Herbs are well known for their culinary uses and their healing value. Maybe you’ve been using herbs in cooking and have decided you’d like to add some medicinal herbs to your garden. With plant sales coming up soon, here are some ideas for planning an herb garden that includes herbs to be used for healing purposes. Since many culinary herbs have medicinal properties, you may be surprised and pleased to see some of our suggested herbs already in your garden.
Most families, including their pets, typically deal with common ailments such as cuts and scrapes, infections, colds, coughs and sore throats, digestive issues, skin problems, and insomnia. Having some natural remedies available to soothe and treat these typical conditions, can save recovery time and healing anxiety. Here are some herbs that can be planted to help support addressing these ailments.
• Cuts and Scrapes: calendula, self-heal, and lavender.
• Infections: basil, calendula, echinacea, oregano, peppermint, and thyme.
• Colds, Coughs & Sore throats: German chamomile, echinacea, oregano, sage, thyme, and tulsi (holy basil).
• Digestion: catnip, German chamomile, peppermint, thyme
• Skin: calendula, chamomile, echinacea, lavender, and oregano.
• Insomnia: catnip, chamomile, lemon balm, peppermint, and tulsi.
All the perennial herbs can be planted once and will continue to provide healing help year after year. Some perennials are okay to start from seed, such as self-heal, catnip, and echinacea. Others, like oregano, sage, and thyme, are best started by getting a cutting or start from a friend, or picking up a plant from your local nursery.
Most of the perennial herbs will like a sunny area and won’t require too much water. If you’ve got a partly shady spot, lemon balm and peppermint will be fine and it will even help keep their typically vigorous growth down just a bit. All of these herbs have flowers that will make pollinators happy, too.
Annuals will need to be planted every year from seeds. They also like a sunny area but will need to be watered regularly. We grow many of the annuals listed here in our main garden, among our veggies. Many of the annuals will self-seed, like calendula and German Chamomile. Know that as you harvest the flowers for making herbal remedies, fewer seeds will be produced. So you may need to leave some flowers to produce seeds, or buy and plant seeds every year. You can also harvest the seeds and save them yourself.
The healing properties we look for in traditional, conventional medicines are the same for herbs. Here are some of the herbs found with those properties:
• Anti-bacterial: oregano, echinacea, lavender, lemon balm, and thyme
• Anti-viral: sage, basil, lemon balm, peppermint, echinacea, oregano, and thyme
• Calmative: catnip, German chamomile, lavender, and lemon balm
• Anti-septic: lavender, thyme, peppermint, and sage
Erin Harwood & Eloyce O’Connor
Erin Harwood & Eloyce O’Connor are co-owners of Garden Delights Herb Farm in Brush Prairie, WA, where they grow a variety of herbs for culinary, medicinal, pet, home, and garden use. They also offer classes.
For more info: http://www.gardendelightsfarm.com
