Growing a Kitchen Herb Garden

Our family cooks our meals two days in advance.  We spend about and hour cooking for two days, which frees up a lot of time not having to prepare food throughout the day or worry about what we will be eating.  Using herbs to flavor our food is important when eating clean, so we added a little herb garden to our studio apartment.

Budget:  $40-$80

1. Finding a location for your garden is the most important part.  A ledge, shelf, counter top, separate table all work fine. Without sufficient lighting in our studio, we installed two fluorescent lights under the kitchen cabinets for $14 a piece from IKEA.  We also bought a light timer from Walmart for $4 and set that to be on for 18 hours and off for 6 (plants do best with 6 hours of darkness).

2. To find a container we went to Marshalls and found two red metal containers for $20. Try to avoid wood or anything that absorbs water.  If the metal container you find does not have drainage, you can solder some drainage holes along the back about an inch from the bottom.  This will prevent extra water from constantly leak out, but will let excess water

Sage, Basil, Mint, Oregano, Rosemary

escape if necessary.

3. For soil we selected a $5 organic blend at the nursery for convenience, but you can collect from your yard or elsewhere.  We gathered a few pounds of large rocks from the desert during an afternoon hike and placed the rocks on the bottom of the metal containers before adding soil.  This helps with drainage and also makes it possible to use less soil for each container.

4.  Our herbs are from a local organic nursery and include the most common plants that we cook with.  If you buy seeds or small starter plants they each cost about $2-3 each.  Assess your own cooking preferences before buying herbs and buy what you most commonly use.  When cooking with your fresh herbs, use 3-4 times as much fresh herb when a recipie calls for dried.  For example if you need 1 teaspoon of dried basil, you can substitute 3-4 teaspoons of chopped fresh basil from your herb garden.  Happy growing!