Make a Simple Medicinal Indoor Herb Garden

Make an indoor medicinal herb garden to have your own year-round supply of herbs, for medicines, food flavourings and lovely aromas. Incidentally, the aroma in herbs derives from oils in the cell of the plants. So, a herb garden is not that difficult to make, and gives great satisfaction to adults and children alike.

Begin by selecting a suitable container, as large as possible within your home. You can use different materials including plastics, but the most recommended are clay, wood or ceramic pots. You can use many containers placed around the house, preferably in areas near windows, all of them with a different kind of herb.

Catnip Plants

Around autumn/fall time is the best time to divide grown herbs such as mint, sage, chives, and parsley, placing some of them outdoors and one or two as part of your indoor herb garden, bringing plants indoors prior to the frost period. Please, remember that young perennials like bay, sage, rosemary, can be destroyed by a harsh, cold frost, so they are best grown in pots and brought inside in winter.

When growing herbs in dry climates, supplemental watering is necessary, but not in temperate parts of the world, because excess of water could harm the plants or promote worms. A good quality, compost, from your own garden or bought can be used. Herbs aren't fussy about their soil and very often grow like weeds in their native habitat. Plant seeds just under the surface of a warm soil and water well. Germination will happen in a few days. Several perennial herbs grow for more than one season, including parsley, thyme, marjoram, sage, mint, and chives. Annual herbs include coriander, oregano, basil and dill. So try when possible, to begin annual herbs from the seed and perennial herbs from fairly young plants, however, parsley is advised to be grown on from a good quality seed. If you are hoping to grow your herbs totally from seed, purchase it from online seed companies or at your local garden supply stores. This ensures the quality of the seed, thus improving your chances to grow all of them successfully.

Some gardeners advise to plant the herbs outdoors and let them 'grow on' for a while, then moving them indoors before a frost, re-potting them to other containers. Once your herbs start to grow, pick them, even if you are not going to use them on a daily basis for cooking, as gathering them regularly encourages them to flourish, and you can dry them to store for later use, all-year-round. Dried herbs can last for up to a year, keeping the most of their full flavour.

Some herbs require sun, moving them onto a window ledge where sunlight will fall on them is sufficient, some herbs may require darkened glass pots, to help protect them against deterioration.

So, outdoors or indoors, herbs thrive in temperate areas, flavouring foods with their leaves and seeds and their aroma filling the kitchen, or wherever you set up your indoor herb garden, with aromatic essences, eliminating household cooking or smoking/pet odours. But best of all, you have the satisfaction of having your own home-grown supply of medicinal herbs, that can be taken alongside your conventional medicines. Also, think about taking herbs for preventative medicine, rather than waiting for your body to get sick. Lots of cultures around the world think of herbs as foods and take them with every meal, to prevent sickness.

Make a Simple Medicinal Indoor Herb Garden