I’m starting an herb garden. Partly because I like gardening, and partly because I am tired of buying things like sage, oregano, basil, etc. I can grow them, dry them, and have them all winter if I’m careful. I suppose I could even have a tiny kitchen garden in the winter. But I’ve also got an interest in medicinal herbs. I take lemon balm and valerian before bed to help me sleep, but I’d like to make a tea of the lemon balm with some chamomile and in my area you just cannot find it, period. The only place to get bulk dried herbs is the Renaissance fair, and that only happens once a year, AND it’s expensive. So I’m planting the basic culinary herbs, along with chamomile, lavender, lemon balm, catnip, and some cilantro (I don’t like it, but my rabbits really do.) What I’d like to know is, what other useful herbs can I grow myself, and what will I have to buy online or out of catalogs? Once I’ve grown what I can, how will I go about drying/storing them? Rather than making tea every night, could I make a tincture of lemon balm and chamomile together and take a spoonful before bed, and would it be as effective? Could I add peppermint in there too for indigestion, or would that cause it to lose its effectiveness? What about witch hazel instead? I’ve got some books from the library, but they don’t go into specifics about any of this. Also–does aromatherapy work as well on animals? Can I heat up some lavender oil in the potpourri warmer and calm the dogs during a thunderstorm? And is there anything I can plant around the perimeter of the property to ward off fleas during the summer? I know this is a lot of stuff, but I’m not finding the information online (though there are a couple of pay sites with the information, I am broke) or at my local library. Thanks in advance to anybody who has any answers or suggestions.
What other useful herbs can I grow myself, and what will I have to buy online or out of catalogs?
It depends on where you live. My suggestion is to hit all the nurseries and any store with a garden center, like Target or Home Depot. (If your local Target has a garden center, they have really great herbs on the cheap – best quality at lowest price that I’ve found in 12 years of herb gardening. My Lowe’s and Home Depot tend not to water when they need to.) Basically, stick to what is local/native, so you won’t have to go through gymnastic maneuvers to keep the herbs alive. I don’t recommend buying online or out of catalogs because it’s hard to tell if the variety being sold in that way is one that is workable in your region.
Another way to get herbs is to join a garden club. I liked Dave’s Garden online. At that online community, they have events they call “roundups,” which are really just plant exchanges. You bring one or 100 plants and everyone else does too. You chat, make friends, trade plants and go home with one or 100 completely different plants. Caution: this is addictive and next thing you know, your garden looks like mine: a completely overgrown jungle. But then again, I live in Florida, so I can grow stuff 10 months outta the year. And now I have gardener friends all over the state.
One of my neighbors did this recently. She randomly walked around the neighborhood and made up a little flyer about a plant exchange. If she saw a yard that was clearly indicative of a gardener living there, she’d cram a flyer in your mailbox. I was the only non-friend, non-family who showed up (am I a gardening geek or what? I will show up at any random stranger’s house to trade plants!), and ended up making some new friends and sharing a lot of plants.
Rather than making tea every night, could I make a tincture of lemon balm and chammomile together and take a spoonful before bed, and would it be as effective?
Yes.
**Could I add peppermint in there too for indigestion, or would that cause it to lose its effectiveness? **
Yes, you can, and no, it won’t lose efficacy. You might also consider adding a bit of grated ginger root, which is also nice for digestion and flavor.
Oh, I just thought of a good herb you might like to try. Get your hands on some Stevia. The FDA finally approved this herb as a sweetener – it’s 200 times stronger than cane sugar. It’s very easy to grow and you just cut it back, dry the leaves, and use TINY pinches here and there to sweeten your tea. I use it in my coffee when I’m growing it. They grind it and bleach it out and sell it in health food stores, but the homegrown stuff is cheaper (obviously) and more plentiful. You cannot bake with Stevia (like cookies), because you don’t get the browning nor the volume that you’d get from say, a cup or two of sugar. But it’s great for teas, coffee… anything you’d sprinkle just a tiny bit of sugar on. Taste first – a little bit goes a long, long way.
**What about witch hazel instead? **
ARE YOU GROWING WITCH HAZEL? I’m impressed, if you are. I waited two years for my nursery to come up with a witch hazel tree and finally got my grubby hands on one. You have to peel the bark off the tree to get to the medicinal part, so I don’t want to kill my tree just to make tea and tinctures. (Same goes with Echinacea or Purple Coneflower: the medicinal parts are in the roots and you have to kill the plant to make an immunity-building tea.) Personally, I wouldn’t use it except for externally (great as an acne killing face wash), but you might find some herb books or web sites somewhere that tell you which herbs can be used for what. I have dozens; google is your friend here. Keep looking for books and web sites: there’s thousands out there.
**Does aromatherapy work as well on animals? **
Yes. When my dog goes in for acupuncture, the vet rubs Nag Champa on her feets and sometimes lavender. She likes it and spends the entire appointment sniffing and licking her feets. So the lavender oil in the warmer during thunderstorms might help a bit. You can rub a tiny bit of the essential oil on them if you’re sure they won’t lick it off.
And is there anything I can plant around the perimeter of the property to ward off fleas during the summer?
Yes. Pennyroyal, if you can get it and if it grows in your region. It makes a nice tea for people too, but it can be an abortificant, so don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, want to be pregnant, and/or want to keep your baby. (See also: The Nirvana song, “Pennyroyal Tea.”) You can also harvest and dry pennyroyal and sew it into a strip of fabric to make a little homemade flea collar. Grind it or pound it into a powder and rub it straight into your pets’ fur. I don’t do this because they lick themselves and each other, but if you had just one pet, that would probably be fine. Be careful if you have a cat; I don’t think they should ingest pennyroyal. I’d have to go look it up.
Anything else?
I’m growing a small selection of herbs in my Aerogarden, Dill, Genovese Basil, Mint, Oregano and Thyme, I also have a pod of Outredgeous red romaine lettuce growing in the failed Chives pod, hydroponic/aeroponic systems are incredible, they grow twice as fast (at least) as the standard dirt pot, and the difference in flavour is outstanding, I have some Dill grown in a dirt pot, as well as the Dill growing in the AG, the AG dill is much more robust, the plants are stronger, and they’re easily twice as flavourful as the dill in the pot
my favorites of the bunch; Genovese Basil and Dill, the rest of them are okay, but I haven’t found the right foods to combine them with yet for best effect
No you don’t need a fancy rig like the Aerogarden to grow hydroponically either, all the AG really is is a shallow bowl with an aquarium air pump and airstone built in, with a few automatic timers programmed in (light timer, nutrient timer, bulb aging/replacement timer) and different light/dark cycles programmed in depending on what you’re growing
I have a homebrew hydroponic rig built that I’m growing lettuce in, and it’s nothing more than a Rubbermaid tote (small tote) with 1" holes drilled in the lid for the Aerogarden seed pods and a small hole for the aquarium airline tubing, I also have a flat Penn-Plax airstone (about 5" long) being driven by a Whisper 60 aquarium air pump, lighting is supplied by a couple of my old aquarium light strips on a simple mechanical timer, I fill it with water as needed (once every 3-4 days) and use Schultz liquid fertilizer, and the lettuces are growing like weeds, I can pick a good sized salads worth of lettuce every two to three days
Since growing seasons here in New England are short (we get usable sunlight from 9 AM to around 4:30 PM in the depths of winter), using hydroponics allows me to get a full 12-17 hours of growing time per day
MacTech, your chives didn’t grow either? I got an AeroGarden as a Christmas gift, fired 'er up, and I’m starting to enjoy basil, dill, mint, parsley, and cilantro, but no chives - they never sprouted. Glad to know I’m not the only one.
Chives seem to be tempermental, I have an AG3 (3 pod model) downstairs in the kitchen, and have a Garlic Chives pod in it, it took a LONG time to sprout, but it did and it’s doing relatively well, the chives in the AG6 (6 pod model) got all fungussed over and gross, so I pulled the dead seeds, nuked the pod with Hydrogen Peroxide, let it dry out, and re-seeded it with the lettuce seeds
some herb seeds like to be sprouted in the dark, according to the posters on the aerogardengrowers dot com website, these seeds should be sprouted under dark covers, not the clear AG domes;
Anise
Borage
Chervil
Chive
Coriander / Cilantro
Dill
Fennel
Marjoram
Onion
Oregano
Parsley
Rosemary
Sage
Tarragon
Thyme
Watercress
I dark-sprouted the chives in the AG3, maybe that’s what worked there
Another point I wanted to mention to the OP: a lot of herbs are seasonal and the season depends on your location.
For example, here in Florida, cilantro, dill, spinach, and most lettuces can only be grown during the winter months. Cilantro will bolt and go to seed by April; it’s simply too hot here to keep cilantro growing in the blazing hot Florida summer climate. Same with spinach. I have to plant Spanish or French lavender because the English-origin lavenders, again, cannot take the FL heat. Rosemary does poorly in containers in FL, but can become a huge shrub if you plant it in the ground.
Another cool herb that is medicinal and very pretty: bee balm. (Melissa officianalis or something like that). Bee balm can be susceptible to molds so if you live in a humid climate (like I do), you have to look for mold-resistant varieties, e.g., Jacob Kline. The bees and flutterbies love bee balm and it makes a tasty tea that helps you sleep.
Another herb for the sleepys is passionflower, which bees and flutterbies also love. I grow it specifically for the Gulf Fritillary flutterbies… which means I have to grow parsley, fennel and rue to feed the larval critrers. Flutterby gardening is a whole other thread; holler if you want more info on that. You can also get a lovely fruit from certain varieties of passionflower, and you’ve probably tasted it in some of the frou frou juice drinks on the market. Passionflower is a vine and mine covers the entire side of my 2-story house, right up to the eaves. It will stay smaller if you grow it in containers, but once I put it in the ground… well, it ate my house. It doesn’t tear up the wood siding, so I let it and that makes my yard look like a true cottage garden. (It sends out little curly-que thingys that grab on to supporting structures, rather than glom on to and dig right into the wood itself, as English ivy would.
Pennyroyal is poisonous to cats. That’s why vets generally suggest you not use dog flea treatments on cats. Although there is one, I believe it’s Frontline, that doesn’t have pennyroyal and so can be used on cats…our vet told us, since we have three cats, that we could use one tube of it divided between them, which is less expensive than buying three separate cat-size tubes.
Here’s my experience:
I usually plant basil (homemade pesto), cilantro, sage, thyme, lemon balm, chives, verbena, mint, tarragon and opal basil (it’s a purple strain of basil - it lends an unusual color to dishes and also has a slight earthy edge).
By mid-summer, my cilantro has been burned beyond all sense, despite the package’s instructions that it loves full sun (perhaps it means full sun in springtime but not summer).
My sage, basil and mint turn into bushes, so I try to keep them separated or cut back from my other herbs or they’ll take over entirely. My thyme and tarragon turn into creepers. With basil, if you don’t harvest it frequently and close to the stem, it’ll stunt its growth. Mint needs to be harvested frequently, too - it gets really leggy if it isn’t.
Mint is a good additive to tinctures and teas, though it’s often used to energize instead of relax. At least that’s what I’ve read.
[hijack]When is the best time to begin starter seedlings? I’m considering starting some plants indoors in the next few weeks like peppers and certain herbs that didn’t seem to have a long enough growing season last year because I started too late. But I’m not 100% certain when it would be too soon. [/hijack]
The best way to dry herb leaves are in a food dehydrator on the lowest setting.
Screens or hanging sprigs on a strung line works, but only if the air is dry with good circulation. You risk fungus growth with this method.
We grow tansy around the house to keep ants away, but I don’t know about fleas.
I have no problem growing chives, but they’re outside in a half-barrel.
The chives I have are outside on low ground and they are hard to kill. They can be under water for a period and they still come back. They will seed the whole soil to chives if you let the seeds mature on some plants.
Lemon balm is a mint. Like almost all mints, that means it’s very hardy and it’s invasive. I highly suggest planting that one in a container, or it will take over your yard. You don’t have to do a thing to it except water it once or twice a week, even in the hottest weather. When it grows yeigh high (about two feet or so) or when it gets flowers, cut it down by about 1/2 or even 2/3, and it’ll grow back again. You can get three or more “harvests” this way through a grow season here in Chicago, and it can be a constant harvest if you simply snip a few stems off whenever you need them. Wherever you snip, two stems will grow in it’s place, so you can prune it low and bushy or high and narrow, depending on what space you’re growing it in.
Valerian is pretty easy to grow. While it’s often listed as liking sun, I find better results here putting it under trees. The part you want to harvest is the root, in the fall of the second year after the plant’s begun to “die back” and the energy is in the root. It’s an easy root to dig, it’s soft and flexible and generally about 2-5 inches long and looks kind of like a bean sprout. Beware, harvesting valerian is faerie work: you end up sleepy and a little drunk and woozy before you’re done! Remember to only harvest 2/3 of your crop so there’s some plants left to spread next year.
I’ve had mixed luck with chamomile. Some batches are great, others nil. I haven’t figured out a pattern, so I’m no help there.
You can, but I generally recommend making herbal simples - that is, one herb in a jar - and then mixing the resulting tinctures to make a formula for you. There’s a couple of reasons for that. One, different herbs require different alcohol:water ratios and different weight to volume ratios of herb and menstruum. Secondly, you’ve got more flexibility in use if you have a shelf full of simples. If you have only valerian/lemon balm, you can treat insomnia. But what if you also have ADD or trouble focusing at work? Lemon balm is perfect for that, but the valerian might make you too sleepy. If you’ve got simples, you can mix them when needed with what’s needed, and not lock yourself into specific formulas.
Lemon balm is ridiculously easy to tincture. It tinctures best with around 50% alcohol, which just happens to be the amount in a bottle of 100 proof vodka. (45%, or 90 proof, is fine too). It’s a 1:2 herb to menstruum, which means for every one ounce by weight of lemon balm, you need two ounces, by volume, of 90 or 100 proof vodka. Just chop up your herbs, weight 'em out, and add the requisite amount of vodka. I have some half gallon and gallon jars I use, but cleaned out spaghetti sauce jars work just as well. Shake the jars gently once a day. I like to add a little woo to my herbs, and all my mascerations sit in a dark space from the new moon to the full moon. If I harvest just before the full moon, that means they sit for almost a full month; if I harvest at the new moon, two weeks. It might be superstition, but it’s what I was taught and it works for me. YMMV.
When you’re ready, line a sieve with a few layers of cheesecloth or a single layer cut from a pillowcase or old sheet. (Make sure you have a pot or clean jar underneath the sieve! We’ve all made that mistake once. Once.) Pour the contents of your jar into the sieve, catching the herby bits. Fold the top of the cloth over and wring/squeeze all the liquid you can out of it.
MAKE SURE YOU LABEL YOUR JARS! (We’ve all skipped that once, too, thinking, “Oh, I’ll remember what this is!” You won’t.)
Valerian is much the same, only you need a higher concentrate of alcohol (about 70% in my experience, although some sources use only 45-55%), and much more alcohol per ounce of fresh valerian - 5 ounces (by volume) of alcohol to 1 ounce (by weight) of fresh chopped valerian root. Same process for macerating and pressing.
Both lemon balm and valerian yield a much better product when tinctured fresh as opposed to dried, so don’t dry your herbs or let them sit around long before tincturing them!
Do you have indigestion at bedtime? This is another example of why I like simples: peppermint is too stimulating for most people just before bed. But you could certainly make a peppermint tincture for other times of the day. I tincture peppermint at 55-60% alcohol, 1:2 ratio.
(If you have bedtime indigestion and trouble falling asleep, I suggest you look up Passionflower, and see if it seems right for you. IANADoctor and all…)
Yes, aromatherapy can be very effective with pets, but you need to pick up an aromatherapy for pets book; some of the specifics vary for different species. Lavender specifically is safe for dogs and humans, but I’m not sure about small pets or birds. Most essential oils are considered toxic to cats even in very small (single drop) doses. I don’t know enough about that to have an informed opinion about it.
Wow, I’m surprised at the number of responses! Dogzilla, no I’m not growiing Witch Hazel. I can get my hands on a plant, but I don’t want to have to kill it later. Taken internally the extract is good for varicose veins, which is what I want it for. Stevia and Pennyroyal sound good. I don’t have outside cats and I’m not interested in having kids, so no problems there. Also, I’ve already got bee balm in a mini greenhouse on my back porch. It’s commonly confused with Lemon Balm or Melissa. I’m not sure which uses are for which one. I’ve got a couple of herb books with different uses for it listed, but they are all somewhat different. I’ve concluded that it’s good for mild anxiety/stress relief and for sleep and for cold sores. Also, English Ivy is the devil.
Harmonious Discord, thanks for the food dehydrator suggestion. I hadn’t thought of that.
WhyNot, I don’t have ADD or anything, I only use Lemon Balm for sleep. On occasion I take a capsule to ward off stress before work or school. Having it separate from the valerian and chamomile is a fine idea–I hadn’t meant to mix ALL my herbs together, just to make one jar of it for bedtime. I was mostly using the peppermint as an example, but yes I occasionally do have indigestion that keeps me up at night. Barking dogs, cats, and thumping bunny rabbits keep me up as well. Making tincture will be simple enough; I have a huge surplus of jars that my aunt kept. Will they need to be refrigerated?
As far as the pets go, I have a dalmatian who FREAKS OUT in thunderstorms and at fireworks, and I’m hoping that a little lavender can help. The cats also could use some help getting settled down at bedtime, which is their favorite time to play with jingly things. The rabbits will be separated from any smells of course because most anything that smells is bad for them. I assume the same for birds as well.
Anybody have any tips as far as growing specific herbs? All my culinary herbs in the tiny greenhouse have sprouted, but the lavender and spearmint have not. I suppose they just need some more time, but any hints would be appreciated. Thanks to all who responded, I appreciate it muchly!
Nope. As long as you’re following the ratios given in a respectable herbal medicine making book, you’ll be fine. The finished product should have at least 20% alcohol, which is good enough to preserve it indefinitely* without refrigeration. Do keep it away from light though, preferably in a dark amber or green bottle. I particularly love Grolsch style beer bottles - they’re easy to open and close, air tight, and fun to empty of their beer, to boot! (Though if you don’t like to drink beer, you can get empties at stores that sell home brewing supplies.)
If you enjoy the process, I highly recommend The Herbal Medicine-makers’ Handbook. Very well written and it doesn’t assume a whole lot of previous knowledge, but it’s not dumbed down, either.
*I think most tinctures have about a 5-10 year expiration date because to sell something, it has to have a date on it; I’ve got 15 year old tinctures that are just fine.
I’m in New Zealand so my advice probably won’t be much help. But this year we have used really good topsoil & even herbs I’ve always had trouble with like parsley (blush!) and chives are growing well.
Lemon balm is also good chopped in a salad or on fresh fish.