Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The Fun Along With Other Rewards Of Cultivating Your Own Herbs

By Vanessa Summer


Besides imparting flavor to food, herbs developed at home by yourself will provide many other benefits. There may be only the necessity for small patches of garden or simple planting containers to grow a variety of herbs and most of what you need to get started can be found at your local garden center or nursery. So herbs have several uses and benefits - let's explore that in some detail.

Maximizing the flavor and color of food must be the one use of herbs that almost all people are familiar with. They actually can be added to all sorts of meals and this can include salads and soups. There may be something exciting about using ingredients cultivated and harvested by yourself, and perhaps that helps to explain the lift they bring to the taste of many meat dishes. Quality recipes can be adjusted to bring new culinary satisfaction to meals that were becoming a little mundane and everyday.

Over the ages an array of illnesses and ailments have been successfully treated with herbs, many of which are credited with curative powers. You'll find a wide range of remedies based around herbs when you conduct some research. Both dried and fresh herbs are used, either by imbibing them in the form of teas or tinctures, or perhaps by applying them right to the affected area in the form of creams or poulltices. If you find it hard to fall asleep, take camomile to calm and soothe you into a peaceful slumber, while if an upset stomach is your problem then the way to settle it is with peppermint tea.

An additional popular way of using herbs that you've grown on your own is to slice them and dry them. Dehydrated herbs can once more be used in teas and added to cooking for additional flavor. They could also be stored when dry and used as decoration, such as adding to potpourri. The principal benefit of this is the pleasurable aromatic fragrance of the dried herbs. Take a bunch of dried lavender, resplendent with delicate grey-green stalks and purple blossoms, tie it with twine and suspend it from the ceiling or a crossbeam to give your kitchen a rustic atmosphere.

It does not matter if you only have a small garden, herbs are very easily grown at home even with minimal space. The way mint grows fastest in pots proves that pots tend to be very good for growing herbs in. It grows and spreads very vigorously and can dominate other plants whenever given the chance. Cultivating mint in a plant container will confine this growth behavior nicely. As with all container gardening you will have to water the pots on a regular basis to prevent them from drying out.

Growing your individual herbs can be another great way of getting children included in gardening as it can be cheap and easy to do. You may just foster a fondness for cooking by letting your children to experience the different flavors obtained from adding the various herbs they have grown. A simple but fascinating way to get them started would be to permit them to sow and then watch grow some cress in a windowsill planter. They are guaranteed to be successful at it, and after that there's the fun of cutting it to add a tasty bite to their meals.

So there are lots of reasons to start growing your own herbs and you will quickly reap the benefits of your efforts.

You might want to see this: Organic Food Gardening Beginners Manual




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