Italian food is all about the spices. You start out with your base of pasta and then add flavorful sauces full of tomatoes, cheese, and fragrant herbs. Whether you are replicating the cooking your grandmother did or just love the hearty aroma of Italian cooking, you know that you need the proper flavors from an Italian herb garden in order to make the right dishes. There are many herbs that make up the Italian canon. These include: basil, garlic, rosemary, thyme, parsley, sage, fennel, chives, and oregano. You can spend a lot of money and buy these herbs fresh or dried from the store, or you can grow your own garden in a planter right in your kitchen no matter where you live, be it in the country or in a small city apartment, but there are some secrets to a bountiful Italian herb garden that one should know.
Italian herbs are not all that different from any other type of plant you want to grow in your container garden. They need the right amount of sunlight, the best type of soil, adequate water and drainage in order to flourish. The requirements for an Italian herb garden may vary from species to species, but these are the basic components of any happy plant. Drainage is especially important -and unfortunately often neglected- so ensure that your planter has holes at the bottom for excess water to drip out.
As you set up your herb garden planter, you should pair herbs that have similar growing requirements. Did you know that rosemary likes a hot climate whereas parsley enjoys a colder environment? As a result, rosemary and parsley would not do well in the same container. However, if you want to know the secret of abundance of basil and garlic here it is: the two herbs have very similar soil and sunlight needs, therefore you should grow them in the same pot.
Some herbs love to spread wildly, for example thyme, a favorite of any Italian herb garden, will continue to grow until there is no soil left and it will choke out all the other herbs, therefore thyme should definitely be given its own container.
Once you have set up your Italian herb garden planter and the herbs are growing nicely, the secret to keeping them abundant is to regularly harvest them. By harvesting the ends of your herbs it stimulates new growth and also you have the added bonus of obtaining a large amount of fresh oregano available for adding to the pasta sauce or for freezing. You can also keep your supply of Italian herbs steady by taking cuttings from mature plants about once every two months and re-potting them as this ensures that your Italian herb garden is growing and also that you will have replacement herbs when some die off. For instance, basil takes about three months to reach its best harvesting growth and when cut off it then takes about three months to grow back, therefore one should always keep three pots of basil growing in rotation so that there is plenty for your pizza.
Once you gain some real life experience with growing an Italian herb garden in planters you will see that producing bountiful herbs is not really so secret after all, they are just commonsense tips that allow you to create and maintain the best growing environment for your Italian herb garden.
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