Suyad Home Improvement

If you plan to harvest your herbs for a purpose-crafting, culinary, medicine-you will need a garden designed to make this easier. Garden centers and libraries have dozens of books full of traditional and modern herb garden designs. Productive herb garden designs have several things in common.

To be productive rather than simply aesthetically pleasing, an herb garden must have a design that allows the gardener to harvest the herbs efficiently. Productive herb garden designs have three things in common: walkways, small beds, and idealized conditions for all the herbs planted there.

Your garden design should allow you to reach your herbs for easy harvesting. A path or walkway between beds or through a larger garden plot is essential. Gravel, bricks, stones, wood, grass, or flat ground cover such as irish moss or creeping thyme all make good pathways. Be sure to make your paths wide enough to allow you to reach one plant without bumping into others.

For easier harvesting, your pathways need to surround small planting beds. The reach of your arm should be your measuring stick for the size of beds. Circles, rectangles and squares can be grouped with paths between for a formalized look. Potted herbs can also be arranged in this fashion, and makes reaching herbs even easier.

Herb garden designs that place herbs with similar uses together make productive harvest much simpler. Designate one bed for medicinal herbs, another for culinary herbs, a third for aromatic herbs, or any division you want. Grouping or arranging herbs in pots in the same way will increase productivity in even the smallest herb garden.

Within categories of herbs, you can group herbs with similar uses in the same bed or area. Your herb garden design might group medicinal herbs for stomach upset together such as peppermint, lemon verbena, marjoram and basil. You won’t have to hunt through the whole garden to find just what you need.

Some herbs will need more sunlight than others. Ideal conditions often include 4 to 6 hours of direct sunlight per day. You can still plant your shade-loving herbs in a bed with sun-loving herbs if you arrange them so that taller, sun-loving herbs block the sunlight. Sunflowers are ideal for this-they love to hog the sunlight, and will protect more delicate leaves from the direct rays if planted on the southern side.

For a full bed of one single herb, such as a field of lavender, you will want to eliminate the possibility of weed growth between your plants as well as creating pathways in between each plant. Commercial lavender growers lay down rows of heavy landscaping cloth and plant evenly spaced rows of lavender within small circles in the cloth. Harvesting and pruning are a cinch! Definitely a productive design. With a little planning and measuring, you can increase the productivity of your herb garden before you plant.