Growing Your Own Fresh Herbs: My Six Easy To Grow Favorites in the Kitchen Garden

Dividing and planting chives, one of my favorite herbs in the kitchen garden. Read more about them and my five other easy to grow favorites here. (I've been using my beloved hand-forged Korean garden tool to do nearly every job in the garden for over 22 years.)

Homegrown culinary herbs are an inexpensive luxury. They're easy to grow, cheap to keep, don't require lots of space or attention, and aren't usually bothered by diseases and pests, making them perfect for the organic garden. They're pretty to look at, bursting with flavor, and far fresher than those pricey little packets at the store, which may have been sprayed with toxic chemicals.

Have you always wanted to try growing your own herbs? Early spring is the perfect time to start an herb garden, and I'm here to give you a little push. You'll find lots of helpful information and inspiration in this post I wrote a while back, Growing and Using Your Own Fresh Herbs: My Six Favorite Varieties.

Chives, basil, Greek oregano, lemon thyme, Italian parsley, and lemon balm have been favorites in my organic kitchen garden for years, not only because they taste good, but because they've all done well in our challenging Missouri conditions. The bounty starts in spring, and I'm often still harvesting well into November. And because the chives, oregano, lemon thyme, and lemon balm are all cold tolerant perennials, that means you plant them once and they come back year after year.

Portable pots of heat loving lemon balm and Greek oregano surrounded by easy to grow Swiss chard in the unheated homemade greenhouse.

One of the nicest things about growing your own herbs is that, unlike many vegetables, you don't need a whole bushel to make a worthwhile harvest; just a little bit will go a long way. Many can be grown in pots, and most herb plants actually benefit from from being regularly snipped back, even when young.

You've really got nothing to lose, especially since young herb seedlings can often be purchased for less than those little "fresh" packets at the supermarket. So even if you end up killing all your plants, you'll most likely have eaten more than your money's worth from them first. Let's get growing!

Looking for more kitchen garden inspiration? Check out these posts.

© FarmgirlFare.com, where a little freshly snipped flavor goes a long way.