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More bang for your garden buck: Pot up instant herb garden now, transplant to landscape later
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Rosemary is another option for your instant herb garden, but unless you get a hardy variety, it will need to spend winter indoors. Photo by Quincy Benton
Psssssst. Here’s a dirty little secret: For less than $20 and in less than one hour, you can create an instant herb garden that will allow you to snip fresh flavors and scents all summer for culinary and apothecary purposes.
What’s more, come autumn, you’ll have some sizable perennial herbs to plant in your landscape. With minimal care but maximum sun, these herbaceous perennials will deliver beauty and aroma for years to come.
Even a greenthumb greenhorn can do this
And you can pull this off even if you are a novice gardener. It’s really not hard with these hardy herbs that tend to thrive on near neglect and Colorado’s near relentless sun.
If you’re an old hand at green thumb ways, you can cut to the chase and just take this as a reminder of the value in going with small containers of herbaceous perennials that can stretch your garden budget when you transplant them to the garden at summer’s end.
If you’re a green thumb greenhorn, here’s the drill: Make a trip to a garden center. Pick out a 12-inch container with a drainage hole. Try to avoid plastic. Even though it is lightweight and does not dry out as fast and won’t chip, you'll be happier with a more organic choice. And so will your plants. Organic materials breathe, and roots appreciate air.
Purchase some potting soil. Miracle Grow is a good brand, but these herbs are not finicky hothouse flowers, so other potting soil will do. Select one four-inch plant of each of the following herbs: lavender, sage, chives, thyme.
Easy and almost instant, this project offers longterm rewards
Now for the dirty part: Once you have assembled your herbs, put a rock or a bit of broken pot over the drainage hole in your container. The idea is to keep all the fine potting soil from rushing out the bottom. Then, add some potting soil. Remove the herbs from their plastic containers and place them into the pot in any arrangement that strikes your fancy. Fill in the pot with soil and you’re finished, unless you want to go one more step and top off the soil with a mulch of moss or stones or bark for a more finished look. Set the pot in a spot with full sun. The impact is instant. There’s no weeding, no bending over, and these herbs are not prone to pests. The herbs are ready to use. In fact, they seem to grow faster when they’ve been snipped.
You can let your instant herb garden dry out between watering. Just keep an eye on it and don’t let the plants droop too much before watering. You can give the herbs a little organic fertilizer to improve their performance, but herbs are pretty tough, and you want to remember that if you’re using the herbs, you don’t want to dump chemicals on them.
Having spent the summer mollycoddled in a container, these herbs will have at least doubled in size. If they grow too much, you can always move them to a larger pot or to individual containers. As summer winds down, you can transplant your herbs to your garden--usually early September gives them a chance to lay down their roots before the first hard frost.
To get more bang for your garden buck, plant these perennial herbs
Lavender tops the herbaceous perennial list for a number of reasons. The plant is understated until you get to know and love its fragrant, silvery leaves and delicate spires of aromatic purple flowers. Lavender repels mosquitoes and moths, but makes many people believers in the power of aromatherapy. Both the leaves and the flowers are used to both stimulate and relax. The French use lavender as a culinary herb. Lavender applications go on and on, just like the plant. Every garden in metro Denver ought to have at least one lavender.
Sage. Its name says it all. Sage is a wise move when it comes to mile high gardens. Garden variety sage is a tough plant with oval, nubby, grey-green leaves and violet-blue blossoms that attract the garden’s best friends: bees. Variegated varieties will add panache to your instant herb pot. Golden sage boasts a mottled leaf of olive green and butter yellow. And speaking of olives and butter, these leaves compliment them both. Of course, one of the most common culinary applications of sage is to turkey and dressing, but some gourmets and gourmands roast and eat just the herbs themselves. For centuries, various cultures have used sage for a variety of purposes, including religious ones. Sage deserves a spot in your garden.
In the fall, you can transplant lavender and sage to a spot of ground that gets full-sun--somewhere the herbs will have room to grow into small shrubs.
Another favorite is cooking thyme. This is very pretty in the pot, with tiny leaves, a cascading habit, tiny pink flowers and a clean, green scent. Lemon thyme in particular makes a beautiful container plant. With yellow-rimmed leaves, the herb has a citrus, spicy smell and a flavor that’s a welcome gourmet touch in your kitchen. Cooking thyme is not as reliable in terms of winter hardiness, but if you find a semi-sheltered, sunny spot and water the herb once a month during winter’s dry spells, chances are good that thyme will return next year.
And then there are chives, a fabulous little plant for your instantaneous herb patch. The plants grow almost like grass blades, only puffier, and they get an adorable pinkish poof of a blossom--both edible. Wherever you might use onion, use chives for a more delicate and less heartburn inducing option. Moreover, chives are high in antioxidants.
At season's end, add the herbs to your landscape
Come autumn, take your chives out of the pot, separate them, and make a little row of chives or put the whole clump down in a sunny spot. Here’s another chive tip: After a few hard freezes, bring a pot of chives inside to a sunny window, water them, and the little herbs will be tricked into thinking it’s spring. They’ll grow inside, giving you fresh chives in the dead of winter.
Next spring, look for the lavender and the sage to come to life again, and with luck, the thyme, too. But the chives—providing you haven’t invited them all indoors--will poke their heads out first. They’ll multiply, year after year, always serving as your garden’s earliest harbingers of spring and reminders of the instant gratification of gardening [ital]and [end italics] its long term returns.
Now that’s a dirty little garden secret worth sharing.
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