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Kitchen Herb Garden
Identify What You Eat
Decide which herbs you really use in the kitchen. There's little or no sense growing an herb you'll never use on a regular basis. Just because some cooking show says to use lots of fennel, if you can't stand the licorice taste, there's no point in wasting garden space.
Not only do you have to figure out what you eat, but you have to identify how much you'll require. There's little sense in growing several dozen basil plants if you only use it once or twice or three different kinds of thyme if you use less than a small pinch or two once a month.
As a very rough rule of thumb, calculate that a single plant will give you a small jar (the small jars in grocery stores) of that herb in a season. Calculate the number of jars you need and then grow that many plants.
Near The Door
It only makes sense to grow a kitchen garden as close to the kitchen door as possible.
That way when you need a few snips of chives or garlic chives for a salad, you only have to take a step or two outdoors and you're in business.
Here are two other thoughts. The first is that you don't require a dedicated herb garden to grow a great kitchen herb garden. You can tuck annual herbs in sunnier spots between or at the back of shrubs or perennial flowers. The second is that growing herbs in containers is quite simple and a collection of clay pots each growing a specific annual herb is quite a growing, gardening, fashion statement. Plus it makes it easy to have an herb garden very near to the back door.
Growing Conditions
Successful kitchen herb gardening is done in the sun.
Herbs really don't grow well in the shade and oil contents in the leaves are lower when the plant is not exposed to the hot, direct sun.
All the rules for successful herb growing apply to growing in the kitchen herb garden.
Feeding herbs is one of those interesting things. If you overfeed an herb, it will get soft and not have a very good flavor. My rule of thumb on this is to not feed perennial herbs at all. They get what they get if the rest of the garden is fed. I always give annual herbs in the garden a shovel of compost in the spring and that's the end of that. Container grown herbs get fed half strength fertilizer once a week or so.
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