Why Interplanting Herbs Is BETTER Than Growing An Herb Garden

In this video, I explain why interplanting herbs is better than growing an herb garden. Growing herbs is important to flavor your favorite foods, but many herbs have special properties that are beneficial to your garden and yard. Growing herb gardens is a bad idea, because it isolates the plants. Interplant herbs and spread them around your yard and garden instead!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 The Benefits Of Growing Herbs
1:20 Benefit #1: Naturally Repel Pests
2:38 Benefit #2: Invasive Herbs
4:42 Benefit #3: Grow Healthier Plants
6:17 Benefit #4: Ground Cover & Weed Prevention
7:33 Benefit #5: Landscaping
9:24 How To Plant Herbs Strategically
12:52 Adventures With Dale

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#gardening #garden #gardeningtips #herbgarden #herbgardening

What’s growing on gardeners it’s Sunday January 14th and it is a beautiful winter afternoon here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina one of the most common Gardens found in people’s backyards are herb gardens but what if I told you that growing an herb garden is a total waste of time and

Space in fact if I could do things all over again I would never grow an herb garden again instead I would interplant herbs around my yard and garden and on today’s video I’m going to share with you five reasons why in planting herbs is a way better way of growing them if

You’re new to the Channel Please Subscribe and hit the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon store and spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated herbs are

Foundational to making food taste good so it is critical that any Gardener with a decent amount of space grow herbs in their Garden however it has become very common to take all of the herbs and cluster them together into a single bed or segregate them into a single section

Of the garden and this is a dramatic mistake that is because most herbs have very special beneficial properties that you should spread all over your yard and garden and not cluster them all together into one defined area where you can’t take advantage of those properties let me tell you exactly what I’m talking

About the first reason why you should interplant herbs all over your yard and garden instead of clustering them together in a simple herb garden is because the scent of herbs repels insect pests oregano rosemary thyme mint Sage basil Dill parsley lavender chives garlic fennel green onions and more have

All been shown to repel various insect pests they will keep insects away from your vegetables and fruit trees the insect repelling properties of herbs is well documented those flavors and Aromas that are concentrated in the oils of herbs that make them so valuable for our for cooking purposes well insects just

Can’t stand those scents and Aromas in fact if you’ve ever gone out and you’ve purchased those natural insect repellants you’ll find that a lot of them contain various oils from different herbs in fact a lot of the insect repellants are actually scented to smell like herbs so when you cluster all of

Those herbs together in a simple herb garden what you’re doing is you’re concentrating all those smells to a segregated area but when you spread them out all over your yard and garden you you can establish a perimeter of those different odors so it’s almost like in many ways covering your entire yard and

Garden with insect repellent reason number two why it’s better to interplant herbs around your yard and garden instead of growing a concentrated herb garden is because most herbs are actually quite invasive the plant that you see right here is a little German th plant that I bought maybe 4 years ago

From Home Depot for a few dollars it was in a cup this big and look how it is spread and taken over half of this entire 4T X 10t raised bed I cut this back numerous times a year and it just keeps spreading and spreading and taking

Over and taking over and it’s not just time that does this oregano does the same thing and Heaven help you if you ever plant something like mint in a raised bed because you’re going to lose that entire raised bed to Mint you could also run into this problem with Ros Mar

Sage lavender they just tend to spread and spread and take over an area so if you grow these things in a segregated raised bed herb garden you’re only going to be able to fit a few in there and you’re going to have a nightmare of maintenance on your hands a better

Smarter more space efficient way to grow herbs is to plant them in the understory underneath your fruit trees or your other taller landscaping plants and this is for numerous reasons that time that you just saw spreading taking over that entire raised garden bed that I basically lost to plant anything else in

That bed I sure wish I would have planted it underneath these two apple trees instead so what would happen is because the apple trees are Dee rooted whereas the thyme is fairly shallow rooted The Roots wouldn’t really compete with each other very much but the thyme plant would spread out and sprawl out

Underneath the apple trees so they would basically grow in Harmony and when you do that remember the smell of the time it tends to push most insect pests away so I would have not only a better more efficient use of space by planting that thme plant with my apple trees but the

Scent would actually keep a lot of the pests away from the apple trees when they start flowering and fru so it would be a winwin more space efficient and a natural insect repellent reason number three why interplanting herbs instead of growing them in a defined herb garden is

Better is because the herbs themselves will actually be healthier let me explain let’s say that I planted my oregano or My Rosemary or my thyme or lavender or something else that’s pretty cold hard and spreading underneath my apple trees what would happen well these are all cold hearty herbs that can take

Pretty hard freezes but they tend to struggle quite a bit once the heat of the summer comes I can tell you my Rosemary gets beaten up my time tends to go to flour my oregano tends to go to flower they don’t like sitting in direct sunshine when it gets really hot but if

I planted them underneath these deciduous fruit trees what would happen well in the middle of summer when these deciduous fruit trees are all leafed out they would effectively be shading all of these plants at some point during the day keeping a lot of the hot sun off of

Them so all of these herbs would grow better in the summer then as the sun gets weaker and weaker and lower in the sky in the fall and winter these deciduous trees would naturally lose all of their leaves so as the leaves fall then the plants will get full sun in the

Winter when they need it because they’re Evergreen and they will keep growing now in full sunlight and you will also get a little bit of cold resistance Because the actual limbs of the tree will act as a bit of a canopy and block some of the

Frost to the cold hearty herbs so you’d be creating this wonderful microclimate for your herbs they’d be cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter and again more space efficient and they will be repelling insects in the process raise your hand if you love pooling

Weeds I’m sure that one of you did just out of spite and maybe one of you out there genuinely does like weeding your yard and garden but the overwhelming majority of us don’t and that brings me to point number four why interplanting herbs is better than growing a dedicated

Herb garden and that is because these herbs can be used as a living ground cover to suppress weeds let’s go back to this time plant look at how dense this is there is no way that any weeds can grow in this ground cover it would suffocate any weed seed that happened to

Germinate so for this reason this is like growing a living ground cover that will completely suffocate any weed in any area that you planted around so again you can use this to strategically plant them underneath fruit trees and basically never have to worry about weeds germinating around them again just

Look at this oregano plant right here this has been growing in this pot for 6 years now and every year I cut it back multiple times and it just grows back thicker and thicker how do you expect any kind of weed to germinate in that Thicket right there it is so dense that

Where you have this growing in the understory pretty much nothing else but this plant can grow it’s just going to outcompete anything else and reason number five why it’s better to interplant herbs instead of growing a dedicated herb garden is they make great foundational plantings around your home

That are very functional now here you have the west facing wall of my house and this only gets about 2 hours or so of sunlight in the winter and 3 hours in the summer you’ll see it’s almost 3:00 p.m. and I’m completely in the shade up

Against my house and one of the problems that I’ve had is I haven’t found any kind of useful plants to plant around this West wall because it is just too shady but hey that is exactly where herbs can play a role because of the lack of sun I can’t plant anything that

Flowers there’s just not enough energy to support anything that flowers and fruits so all I can pretty much grow here are things that are evergreen then it hit me what’s a great Evergreen food that I could grow any kind of herb so what you see right here is Rosemary and

This has been growing on protected outside for about 6 months now temperatures in the 20s don’t bother it at all and this is a wonderful strategic location for something like Rosemary because it gets so beat up in our incredibly hot humid Summers so all of this shade is going to protect it all

Summer long I wish I would have planted my oregano and thyme here because they get beaten up in the summer in fact I may just transplant my oregano finally out of that container and put it right here because this really shady spot that only gets 2 or 3 hours of Sun every

Single day is the perfect environment to grow a cold hearty green that tends to get beaten up in the Heat and the radiative warmth of the house itself that adds 5° of temperature protection in the cold so if we had a really bad freak freeze the house would actually

Protect it so this is one of those foolproof bulletproof locations that you should plant your cold hearty herbs insect repellent weed suppression space saving healthier plant there are so many reasons why herbs should be spread all around your yard and garden instead of just confined wasting their talents to a

Specific location spread them around and get all of the benefits throughout your yard and garden now many of you that watch my Channel all the time know that recently I purchased a homestead property in Florida for future development many years from now and although I won’t be there for several

Years the gears in my head are constantly turning with how I’m going to lay things out and as you also know Florida has a ton of insect pests just like we have here in the coastal Carolinas possibly more so how do you think I plan on laying out my eventual

Food Forest and yard and garden when I eventually relocate I intend to use the incredible insect reducing properties of herbs to my advantage so I would like to plant the spreading herbs underneath my fruit trees so for example it would be fruit tree bam oregano fruit tree bam

Rosemary fruit tree bam Sage fruit tree bam thyme fruit tree bam lavender etc etc and that way they will grow all throughout the year and they will keep the insect pests away and then the trees will also help them by keeping the sun off of them in the summer and the hard

Frost off of them in the winter then when it comes to the vegetable garden we can use non-invasive herbs to our advantage so if you can pretend that this bed was all planted out with something very susceptible to insect pests like tomatoes well you can interplant in between the different

Tomato plant plants things like green onions or leaks or garlic or chives or things like that that have pest resistant properties but won’t take over the entire area something like Dill cilantro parsley basil etc etc they’re grown more like annuals so they’re not going to take over a whole area like

Those other perennial herbs will underneath the fruit trees so if you lay things out properly you can have a garden that really has a lot of different herbs interplanted all around it with no negative consequences you get lots of benefits and it maximizes space efficiency and that is why interplanting

Herbs around your yard and garden is better than growing a defined confined herb garden there is so much more to herbs than just their edible characteristics and making our food taste better they are ground cover they are insect repellants and when you interplant them strategically and correctly around your yard and garden

Not only will you have to do less weeding have to chase after less bugs and you will have overall healthier herbs because they’ll be growing in a better microclimate but you will also have better space efficiency and use as well so hopefully this video really got the gears in your head turning and

You’re thinking a little bit differently instead of those conventional ways and you can think of a better way to use the space in your yard and garden and get more benefits out of the deal so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make

Sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification Bell so you’re notified when I release more videos like these if you have any questions about growing herbs please ask them down in the comments section below and if you want

To see everything I use in real life in my yard and garden to grow them I have everything I use linked down on my Amazon storefront Link in the video description so expand the video description click on the Amazon link and you’ll see everything I use in real life

And while you’re there check out my spread shop for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video oh boy look at this new Snake toy that we got for Dale

Uh-oh somebody wants to play he’s got it oh look at him he’s so strong you’re so tough ready Dale wait let’s see if you can catch oh almost got it buddy that was really tough that was hard to catch that was hard to catch he’s so strong he’s such a good handsome

Tugger nice catch buddy that was great