How to grow chamomiles

Chamomile is a low, feathery annual in the daisy family, grown for its small white-and-gold flowers rather than for food. Gardeners tuck it into an herb bed or border for the blooms, snipped fresh or dried for tea, with a strong apple-like scent when crushed. It occupies a bed for one season, flowering from early to midsummer and opening new blossoms as long as it is cut back rather than left to go to seed. Its roots stay shallow and spreading, so the plant shows a dry stretch of topsoil faster than deeper-rooted vegetables nearby.

The hardest part of growing chamomile well is the harvest discipline it demands. Wisconsin Horticulture Extension notes that plants readily self-seed unless every flower head is removed before it ripens. A gardener who picks a handful of flowers for tea now and then, but leaves most blooms to fade on the stem, ends up with a colony that reseeds itself through the surrounding soil by the next spring. What started as one small patch spreads into paths and neighboring beds, competing with newly germinating carrots or lettuce, and the fix at that point is pulling seedlings by hand all season.