Grow Your Own Thyme
By Vanessa Richins
Every garden should include some herbs.
These complement your fruits and vegetables, allowing you to add lots of flavor in a healthy way.
One perennial herb that is easy to grow is thyme.
It’s used for many meat and vegetable dishes, as well as in stuffing and soups. Even if you don’t have much room outdoors, you can put a pot on the windowsill.
There’s a wide variety of thyme available. Choices include English, lemon, orange, Caribbean, creeping and silver thyme. When I worked at a water conservation garden, the harvest sextion included a thyme lawn. The varieties were chosen by when the flowers bloomed, so that throughout the summer, there would be blooms.
You will need a location that provides full sun. Use the windowsill if you are growing your thyme indoors, since light is drastically less than outdoors.
There are two ways to start new thyme plants. You can plant seeds in a pot, then barely cover them with soil. Carefully water them until they germinate, since the seeds are just below the soil. Older thyme plants can be divided to produce new starts.
Thyme is a plant that doesn’t like “wet feet”. Don’t water your plants until the soil feels dry on top. Give it a liquid fertilizer twice a month starting in late spring and continuing throughout summer.
Once your thyme plant has had a chance to grow and establish itself (a few months), you can start harvesting. The leaves are the part that are usually used, although you can also use the flowers. Don’t use the whole plant, though, as the plant needs to be able to perform photosynthesis still.
Do you grow your own thyme?
August 3rd, 2009 at 4:59 am
Hi, Vanessa!
Thank you for reading my article about growing Thyme and including me in your source list!