Food, Health and Beauty: Enjoying a Home Herb Garden
There are so many types of gardening, but none are as simple to plant and maintain as a home herb garden. Even better, maintaining a home herb garden is inexpensive, as the plants are cheap and they don’t require lots of water and fertilizer. It’s a rewarding kind of gardening because newbies can become instant successes, enjoying great rewards no matter what their gardening skill level. The most difficult part, of course, is choosing what kinds of herbs you’d like to grow. Below is a useful guide to the three most common types of home herb garden: culinary, medicinal, and ornamental.
Culinary herbs are the most common type of herb to find in a home herb garden. These very familiar herbs, such as basil, rosemary, parsley, sage and oregano, are generally consumed as flavorings for food. This means that as well as enjoying their beauty in the garden, we’re also able to eat the fruits of our work. What hooked me was the first time I snipped off some rosemary from my garden to use in a dish we were cooking. Believe me, nothing compares.
Fresh herbs from the garden, after all, are superior to dried, store-bought herbs in every way! Best of all, enjoying a home herb garden full of culinary herbs is accessible to everyone. Whether you grow them in a window box or a formal plot, in the city or the country, any home can play host to a culinary garden of some kind.
Some home herb garden growers use their gardens specifically for a medicinal purpose. Medicinal herbs have been used to support human health since ancient times, and many modern gardeners also appreciate the plants’ many benefits. After all, nearly eighty percent of drugs on the pharmaceutical market are directly derived from plants.
The herbs that are extracted for sale on natural food store shelves are easy and cheap to grow at home. A home gardener can easily raise such heavy hitters as immune-boosting Echinacea, sleep-cycle-regulating valerian, brain-boosting gingko, and heart-healthy garlic instead of buying them in pill or tincture form.
Finally, never underestimate the beauty of a home herb garden! Many gardeners plant herbs just because they’re so pretty. The technical term for this is an “ornamental herb garden”. Though most herbs have value far beyond their lovely aesthetics, herbs are used in many landscaping settings for their lovely colors, hardiness, climate-specific derivation, ease of growth, and inexpensive, water-wise care (depending on the cultivar.)
There are so many different kinds of herbs that they integrate beautifully into any garden design. Best of all, most herbs you plant will have a range of other uses, as well!