Beginners Guide to Growing Amazing Herbs

This post was most recently updated on May 17th, 2020

Are you new to growing herbs? Today we are looking at how best to grow herbs at home in your backyard.

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Herbs include plants that are used for both medicinal or culinary uses. Growing herbs is easy with a few simple steps.

Growing Herbs

Herbs are a great addition to your new garden. They make meals delicious, are the ultimate companion plants to go in your vegetable patch and are fairly indestructible (most of them are at least).

Herb position in the garden

Pick an area that you won’t be digging over all the time as they will stay in place for at least the whole growing season – parsley, cilantro/coriander, fennel or all the time as established plants most other herbs.

Somewhere near to the kitchen is also a good idea, even in pots on the veranda/patio or your kitchen window sill.

Plants that originated in the mediterranean prefer drier, sunnier conditions. Examples are:

Rosemary
Thyme
Sage
Oregano

RELATED: Best herbs for hot climates

Herbs that tolerate more damp or shady conditions include:

Mint
Parsley
Cilantro/coriander
Chives
Lemon balm

RELATED: Best herbs for the shade

Sourcing herbs for planting

Try and find someone else with the herbs that you would like to grow and try and take some stalks and roots from existing plants and you can save yourself a lot of money.

Thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, lavender can all be grown from little bits of existing plants with roots on from larger plants.

Parsley, coriander, marigolds and fennel are best started off as seed or bought as little plants from a nursery.

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Preparing soil for herb planting

Remove any weeds from the soil and loosen the soil with a garden fork.

Add 2-3 inches of compost on to the top of the soil and mix this in to the top 4 inches of the soil.

Dig a hole deep enough to plant in the seedling without covering the stalks.

Looking after newly planted herbs in the garden

Keep up the regular watering, water at least once per day for the first week, 3 times a week for the second week and 1-2 times per week there on.

If you would like some more help getting your vegetable garden started I really recommend that you checkout our very in depth e course – The Productive Garden: Getting a full time harvest from a part time garden.

For more gardening resources, be sure to check out our resources page!

For further reading, I really recommend all of these books. I own every one of them and they are amazing resources!