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.
And you can pull this off even if you are a novice gardener. It really isn’t 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, take this as a reminder of the value of planting perennials in containers, then stretching your gardening budget by transplanting them to the garden at summer’s end.
Here’s how to do it
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 4-inch plant of each of the following: lavender, sage, chives, thyme.
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 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 and 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 before dumping 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 early September usually gives them a chance
to lay down their roots before the first hard frost.
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.
The leaves and the flowers are used both to 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 complement 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 it 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.
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
and 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 and its long-term returns.
Now, that’s a dirty little garden secret worth sharing.
Plot your pot strategy
Containers should make a statement, says Annie Huston of Columbine Design. Following are tips to ensure the plants stay healthy throughout the season.
Make sure the container is easily reached for hand-watering or by another type of irrigation system.
Design your space with empty containers first. Use groupings of various size. Remember, uneven numbers are more pleasing to the eye.
Make a note of the amount of sun the area receives. You’ll want to buy plants that grow in the conditions you have.
Decide on a color palette. Blooms and foliage can contrast or match or all be in one color family. Experiment.
Purchase potting soil and slow-release fertilizer.
Make sure the containers have sufficient drainage holes. If the pots are quite large, layer the bottom with lava rocks or broken clay to improve drainage.
Plant from the middle of the container out. Small plants or those that trail should be on the edges of the container. Tall plants go toward the center, or if the pot backs up against a wall or fence, place tall plants toward the back.
For simplicity and easy care, try filling one pot with the same kind of plant. The result will be striking.
