Planning an Easy Herb Garden for Your Homestead

‘Tis the season for colds, flus and all manner of other lovely bugs that plug your sinuses and tickle your throat. It also just happens to be the season of garden planning and seed starting! Convenient! Let’s talk about how you can plan an easy herb garden for your homestead, and why you should!

Disclaimer!
Any and all information included in this post should not be taken as medical advice, and is for informational purposes only! Always consult with your doctor before utilizing herbs medicinally!

Why an Herb Garden?

What’s the big deal about growing an herb garden anyways? Why should you add it to your already pages long homestead project list?

Well, not only do most of us use herbs everyday in our cooking, but they also make wonderful additions to the home medicine cabinet!

Did you know that peppermint, while it tastes great in a sun brewed summer tea, can also be used to help quell morning sickness and stomach pain?

Or that parsley can be beneficial to your kidneys and can help lower blood pressure in some cases?

What could be better than stepping out into your back yard and having your pick of delicious, fragrant herbs to add to a breakfast skillet or a mug of calming tea?

Sounds pretty great, right?

Where to start?

The best place to start is to figure out where you want to put your herb garden.

Do you have the space for a full garden, or would growing a few, select herbs in pots be more suited to your situation?

Ideally, your herb garden will be somewhere that gets between 6-8 hours of sunlight per day. This will help ensure that your herbs have all the light they need to thrive!

In addition to location, location, location, you also need to take soil quality into consideration. While some herbs do quite well in poor, clay or rocky soils, a majority of herbs prefer richer soil in which to grow.

Some questions you might want to ask when looking at your soil are:

Does my soil get easily saturated during a rain or dry out quickly?
Are there any possible contaminants from run off or previous owner’s?

Knowing the quality of your soil in advance, as well as what amendments it might need will help set you ahead when you go to plant your herb garden!

What plants to pick?

This is where things get exciting, and maybe a little stressful, depending on how much decision making freedom you like. 😉

The options for herbs to grow in your herb garden are virtually endless and confined only by your budget, imagination, and space!

Picture of an rose blossom in full bloom.

Common Kitchen Herbs:

Basil

Thyme

Oregano

Dill

Cilantro

Parsley

Common Medicinal Herbs:

Elderberry – Helps as an anti-inflammatory and antiviral.

Echinacea – Helps boost immunity and good for venomous bites.

Chamomile – Wonderful for insomnia and stress.

Comfrey – Excellent for wound healing.

Peppermint – Excellent for stomach issues.

Lemon Balm – Works well against herpes viruses, especially cold sores.

Roses – Great source of Vitamin C, and an astringent.

While this is, by no means, an exhaustive list of herbs that you can grow in your garden, it is a good place to start.

How to Decide?

I know that for me, personally, deciding on only a few herbs when there are so many amazing options is just too much. I want them all, and I want them all now. Which, financially and practically speaking is just a terrible idea!

Never start by doing everything all at once.

I promise you that even though it sounds great, it’s a sure way of overwhelming yourself and getting burnt out. We don’t want that!

So start small! Maybe only get three or four different herbs to start with.

Plant them, watch them grow, learn all about their uses…basically, what I’m trying to say is that you should become extremely familiar with each herb you plant, and, slowly, over time keep adding one or two new herbs.

Before you know it, you will have a gorgeous garden and numerous herbs filling little jars in your pantry ready to be used for culinary or medicinal purposes at a moment’s notice! 😉

For me, it helped to find one or two things that I wanted to replace in my family’s medicine or kitchen cabinets, and picked my herbs that way.

Basil was a definite first herb, as was peppermint! We eat a lot of basil pesto, and drink a lot of peppermint tea in the summer, so these two herbs just made sense for us!

Some common things people use as determining factors when picking herbs:

Herbs that help common acute illnesses in the family (colds, flus, etc.)
Herbs that help with chronic ailments in the family (asthma, arthritis, etc.)
Ease of growth in your climate/soil
Maintenance requirements
Amount of production
Most frequently used herbs in the kitchen

Where to Find Herbs?

While a lot of your more common kitchen herbs: basil, oregano, parsley, etc. are usually stocked at local nurseries, some of the medicinal herbs can be more challenging to find.

One of my favorite places to get herb seeds, as well as root crowns or young plants is Strictly Medicinal Seeds. Not only do they have a huge selection of plants to choose from, but they are also good quality and have a high survival rate!