subject: Enhancing Your Garden With Fragrant Herbs [print this page] Few things are healthier than spending time outdoors, in the fresh air and unfiltered sunlight, working in a garden. This is perhaps the best and most valuable kind of exercise. What could make this experience even better? How about planting a wide selection of fragrant herb seeds, in addition to the veggies, fruits, and flowers you cultivate?
In addition to enlivening dishes and making excellent, healthy teas, fragrant herbs can be beneficial simply by emitting their wonderful fragrances. The best thing about planting an extensive crop of herb seeds is that all of these wonderful aromas compliment each other. The delicate sweetness of lavender is very different from the aggressive pungency of basil, garlic, or rosemary, but this doesnt mean that they clash. Marjoram, lemon balm, dill, parsley, and mint are all very different, as well. But when planted together, their distinctive scents blend very well. Indeed, herb seeds play nicely with each other!
In planting herb seeds youll diversify your food supply and also adding another useful dimension of self-sufficiency in other household necessities. Lavender can be used to perfume bath water, for instance, or as a room and carpet freshener. Lavender can be woven into floral arrangements. Rosemary is another good choice for indoor decorative purposes; it has a wonderful scent. Some people have started using rosemary bushes in the place of other holiday decorations during Christmas time.
Lemon balm is another good candidate you should consider when selecting herb seeds. It is among the most tenacious and aggressive of the herb plants, growing very fast and enduring frost very well. If you plant lemon balm youll need to trim it back frequently. Use the cuttings for herbal tea, or even for adding flavor to ice water.
Lemon balm thrives so well in most climates that it doesnt become fully dormant even in the dead of winter. Sometimes it remains defiantly verdant long after frost has drained the color from every other blossoming plant and the trees have shed their last leaves.
Whatever herb seeds you select, you wont be disappointed. They are very easy to grow and even easier to tend. And even a little effort will be rewarded with a delicious, fragrant harvest that will make your food taste better and your home smell terrific.
