Course 12 | Backyard Gardening and Cultivation

Growing your own medicinal herbs is one of the most rewarding ways to work with herbs and it is an empowering way to engage deeply with your own healing process. This course gives you the knowledge and skills to develop your herbal garden, regardless of whether you are starting at the beginning or looking to expand on your abilities as a herb gardener. After completing this course you will be able to plan and create a garden, select the best plants for your garden, assess and improve soil health, propagate new plants by various techniques, and harvest and dry medicinal plants.

 This course is grounded in the understanding that, as humans, we are part of an ecological web. We discuss various relationships within the garden – including human-plant relationships and the relationships between plants and soil-based organisms. The tools offered are based on organic methods and informed by the principles and ethics of permaculture, which are explained in our discussion on garden design. 

You are shown how to assess your potential garden space and design and plan your herb garden. We discuss considerations for establishing a garden and choosing materials to use for building garden beds and for pathways. In order to create a healthy organic garden, we build your knowledge of soil including the physical and biological aspects of soil health. We discuss soil in-depth and learn about soil testing, including skills you can use at home, as well as soil amendments, mulching, and how to compost effectively.

We explore plant life cycles and how to research for plant selection. We look in detail at multiple methods for propagating plants and provide you access to video demonstrations as well as detailed instructions with written and visual aids to help you apply your knowledge and build your skills in the garden. We look at some specific examples of herbs to grow as well as more general procedures that can be applied to any herb you wish to grow. 

We discuss medicinal weeds in the garden and learn how to make use of them to improve your garden health in addition to human health. While our focus is on outdoor gardens we also cover herbs for growing indoors and container gardening. Finally, we go into detail about how and when to harvest medicinal herbs and how to dry and store them for future use, completing the cycle and giving you the knowledge for herb gardening from start to finish. 

By the end of the course, you will have the ability to: 

• Plan a medicinal herb garden.
• Research plants to obtain all needed information about successful cultivation. 
• Plan herbal cultivation and harvest according to plant life cycles. 
• Propagate and maintain various categories of herbs. 
• Understand propagation skills including seeding, stem cuttings, root cuttings, divisions, and transplanting.
• Amend soil for plant growth.
• Conduct a basic soil test. 
• Create new garden beds. 
• Recognize and utilize under-appreciated garden ‘weeds’.
• Select herbs for container gardening and indoor gardening. 
• Harvest medicinal herbs for use.
• Grow specific select plants.