onto the path and make a mess of your pretty design. Put them at the back of the bed, preferably against a fence, wall, or planting of self-standing taller plants like 5-6 foot tall sunflowers (very pretty!), or a stand of Joe Pye. Joe Pye can grow to 10 feet or more in height, but will stand and when in bloom is a better butterfly attractor than butterfly bush!

Conversely, you’ll want low-growing plants near the path borders. Thyme is good for this, and will tend to creep over the border. It smells great, is beautiful in bloom, and more useful than phlox. Chives behind the thyme gives an 8-inch level and the purple poms of their blooms are lovely. If you plan properly, the growth levels in your beds will complement the flowers and herbs they front or support, and everything will be easily accessible.

And if you choose to take up a chunk of the yard with an herb and kitchen garden, don’t forget to plan the veggies you grow as carefully as you plan your herbs. Establish some perennial beds for such herbs as rosemary and sage, and such edibles as rhubarb and artichokes. I have seen a kitchen garden centered around an artichoke patch that was beautiful. ‘Chokes can grow to 10-12 feet, and if you don’t harvest the buds in time they go on to become huge purple thistle-like blooms. Surrounding these are the shorter Jerusalem artichokes, which are a wild sunflower. You’ll be digging for some tubers in the fall, but artichokes have to be separated every year too, as does rhubarb. When you thin these perennials from the formal kitchen garden, you can always transfer the excess to a section of your truck crop garden, where they’ll happily keep right on producing food even if you let the formal plantings just look pretty.

Lettuces, several colorful varieties of kale and chard, even dark green collards can be planted in spaces among the herbs, harvested and replanted two or three times through the season, and they will add to the beauty of your plantings. Lettuce and kale also grows well in pots or flats, so can also be part of your porch or window garden. I like the leaf lettuce mixes, where you get everything from light yellow-green varieties to deep purple oak-leaf lettuces. When the plants get 2-3 inches tall, just clip them off (leaving half an inch) with a pair of scissors and you’ve a fine young leaf lunch salad. Spinach can be grown this way as well - these plants have shallow roots, the flat need be no more than 3-4 inches deep. Mix good potting soil with real garden dirt to get the most nutrition from the plantings, and it’s okay to fertilize with a little Miracle-Grow or organic fish fertilizer once a month.

Check out some of the resources below or seek your own on the magazine racks or library. Once you’ve aimed your mind in the direction of growing things, you’ll begin to notice there’s information everywhere! Take your time, start with some pots and cuttings from a friend, or try your hand at mixing good dirt and planting seeds. You may find you’ve a positive flair for it!

Links:

The Herb Garden

Kitchen Herb Garden

The New Kitchen Garden by Anne Pavord

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Filed under Garden, Homestead, Indoor Plants, Landscaping, Porch Plants, Yard |