Growing Your Own Herbs
If you are not the type of person that really wants to spend their time managing an elaborate fruit or vegetable garden, you might consider planting and maintaining an herb garden. As the product perhaps may not seem as significant, you’ll still enjoy the constant availability of fresh, delicious herbs to flavor your meals with.
First you’ll have to choose the herbs that you will plant. You might have a difficult time doing this due to the huge scope of herbs available. However the easiest way to choose is usually to do what I did; just look at what you may have inside your kitchen. By planting your individual collection of herbs, you can save money buying them from the grocery store while having the added benefit of freshness. Many of the herbs you may start with include rosemary,sage, basil, dill, mint, chives, and parsley among others.
When choosing a place to place your plants, you should never forget that the soil needs to have extremely good drainage. In the event the dirt gets watered and stays completely saturated, you haven’t any possibility of growing a healthy plant. Among the best ways to fix the drainage problem is to dig a foot deep into the soil, and put a layer of crushed rocks down before replacing all the soil. This would allow all the water to escape, thus saving your plants.
When you are prepared to begin planting herbs, you may be tempted to buy the more high price plants from the store. However, with herbs it is actually much easier to grow them from seed than with other plants. Therefore you can help to save a bunch of cash by staying with seed packets. Some herbs grow in a dangerously fast rate. For instance, if you plant a mint plant inside anopen space then it will take over your complete garden in a matter of days.
An effective way to avoid this concern may be to plant the more aggressive
plants in pots with holes on the bottom to allow for drainage, of course).
As it reaches time for you to harvest the herbs you have labored so hard over, it might be fatal for your plant to take off very much. If a plant isn’t well established, it isn’t healthy to remove any leaves whatsoever, even if it looks like its not using them. You might want to wait until your plant appears to have been well established for several months before taking off any leaves. This wait certainly will be considerable, because by growing unabated your plant will produce healthily for years into the future.
Once you’ve harvested your delicious home grown herbs, you’ll want to use them in cooking. Why else might you have cultivated them? Well first the process begins with drying them out. This can be easily achieved by placing them on a cookie sheet and baking them 170 degrees Fahrenheit for two to four hours. After they’re sufficiently dried for use in cooking, you can possibly consult the nearest cookbook for instructions on using them to effectively flavor a dish.
If you want to store them for later usage, you must store them inside a plastic or glass container. Paper or cardboard will likely not work, since it will absorb the flavour within the herbs. Through the first couple of days of storage, you ought to regularly check the container and find out if any moisture has accumulated. If there is, you must remove all the herbs and re-dry them. If moisture is left from the first drying process, ıt’s going to encourage mildew while you store them. Nobody likes mildew.
So if you like herbs or gardening, or both, then you certainly should probably consider establishing an organic herb garden. It will require some work
at first to set it up for optimal drainage, and pick what herbs you choose to cultivate. But following on from the initial hassle, it’s just a matter of harvesting and drying your own favorite herbs.
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