| Planning the site and layout
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Choose as sunny a site as possible (6 to 8 hours of full sun a day), to encourage your plants to produce the essential oils that give them their flavour.
Tucking herbs into a vegetable garden is a good way to add variety and will protect your crops from insect pests. You can also plant them in formal or informal beds, place them in borders or grow them in pots on a balcony or patio.
Most herbs require rich, loose, well-drained soil with a neutral or slightly alkaline pH. You can improve the quality of your soil by adding compost or well-decomposed manure and peat moss.
A number of species can be sown directly outdoors in spring, as soon as the ground warms up.
Others should be planted from seedlings started earlier indoors or propagated from stem cuttings or by division.
Transplant the seedlings outdoors once all risk of frost is past and after you have hardened them off gradually by placing them outdoors for a few hours each day for ten days.
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