Tower Herb Garden: Tips for Planting

For me, how to start an outdoor herb garden are one of the essentials in my garden and my cooking. Mint, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil, parsley, and oregano are my favorites. I have lots of them right outside, handy in the kitchen. Because I have lots of room, they each have their own container. Others reside in the garden – chives, garlic, more thyme and parsley, and a few others.

But not everyone has space or uses a lot of herbs. A tower herb garden is an efficient and beautiful way to grow a selection of your favorite herbs in a relatively small space.

Strawberry pots make useful upright containers not only for a small crop of strawberries, but for flowering annuals or a small herb garden. These pots, supplied by most garden centers, have several pockets or openings for placing plants in a vertical array.

How to start an outdoor herb garden

 


Using a strawberry pot for a small tower herb garden has several benefits. You can grow most of your favorite herbs, one to each opening or pocket. It can be placed on a balcony or on a patio near the kitchen for easy harvesting. You could even bring it inside as the weather turns cold, so you have fresh herbs for your culinary creations throughout the winter months.

Like anyhow to start an outdoor herb garden container-grown plant, the weight of the pot, and the dirt can make moving the container difficult. Another problem often found in using strawberry pots for the novice user is in watering the plants. Bottom plants often do not receive enough water, while the top openings can leak water and be quite messy.

Creating your tower herb garden

First of all, set a piece of a broken clay pot or something similar over the bottom drainage hole so the soil does not leach out. Set a layer of styrofoam chips or plastic chunks in the bottom for drainage that does not add weight. This should make the container lighter to move.

The next thing to prepare for is watering your tower herb garden. This can easily be solved by inserting a column reservoir in the center of the pot. Depending on the size of your strawberry pot, a 2-liter plastic milk jug can be just the ticket for this. I’ve found that a length of 2-inch PVC pipe with a sealed bottom is the very best solution as it can be cut to whatever length you need- more on this later.

If you’re using a bottle, discard the bottle cap. Punch or drill holes all over the jug or bottle – down the sides and along the bottom. Don’t make these too large — you want the water to drip out slowly into the soil at all levels, not rush out quickly.

Attach a short piece of hose to the bottleneck, inserted into the jug and secured with duct tape. You will want this long enough to rise above the level of the soil you add so water can be easily added.

Now, place the jug into the center of the strawberry pot and start adding potting soil. As you come to level with the pockets, gently insert the plants, taking care to spread out the roots and cover them with soil. Continue adding herbs and earth until you reach the top.

If you’re using the PVC pipe, make sure it’s a little longer than the container’s height. Seal the bottom, and drill holes along the pipe so water can leak out. Set it in the center, and fill the soil around the bottom to hold it in place. As you add soil and plants, make sure to keep it centered. The top should rise above the final soil level by at least an inch.

As you place your herbs, take into consideration the best placement. Make sure trailing ones will not cover ones that are more compact, and plant taller ones like chives and rosemary in the top opening. Keep invasive ones like mint in their own containers!

You may want to include marjoram, basil, thyme, parsley, and sage in the pockets, along with some edible flowers like nasturtiums and pansies.

Can’t find a strawberry pot? Here’s a really easy way to make a tower for herbs, using 3 unglazed clay pots in graduated sizes and 2 large plastic pots. 

 

Then, sit back and enjoy your harvest of fresh herbs from your tower herb garden all year long!

Find out more about herbs, how to grow them, and how to preserve them in my Kindle book, Growing Culinary Herbs. Now updated, with a new section revealing 5 ways you can have a home herb business of your own!


Looking for Vegetable Garden Design Ideas?

What kind of a vegetable garden design would best suit your needs?

Likely, it will depend on where you live, what kind of soil you have, and even the space that’s available for planting your vegetables.

Find out 16 great vegetable garden design ideas, thanks to Safer, to open your imagination to a bunch of gardening methods you may not have thought of.


Traditionally, we expect a plot of land, rows of veggies with pathways between, and maybe a trellis for peas and beans. Planting an in-ground garden is a lot cheaper, and once you’ve prepared the area and soil over time, it takes a lot less start-up work. However, settling on a traditional garden design has some problems.

  • Not everyone has a readily available space.
  • You have pests and weeds to contend with.
  • The soil can become compacted.
  • Maybe you’re in a condo, an apartment, or a townhouse. No space there for a traditional vegetable garden.

No matter where you live, or how much space you have, if you want to grow your own veggies, there’s away.

Did you find some ideas that you’d never thought of?

Hugelkultur was a new word for me – although I walk right by an example of it on my morning walk. The Keyhole design is similar to pit or trench composting and easy to add to either a raised bed or an in-ground garden.

 

Carrots grow well in almost any garden – even containers!

Raised beds, container gardens and plant pyramids are three design ideas I use, depending on different locations in the yard.

For anyone with limited space, vertical growing methods and container gardening are easily adapted to a small yard, a patio, or even a balcony. By matching the plant to the pot size, you’re almost unlimited in what you can grow in containers. Make use of the vertical space on a garage wall or a fence to attach planters for leafy greens, strawberries, and herbs.

Which vegetable garden design ideas can you see yourself using this year, or in the future?


Winter Gardening

Its nice to have a season where the outdoor work is minimal – just a little bit of clean-up to finish, and the occasional foray into the vegetable garden for winter vegetables. But even in the winter months, there are things to enjoy and marvel at in the garden.

Here on the west coast, we have gone through the wettest November in over 100 years.  the rains brought floods to several towns on Vancouver Island, but it also built up the aquifers that were strained after a very dry summer and gave gardens a good deep watering to get them back on track. Now in early December is experiencing cold dry clear days, with temperatures about ten degrees below normal.

In my gardens, I’ve just dug up the last carrots to store for the winter. The Swiss chard and kale seem to thrive quite well in this weather, and we have been enjoying their fresh greens quite frequently. The parsley also loved that November rain and I’m sure I have enough to keep a restaurant stocked with it all winter! My perennial herbs – thyme, rosemary, oregano, and sage – are still green and producing enough for my winter soups and stews. I’m not sure how long the oregano will last, but I’ve dried enough to get by until spring.

In the flower gardens, the last calendulas have just succumbed to the cold weather and looked so pitiful I removed most of them today. They have been blooming prolifically, on two-foot-high bushy plants ever since mid-August. (I was a bit late with the seeding). My pot of nasturtiums is also finding this weather too much, and it was another one I had to cut back and add to the compost today. Like the calendulas, it has been a mass of golds, deep bronze, and bright orange blossoms all summer and fall.

 

Nasturtiums Just Keep On Blooming

How to start an outdoor herb garden last bloomer in my gardens is usually the tall late chrysanthemum that my mother-in-law gave me several years ago. Over the spring and summer, it grows from the base to at least three or four feet, bushy and green. From one small clump, I now have several large ones, great background fillers in the flower garden. In November the buds that have formed start to open, and for a month or more I enjoy gorgeous bronze-rust flowers, with gold on the underside of the petals. They make a wonderful cut flower, bringing color back into the house when there are no other blooms in the garden.