Wednesday 28 September 2011

The Pleasure And Other Benefits Of Growing Your Own Herbs

By Grahham Greener


Among the many rewards of growing your own herbs is that you can use them to bring out the flavor of food dishes. You can easily use a small section of your garden, or even planting pots, to raise enough herbs to satisfy all your needs - and your neighbourhood garden center or nursery will stock just about everything that's needed for starting out. Indeed herbs have many uses and advantages - let's explore that in some detail.

The most evident selling point of growing herbs is their addition to food preparation, providing flavor and color to food. They truly can be added to all sorts of meals and this can include salads and soups.

There are lots of meat dishes where herbs help to boost the overall taste and if using your own, you will know that these are freshly picked from your garden. When you test out various recipes you will add variety and new tastes to your daily meals.

One more ages-old selling point of herbs is their healing ability, which has been used successfully with many ill-health conditions. You'll find a range of remedies based around herbs if you ever conduct some research.

These herbs are used either fresh or dried out and can be taken internally, such as in drinking teas or tinctures or used externally by being put in to poultices and creams that can be applied to affected areas. Peppermint tea is a superb example of a treatment for an upset stomach and chamomile tea is recognized for its soothing effect and can help to calm you when taken before bedtime to help you gain a restful sleep.

One more popular way of using herbs that you have grown by yourself is to slice them and dry them. Dried herbs can again be used in teas and included in cooking for additional flavor.

The aromatic smell of dried herbs will be able to calm and please at the same time. Get a countryside feeling with dried lavender dangled in bunches from the kitchen ceiling, which will also provide subtle aromatic and visual tones.

It doesn't matter if you just have a small garden, herbs are very easily grown at home even with confined space. The way mint flourishes in pots proves that pots tend to be very good for growing herbs in.

It grows and develops very vigorously and can dominate other plants whenever given the chance. This advancement may be contained effectively when raised in a pot. As with the majority of container gardening you simply must water the pots regularly to prevent them from drying out.

Growing your personal herbs is yet another great way of getting children involved in gardening as it can be cheap and easy to do. This may also get your children interested in cooking by adding the herbs they have grown to dishes and helping them to explore different flavors.

An excellent way to introduce children to cultivating herbs is to help them to sow some cress seeds from a carton and watch them grow on a windowsill. It's easy and quick to grow and can be good fun to cut and delicious to add to their food.

So you'll find a lot of reasons to start growing your own herbs and you will shortly reap the benefits of your efforts.

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