Herb

When planning the design of your herb garden, you can research what others have done. Dozens of herb garden designs are displayed in books and magazines you can find at garden centers or the library. For productive garden design, you will see some common patterns.

Herb gardens are attractive even when scattered and disorganized, but for efficient harvesting, the productive garden needs a planned design. Walkways, compact-sized planting beds, and planned sun/shade exposure are three commonalities in herb garden designs.

Your garden design should allow you to reach your herbs for easy harvesting. A path or walkway between beds or through a larger garden plot is essential. Gravel, bricks, stones, wood, grass, or flat groundcover such as Irish moss or creeping thyme all make good pathways. Be sure to make your paths wide enough to allow you to reach one plant without bumping into others.

Small planting beds make harvesting easier. Shapes such as circles, small squares and narrow rectangles are ideal designs for reaching all your herbs. Formal gardens often outline these shapes with shrubby herbs such as boxwood, lavender, marigold, or thyme. Productive designs allow you to reach every herb easily from your pathways.

Increase your garden’s productivity by grouping herbs with similar uses in the same small bed. Culinary herbs can be in one bed, medicinal herbs in another, aromatics in another. The same grouping can be used if you plant your herbs in pots rather than beds. The grouping of like with like is the key to the productive herb garden design.

Within categories of herbs, you can group them with similar uses in the same bed or area. Your herb garden design might group medicinal herbs for stomach upset together such as peppermint, lemon verbena, marjoram and basil. You won’t have to hunt through the whole garden to find just what you need.

Herbs are not all the same size and some like more sunlight than others. Taller herbs that enjoy direct sunlight can be planted to block the sunlight from shorter, shade-loving herbs in the same bed. Sunflowers planted on the southern side of sun-shy herbs will soak up the damaging rays and protect the leaves of shadier herbs. Many other taller herbs can be employed for the same trick.

For a full bed of one single herb, such as a field of lavender, you will want to eliminate the possibility of weed growth between your plants as well as creating pathways in between each plant. Commercial lavender growers lay down rows of heavy landscaping cloth and plant evenly spaced rows of lavender within small circles in the cloth. Harvesting and pruning are a cinch! Definitely a productive design. With a little planning and measuring, you can increase the productivity of your herb garden before you plant.

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