It’s Good to Be Home: How to Make a Patio Herb Garden

Welcome back, friends to our monthly blog hop, “It’s Good to Be Home”. Every month, a few of my friends and I meet you here to share all types of home inspiration. Thanks for joining us!

Not only am I a beginner veggie gardener, I’m also a newbie with planting and using herbs.

After we completed our diy pea gravel patio this summer, I felt like a patio herb garden would be a great addition. Not only would I have fresh herbs convenient from the kitchen, but I could also take this as an opportunity to learn to preserve herbs for cooking and medicinal purposes.

Here’s how I made my patio herb garden

Naturally, the first thing to do was remove the grass from the area and prepare the soil for planting.

We borrowed a small tiller to speed up the process of removing the grass and breaking up the soil.

After that, I placed the plants where I wanted them, I got them planted, being careful to put the correct tags with each one. As a newbie herb gardener, I still get some of them confused lol!

I’ve learned that it’s a good idea to wet the soil before planting, but I also watered each of the plants well after they were in the ground. Because herbs love lots of sun, mine have done very well their first year in their new home. I realize that some of them may eventually grown out of this space, but that’s ok. I can always transplant them in another area of the yard.

Here are the herbs I chose to plant in my patio herb garden

I have two of each of the plants, one plant on each side of the patio step. That patio step was also a diy. It didn’t go as planned but it worked out ok 🙂 That’s the life of a DIYer, right? Some projects go as planned and some do not. But you learn so much in the process.

I’ve been using fresh basil in my Italian dishes. I’ve still got lots to learn about what herb is good for what type of dish. But it’s been fun experimenting.

We’ve also been dehydrating some of the herbs to have them on hand year round.

We purchased a food dehydrator several years ago and it works like a charm for drying our herbs.

There are three baskets in the dehydrator, so you can either dry lots of one herb, or dry several different herbs at one time.

We’ve learned during the drying process that it’s a good idea to rotate the baskets every few minutes. This keeps the one on the bottom from getting too dry.

Once the herbs were dried, we crumbled them up and add them to small glass jars.

We also added labels to the jars so we will know for certain what herb is in each jar. By the way, did you know that parsley and cilantro look very much alike? Somewhere along the way we thought we were growing Cilantro. Needless to say, I had to change that label to Parsley lol.

It’s been so much fun this summer learning about gardening. There’s still so much to learn and so much to do, but we are enjoying the process. We have plans to expand our garden area and even get chickens in the spring. So I guess you’ll be seeing a DIY chicken coop soon too 🙂

Don’t forget to hop on over to see what my friends are sharing today for “It’s Good to Be Home”

The Ponds Farmhouse

Robyn’s Southern Nest

My Weathered Home

Southern Spangled

The Frugal Homemaker

At Home in the Wildwood