6 Easy-to-Grow Herbs for Your Garden

Calendula

Also called Pot Marigold, this plant is commonly found in herbal gardens. Calendula is a sticky and resinous herb that has bright orange and yellow flowers that bring sunshine into your life just by looking at it, even if the sun isn’t around. The unique curly seeds are easy to start indoors or outside, and readily reproduces outdoors annually for a lifetime of blooms. And it’s a good thing, because the petals are edible and really jazz up your salads. The petals are also commonly used as a natural dye for fabrics and the flower heads are often included in skincare products.

Chamomile

Walking into your garden and getting a whiff of that sweet, relaxing Chamomile scent is a game changer! This bunchy plant can easily create a meadow, giving those English garden vibes in your beds or in larger containers. It has tiny daisy flowers, feathery leaves you’ll want to run your fingers over, and an Apple-like flavor for your teas. Chamomile is also used in herbalism as an essential oil. It’s color is surprisingly dark blue due to its phytochemical make-up containing chamazulene, which is also in Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) and Yarrow (Achillea millefolium). While both German Chamomile and Roman Chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile) are used in herbalism, we are referring to the German variety.*

Garlic

Did you know that this spicy culinary herb is used in herbalism? It’s fun to plant as each clove turns into its own bulb! Plant in the fall or early spring, depending on your location and desired harvest time. Grab a whole bulb from your favorite nursery or seed company, and gently break off each individual clove like you would for cooking. Push them a couple inches into the soil with the thicker end or side closest to the roots of the bulb on the bottom.

Before harvesting the bulbs in the mid to late summer, if you choose hardneck varieties, enjoy the curly scapes in early summer. You can cook them or let them flower for a stunning globe-like purple flowers, but cutting the scape off when curled encourages larger bulbs. In a pinch, grocery store Garlic can work too, but those are usually softneck varieties without scapes, that store longer and have more, but smaller cloves.

Lemon Balm

Every herbalist, budding or not, needs some vibrant green Lemon Balm in their garden! It lives up to its name with its pleasing lemony scent and flavor. In the Mint family, this herb similarly grows in a bushy shape and is strongly aromatic. Like Calendula, once you grow this plant, it’ll never leave your garden (and your herbal toolkit). If you harvest it just before flowering, you’ll be lucky to get a second harvest later in the season but this generous plant is so prolific, you probably won’t need one!

Peppermint

We all know this one! Did you know this herb is a hybrid cross, noted by the “x” in the botanical name, between Spearmint and Water Mint varieties? Because of the different phytochemical makeup, Peppermint has a spicier (hence the “Pepper” in its name), more cooling flavor than sweeter Spearmint. To distinguish it from Spearmint, the Peppermint leaves are generally darker green with reddish veins. Its roots notoriously spread by rhizomes, so it’s commonly advised to plant this quick-growing one in a pot.

Yarrow

At up to 3.5 ft high, Yarrow is the tallest growing of the herbs listed. This plant tends to creep in the soil, so much that some even use this plant as a groundcover to replace lawns because it rapidly spreads by rhizome like Peppermint. To keep it on the downlow, it can easily be maintained with a lawnmower. If you choose to let it do its thing, you can enjoy its multitude of tiny white flowers grouped into what looks like one big flower and its herbaceous scent. It gets its species name millefolium, from its “millions of leaves” that almost look like tiny feathers or ferns. It and other varieties are also commonly used in floral arranging.