12 Herb Growing Tips

I love herbs, they are part of my every day. They are in my hand cream, shower soap, shampoo, breakfast tea, evening meal and scenting my home and patio. Now you do not need to go quite as far as I do to enjoy herbs in your garden. Here is a list of 12 tips that you can use to get you started including herbs in your garden.

1. Plant Perennials. Edible plants that come back year after year save planting time, and maintenance is usually limited to annual weeding, fertilizing and mulching. Hardy perennials like sage, lemon balm and mints will thrive where winters are cold, sorrel is a terrific perennial salad green, horseradish grows almost anywhere. And don’t forget the self-seeding annuals. You can have an easy crop of cilantro and calendula by letting them drop seed at the end of the season, just leave a marker so you do not dig up the patch before they sprout.

Calendula

2. Include Essential Kitchen Herbs. You will regret it if you skip the traditional culinary herbs even if what you want is a medicinal garden. The rewards of growing culinary herbs such as basil, dill, oregano, sage and parsley, which are easy to grow and sometimes pricey to buy, will give you good meals and something to trade with later.

mints, sage and edible flowers

3. Grow Good Things to Drink. In addition to growing what you eat, try growing tasty beverages. Making simple syrups from Lemon balm or lemon verbena makes fun lemonade and great summer cocktails. Apple and Pineapple Mint are perfectly refreshing for summer iced tea. Did you know you could make a rhubarb stalk tea that is a tart substitute for lemonade?

Lemon balm with a dragon fly

4. Experiment with Herbs you have never grown or never heard of. Look for a variety of thyme, sage or oregano that has a different color, texture or flavor, like lemon thyme, purple sage or golden oregano. They will break up the landscape as well as introduce new ideas. There is nothing more lovely than a vinegar made with purple basil and the taste is just as great as the regular sweet basil. Choose the herb of the year for 2024 Common Yarrow.

Common yarrow It will thrive in poor soil during dry periods and still produce blooms. It was introduced to America during colonial times and is considered a naturalized native plant.

White yarrow

Growing Tips 

Common yarrow is a perennial in USDA Hardiness Zones 3-9 and thrives in sun but can tolerate shaded areas. Growing upright 2-3 feet tall and spreading to 3 feet, it is best placed near the back of ornamental gardens and may need to be staked in windy areas. Cutting back plant stems before flowering in late spring can help control the height of the plant.

 You can grow it in pots as well. Check out these Yarrow posts. 5. Interplant Compatible Crops. Basil is said to make tomato plants ripen better and faster, so I always interplant a few basil with the tomatoes. Other plants can be added for color or companion planting to keep away bugs and other pests. Here is a link to a post on Companion Planting.

6. Succession Sow for Steady Harvests. Cilantro is a great herb for making salsa, but many people complain that it goes to seed long before the tomatoes are ripe. Solve this problem by sowing seed two weeks apart through the end of August. This will give you a constant crop of tasty leaves. You can do the same with Dill to provide dill weed to go with all your summer vegetables.

Cilantro

7. Create Many Mini-Gardens. Just because you do not have a large garden plot or a space that gets all the required sun, does not mean you cannot make a garden for yourself. If you have a small area to the south or west that will get the needed 6 hours of sunshine, place a small patch of herbs I that space and enjoy the wonders of a good harvest. Establish deep, fertile beds wherever the sun beckons, and use large containers to make use of sunny spaces on your deck or patio.

Kitchen herb garden at Chicago Botanic Gardens

8. Try Vertical Gardening. If you have a small patio or balcony use your upward space to make the most of what is available. Create terraces with stacked pots or cement blocks, or even recycle a wooden palate for vertical space. By adding 3 to 4 inches of compost at the beginning of each new season, you can grow herbs and vegetables I a tight spot. Nasturtiums look very nice spilling from a pallet.

9. Use Herbs for Free Fertilizer. Take advantage of free, nitrogen-rich fertilizers you can craft from herbs such as comfrey, parsley and chamomile. Make a fertilizer tea by steeping leaf cuttings in water or just add these to your compost bin to enrich your spreadable compost.

compost bin

10. Weed Early and Often. Most garden crops require weeding at least three times: Plan to weed five to seven days after sowing or transplanting, again seven to 10 days later, and a third time three to four weeks after the crop has been planted. By that time, the plants should be big enough to mulch and should have plenty of leaves to shade the soil’s surface cutting back on weed growth.

11. Preserve the Harvest. Much less garden produce will go to waste if you freeze the extra in small batches every few days. For example, add chopped chives diced tomatoes or squash and freeze for quick cooking later. Combine green beans with dill in a small zip seal bag and drop into the freezer when your garden gave you more than a meals worth. You can also create seasoning ice cubes by chopping herbs and measuring into an ice cube tray, top with water and freeze. Once frozen, pop the cubes into a zip seal bag and you have a winter worth of pre-measured herbs for soups and stews come winter.

12. Drying is the easiest way to preserve your herbs. Cut the stems at the peak of flavor, generally early morning after the dew is lifted and bundle with a rubber band. Hang to dry out of the sun and use to create blends, season foods and decorate and scent your home.

So go try out a few herbs in your garden space and share with us how it went!  You can share thoughts and ideas here or on our Instagram page: www.instagram.com/backyardpatch43 

6 Unique Ways to Preserve an Herb Harvest

There are many ways to preserve the herbs from your harvest.  Here are a few quick and easy ones to get you started.

Freeze leaves in water

Quick and easy, you just grab an ice tray fill the square halfway with water and add the herb leaves.  You can leave the leaf whole or chopped them fine.  Pop them into the freezer.  Once the cubes are frozen fill the tray the rest of the way with water and freeze again.  This two-step method makes sure the leaves stay covered by the water and ice so they keep their green color.

Once finally frozen you can pop put the cubes and place them in a zip lock bag for long term storage.  This will give you herbs for casseroles, soups, stews and long cook dishes all winter.  Discard the cubes once the spring harvesting begins.

Make a Bouquet Garni Bundle 

Bouquet garni is a bundle of herbs (thyme, bay, parsley, rosemary, savory) used in long cook soups and stews.  It is great in the crock pot where you can hang the bundle from the side and let the flavor infuse the dish, then remove the bundle when cooking is over.  You do not have to worry about leaves in the dish or picking out bay leaf.

You can use a bouquet garni fresh, or you can make fresh bundles and hang them to dry.  Once dry, you can wrap a cello bag around them and give them as a gift along with a soup recipe, or save their wonderful goodness all for yourself.

I have previously posted recipes to use with bouquet garni too!

Dry in a paper bag

Savory, Thyme and rosemary are all great candidates for bag drying.  The leaves have a small size and very little moisture, so you toss the cut stems in a bag, hang it on the wall and let the herbs dry.  Sometimes depending on humidity, I will give the bags a shake every few days. No other special treatment is needed and the herbs will be try enough to be stripped from the stems for storage in about a week.

Honey or Vinegar Infusion

Make an infusion of herbs transferring the flavor into another medium.  You can create a vinegar or honey.  See these posts for detailed instructions.

How Tuesday on making vinegar

Recipes using Herbed Vinegar

Make a compound butter

A compound butter is any plain unsalted butter to which you add herbs. You can create a single herb flavor or blend the herbs tighter to create a variety of flavors.  The general rule is 1/8 to 1/4 cup herbs into 1 stick unsalted butter.

Here is one of my favorite versions:

1 tsp parsley, finely chopped

1 tsp thyme leaves

1 tsp chopped chives or garlic chives

1 tsp tarragon

Blend the herbs into 1 stick of room temperature unsalted butter with a fork to get the herbs evenly distributed.  Then roll the soft butter into a sausage in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator to eat in a week or in the freezer for up to 3 months.  You can use the butter on fresh steamed vegetables, steaks, baked or roasted potatoes, rice, egg noodles are on your morning toast of muffins.

I have more recipes for making compound butter (also called Herb Butter) all over the blog, but here is one of my first. 

Make a salt

There are several ways to make herb salt.  My two favorites are just to layer the whole herb leaf in salt and allow the salt to absorb the flavor from the leaf then later remove the leaf and you have white salt infused with flavor.  Another way is to run the salt and herbs in a coffee grinder.  I start with a larger salt so that I get a fine salt with fine flakes of herbs in it. 

You can also make an herb salt with chopped fresh leaves that you stir into salt, then spread on a baking sheet and allow to dry in the open air for 2 to 3 days to a week depending on humidity.  This is a great way to infuse the salt with a mixture of herbs, like a blend of chives, thyme, parsley and sage.  You use about 1 teaspoon of chopped fresh herbs to ¼ cup of salt (I like kosher.)  Once the herbs and salt have dried, you can place the mixture in a jar where it will keep its herbal taste for at least a year.

We will be posting more ways to make herbed salt and flavored sugar later this fall.