Grow Lemon Balm and Let its Aroma Enrich Your Life

Are you anxious or under some serious stress? Using lemon balm is an excellent way to calm yourself. This aromatic herb has several other beneficial medicinal properties besides relaxation. Not only does it pep up your mood and spirits but it relaxes your mind, promotes sleep, improves digestion, reduces flatulence, and heals cuts and injuries on your body too. Its helps seal up wounds and in other words, it can make an excellent surgical dressing. You can rub lemon balm on your skin to repel mosquitoes and it can help heal bites of venomous creatures like scorpions. It even brings down fever, as it induces perspiration. These are just a few of the many of its uses. In fact, you can make a long list of its anti-viral and ant-bacterial properties as also its medicinal and cosmetic uses or its uses in the kitchen.

Growing Lemon Balm

From the mint family, lemon balm is a very plant easy to grow. You can either sow its seeds in a piece of land that is fertile and moist or grow it from stem-cuttings or root divisions. As the seeds are quite small, ensure that you cover them with a thin layer of rich soil so they do not blow away in the wind. You can use stem-cuttings taken from the plants in summer. If you use root divisions, it is best to do so in early fall or spring. See to it that each root- cutting has at least 3 or 4 buds. Space the plants about 2 feet apart to allow the necessary freedom for it to grow well. As with many plants, lemon balm takes more time to grow from seed than from cuttings. You will also have more success growing plants with more succulent leaves in shade than under bright direct sunlight.

In winter, if ground conditions are freezing cold, mulching the crowns will help. Proper irrigation, suitable fertilization with chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, prevention and removal of weeds, usage of organic and other controls for keeping away insects, adopting good cultural practices are some of the important aspects that will help you in harvesting healthy, disease-free, lemon balm. You need to cut off the decayed stalks and loosen the soil around the roots to allow faster growth. Trim the plants quite frequently so as to stimulate branching and to increase foliage.

They usually are in bloom from late spring to midsummer. The flowers are white or yellowish and attract bees. The leaves are oval or heart shaped, shiny and crenate. When fresh, lemon balm gives better fragrance than when dried.

You can harvest once or twice a week, once the plants start to bloom. Take care to avoid bruising the leaf during harvesting, as otherwise the quality of the product will suffer. Dry the harvested lemon balm outside, but in partial shade rather than directly under the sun. If there is moisture in the air at night, the lemon balm will turn brown. Alternatively, you can air dry it in your shed, or even oven dry it on screens. You need to store the dried balm in airtight containers.

With the umpteen ways in which lemon balm can be put to use, there is no doubt that you will find many uses for it with your own bountiful harvest.