An herb garden can be quite useful, it can add beauty to your yard as well as provide flavoring for your meals and treatment for minor ailments. But how do you go about planting one? Should you put the herbs in with your flowers or have them separate? Do they need summer shade? What do herbs look like?

An herb garden can be planted pretty much anywhere. In fact, herbs are pretty easy to grow and if you have a flower garden now you will find that you have no problem keeping a herb garden. That having been said, you do want to do a little bit of planning to give them the best chance possible.

The first thing to do to is set aside some space for growing your herbs. It's nice if it can be accessible to your kitchen door so you can rush out and snap off some basil and then throw it into your pot of spaghetti sauce, however this is not imperative. What's most important is that you provide enough room for the plants because, since they are hardy, they can easily become overgrown. So you want to make sure each plant has enough room.

Plant your herbs in sections leaving about a foot of space for each section. Just like flowers, herbs will look better when they are planted in groups. You can intermingle them with your flower garden if you want - they actually look quite nice this way. Just be sure to give them enough room; you may have to thin them out during the season so that they don’t take over the garden and steal all the nutrients from your flowers.

Plant them in an area of full sun or, if your particular herb likes partial shade, then make sure you adhere to the requirements of the plant. Make sure that the soil has good drainage and mix in some compost. You don't want the soil to be too dry, although most herbs will do well in a dry environment. Make sure the water holds some moisture but no standing water.

Nobody likes weeding, so make sure to mulch heavily or lay down some of that landscape fabric that keeps the weeds from popping up. You definitely don't want to use any kind of chemical weed killer as you don't want at risk of getting these chemicals on your herbs which you are planning to eat later. The same goes for pesticides - stick to organic methods only.

You can grow anything you want in your herb garden, but usually it's a good idea to grow the herbs that you use in cooking or for medicinal purposes. Even so, herbs can just look pretty too, and you might just want to grow them just to look at.