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There are a lot of reasons to plant a culinary herb garden, but the greatest and most obvious is that you'll get great free herbs when you need them.

Buying herbs from a store is okay, but once you've a culinary herb garden you will never desire to go back to this. There some critical things to figure out before you start planning.

Where you place you culinary herb garden is vital. It needs to be suitable for you when cooking, close to the kitchen door has got to be the ideal pot. The location must gets plenty of light. Although many herbs will grow anywhere it does not mean that they'll be tasty. If the herbs don't get enough sun they will grow long weak branches as they attempt to stretch to find the best light. These will be lacking in the vital oils which give the herbs their flavour.

Try not to put your herb garden anywhere excessively prominent or make it too much of a feature in your garden. The trouble with this is that when you start using the herbs and cutting at them, they go through phases where they look at bit battered and abused and although it will not affect you plants, you may not want your guests looking at them and offering unrelated advice.

Soil, this is an important factor also. If your soil is lacking in nutrients you may be best off mixing through some quality compost before planting your garden.

Now you've a good location, suitable light and the right soil. Next you need to decide on what you are going to plant in your culinary herb garden.

Herbs fall into three fundamental categories; herbaceous, evergreen and annuals. The evergreens are magnificent, they're hardy and will just keep on going. These will need pruning minimum once a year, but hopefully you'll be using them always and the job will be done as you go. With these plants it is important to make sure that once the stalks begin to become woody that you cut them back. These stalks will produce bit new growth and will keep light away from the excellent tasty branches underneath.

The herbaceous plants need to be cut back completely in winter. This is easier than you think; simply chop it off at the grown there're no pruning strategies needed for these plants.

Finally you've the annuals. These are slightly harder to manage. When planting annuals it's worth planting quite a few plants a few weeks apart to ensure that you've adequate leaves when you need them. Once the herb produces flowers it will no longer provide you leaves, and may never do so again. So use and enjoy these herb when they offer you their leaves and expect to have to keep planting more.

Now you only need to head down to your gardening centre to get your culinary herb garden up and running and start enjoying the new tastes of your garden.