Especially for novice gardeners, labeling garden plants is important. Even if you only plant a container herb garden, knowing which plant is where allows you to give each plant exactly the care it needs. If your only exposure to basil comes from square tins from the supermarket, how will you tell your sweet basil from your Genovese basil? Plant markers placed in the herb garden help to identify the plants. More than just ensuring proper watering and fertilizer application, in an herb garden, plant markers ensure that you don’t harvest the cilantro instead of the dill to use in pickles.

Nursery Tags

If you buy the herb plants, there is always the nursery tag to use as an herb garden plant marker. This has the advantage of putting all of the plant’s care instructions right there next to the plant. Using nursery tags as herb garden plant markers is generally considered a faux pas among gardeners. Aside from the visual considerations, the ink used to print the tags tends to bleach out in the sunlight, and the plastic that the tags are made of does not hold up to the elements well for an entire growing season.

White plastic Plant Markers

Herb garden plant markers made of white plastic are inexpensive, functional, and readily available at garden centers. Shaped like popsicle sticks, these are a step up from the nursery tags, but they still give an impression of a tiny plant cemetery until the plants grow up around them. T-shaped plastic herb garden plant markers are also available, providing a larger writing area.

Seed Packet Tags

Some garden supply catalogs and outlet sell herb garden plant markers that the seed packet slips into. These can be useful for rows of plants in your herb garden, but they have the associated disadvantage of limiting you to one marker per seed packet. The seed packet plant tags should only be used with empty seed packets.

Metal plant tags

These are similar to the white plastic herb garden plant markers, but made of bronze or another metal, to be written on with grease pencil. Metal plant markers for herb gardens are more expensive, but blend in better with the soil and mulch. Metal plant tags might be worth the money for herb gardeners particularly concerned with aesthetics.

Do Not Use Popsicle Sticks

As tempting as it may be to recycle used wooden popsicle sticks as herb garden plant markers, those do not hold up well for long. In a best case scenario, the writing fades and bleeds into the wood. More often, micro-organisms feed off the residual sugar on the stick and the whole thing turns into a moldy mess.