Make Room for Thyme in Your Herb Garden
Call me crazy, but if you do not have thyme growing in your garden you can’t call it an herb garden. It’s one of the most necessary and helpful plants around. It helps that there are more than a hundred unique varieties with tempting flavors and smells.
Regardless of which variety of thyme you choose, all of them have a woody, twig like stem and little oval-shaped leaves. In early summer or late spring, depending on where you live, your thyme will blossom with tiny pink, lavender or white colored blooms.
It’s good to be familiar with the following three varieties of thyme:
- Common Thyme: This type of thyme is the one that fills most of the little seasoning jars you can get at the grocery store. This variety is bigger than the others and is great to bake with because of the bold aroma and taste. You can examine the leaves of this vaiety of thyme to decide which of the following 3 kinds it is. You can find that the French type has very narrow leaves as opposed to the German which has very broad leaves, and then there is the English variety which has variegated leaves.
- Lemon Thyme: You will never guess what lemon thyme smells like. If you cannot tell that that one out you might want to choose another hobby. Yes, lemon thyme has a heavy lemon scent that you can’t miss. You can even find some types of lemon thyme that have little yellow flowers.
- Wild Thyme: This variety of thyme isn’t usually planted for use in the kitchen, so do not believe that every thyme plant is the same. If you are seeking an unusual ground cover, this is a great starting point.
Using thyme is not hard, just clip off some leaves, chop them if necessary and add them in with your other ingredients. Thyme thrives on trimming back and there’s no better way to prune your herb than to cut some leaves for a delicious meal. Thyme is also found in cosmetic products that you can make at home. This herb can be used in all kinds of products from soaps and shampoos to potpourri or you can simply put some in your bath.
According to folks, thyme has a lot of healing uses too, including helping with digestion, soothing a cough, easing asthmatic breathing, helping with headaches, encouraging sleep and reducing flatulence. It seems like this herb does everything but dust the furniture.
This herb is one of the easiest plants to grow. This plant enjoys full-sun and well-drained, rich soil and can be raised indoors too. Because it takes a long time to germinate your plant (a long thyme), I suggest that you head on over to the home improvement store and buy a few herbs for your garden. This herb has a pretty sculptural quality and looks nice in an outdoor rock garden, on a patio or along a stone wall.
If you don’t want to bother with taking your thyme inside for the cold months, you can dry it by snipping off each branch at the stem and hanging it upside down.
It’s always a good thought to keep the seeds from your thyme herb. Believe it or not, your thyme can even be used in germination up to three years later.
Good luck with your herb gardening. Be sure to let me know how your herb garden grows.
Here is more information on Herb Garden Plants. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Herb Gardens.
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