I love to cook. Since I also love to garden, I have been adding herbs to my edible landscape over the years. One is sage. Aside from the gorgeous blue flowers, it is a tasty herb to have. The quintessential Thanksgiving flavor. It is a perennial, as are most of the herbs I will show today.
Next is chives. They are wonderful to top off lots of dishes and one of my favorites to add to eggs. This plant is only in its second year, but will get much larger each year.
Rosemary is one of those herbs that dries wonderfully. It isn't a perennial in my zone 6 garden, but south of me it will grow into a huge bush. Around here, I'll simply pull up the whole plant and hang it to dry in the fall. You can transplant it into a pot for indoors if you like, but I've never cared to. We don't use tons of rosemary, and I get a lot of it from one plant. It's something I tend to plant every other year or so.
Mint is a favorite here and this is peppermint. It is wonderful in teas, jellies and mojitos. Just be careful, as it is invasive and will quickly take over where it is planted. This is in my new perennial flower garden at the front of my yard. I'm hoping that everything here will take over. I'm not a big fan of mowing the lawn, so the less lawn I have, the happier I am.
This is another mint that I just stole from my neighbors. They have a huge patch (yes it is really invasive) and they were more than happy to let me have some. Last year they let me harvest as much as I wanted. I ended up drying some and making mint jelly out of the rest. It was a real treat.
Lastly I have thyme. This is a new plant. I had a nice plant, but Toby decided to dig it up for a nice cool spot to lie last summer. This is now in the aforementioned perennial flower bed. I love thyme in chicken dishes and find it goes very well with the sage.
I also grow the typical annuals of basil and dill, but you've seen pictures of those in past posts. What kinds of herbs do you like to grow or eat?
13 comments:
My herbs are behind my house on top of this dry sandhill. They are quite happy there. There's sage, parsley, tarrogon, thyme, oregano, echinatia (sp??), lavendar, rosemary and chives. I cook with very little of them. I prefer to get mine from the farm I bought them from. They are simply perrenials mixed with irises, asters and milkweed (the 2 of them from the weed lady :) she grows native weeds for the gov't to transplant).
My garden is doing well.
I love coming to your blog. It's such a breath of fresh air. Love the pics, as usual.
Farmwife, why don't you eat your own herbs? Just curious. I forgot to show my 2 kinds of oregano. Don't know how I missed them, they're right next to the sage.
Kayla, you're too sweet.
I don't grow a lot of herbs, because my neighbor takes care of that part of gardening. I grow tomatoes and onions and lettuce and...you name it, for her. In turn, she supplies me with gifts from her herb garden. In my own garden, I grow chives, basil and parsley, all of which I use, and thyme that I just let flower for the bees, as I'm not that fond of the taste of it.
Granny, you have a great arrangement with your neighbor. It's always nice when you can work together.
I don't have great "sun" except for my front steps, so I do container herbs: basil, oregano, mint (two kinds) rosemary, thyme, sage, parsley, cilantro. . .I think that's it! I use all of them all summer and fall.
I also have a big pot in the backyard that has chives in it and it comes back every year. (My other herbs don't make it through the winter, except for some thyme which did come back a bit.)
The chives are my kids anytime snack. I can always tell when they've been back there munching b/c PU! lol
By the time I get to them they have flowered and I'm behind everywhere else. This year with that week of 90F weather we had last week+ everything... my snowballs, my spirea's etc.... all came and went in under a week. My allergies this year are out of control and it's been 20yrs since they've been this bad.. teens.
Except for the chives - which I do clip and use, I buy herbs properly dried etc not very far down the road.... so I hit all the good points, organic, fresh and local :)
My parsley is headed for flower, my lavendar already is.... it's not even July....
FOM, you do get a lot of shade with all those big trees. I think it's awesome that the kids eat the chives. Morgan is addicted to sugar snap peas here.
Farmwife, the heat has been amazing this year and allergies have been horrible. It sounds like you get some great stuff from that farm.
Yum! I planted peppermint and spearamint this year to dry for tea. In addition to the usual subjects this basil, oregano and parsely, we have dill, thyme, sage, cilantro, chives, hysop, lovage and lemon verbena. :)
Allison, I love mint tea. It's one of the many reasons I don't care if the mint takes over the front garden.
I grow most of my perennial herbs in pots that sit on the front deck area. I need to do a hard trimming on them though as the oregano is taking over and crowding out the rosemary and chives. Sounds like a good project to do today in fact!
You have a nice selection of herbs and mints. Great complements to a working kitchen garden.
Laura, I love having it all at my fingertips. It's so nice to have the nice fresh herbs to go with the fresh veggies.
I've got all of those herbs in my old garden, but not much in the new one. I have to get some clippings so I can get then transferred over.
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