Page 24 2024 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April 2024 Herbs! Beauty, fragrance, health, flavor! Herbs offer so much! Packed with nutrients, beautiful in a landscape, used for millennia for healing, easy to grow, and great for pollinators! Are herbs the perfect plant? They are certainly perfect for any garden. For anyone new to gardening, herbs are an ideal place to begin. For anyone already gardening, herbs are an easy addition to the home vegetable or flower garden. For anyone already gardening with herbs, there are so many more to try out! How Does Your Garden Grow? Getting started with herbs is quite easy, particularly for anyone who has ever grown a flower or vegetable. Even without experience, as long as herbs have plenty of sunshine and water when the soil feels dry, herbs are unfussy. They do not typically have pests and rarely need fertilizer unless grown longterm in pots. Herbs will happily grow in pots of plastic or clay, in raised beds, or in the ground. Drainage is important wherever they are planted as herbs, along with most plants, will succumb to root rot if left in overly wet areas. Most herbs can be either sown directly from seed or transplanted from starts when the soil is warm enough, although some, such as lavender, do best as cuttings in order to grow true to type. Grown in pots, many tender herbs can even over-winter inside near a bright window. There are also a wide variety of perennial herbs, meaning plant them once and enjoy for years! Spice Up Your Life with Herb Gardening Consider garden design when beginning an herb garden. Do you want a dedicated herb garden or herbs interspersed throughout existing beds? Herbs can be interplanted with vegetables as natural pest repellants and to encourage healthy growth as companion plants. Dedicated herb gardens can revolve around a theme such as culinary or medicinal herbs, or a similar or contrasting color palate. Herbs grown in pots can be moved throughout the season to showcase the best looking plants or to find the sunniest spots. No matter where or how they are planted, herbs can grow successfully without chemicals or poisons. Herbs can provide a variety of rich colors to the landscape and when allowed to flower add additional interest, as well as food for bees and butterflies. If left to go to seed, herbs will provide winter food for birds, a place to hibernate for beneficial insects, and add visual interest to the winter landscape. Many herbs are so easy to grow, they make a great horticultural project to do with kids and grandkids. Herbs may be annuals, perennials, or biennials. Annuals complete their life cycle of growth, flower, and seed within a one growing season. Annuals are replanted every year. Biennial plants complete their life cycle over two growing sessions, flowering and setting seed in the second season. Perennials are plants which die back in winter, but sprout new growth from the same root system in the spring. Continued --
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