| Culinary Herbs |
From "Ask DIY"
episode ADI-105 |
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Q: Where do I begin if I want to start growing an herb garden inside?
A : (Jesse Mack Burns, Ask DIY Gardening expert) A great place to start is in your cookbook! Leaf through it to check out recipes with herbs, and decide what you'd like to have available in your own kitchen. You might like chives, which have an onion flavor and are good in soups and omelets (figure A, at left), or rosemary (figure A, at right), which is great with chicken. Select a few of these to plant in a strawberry jar, (figure B, at right), which has openings on the sides and at the top and is a good way to showcase an indoor herb garden. One good choice is sage (figure C), because it has fuzzy leaves and will cascade from the side holes. It also has a good flavor, particularly for stuffings and stews. Parsley (figure D) is also a good selection for an indoor container garden. It's delicious as a basic seasoning for potatoes, stews, breadings, sauces . . . and it's also a nice garnish. Once you've selected the herbs you'd like to grow and purchased young plants from a nursery or home store, here's how to plant them in a strawberry jar. Materials:
Strawberry jar
Gravel to cover bottom
Good-draining potting soil
Nursery herb plants
- Cover the bottom of the jam jar with gravel for good drainage.
- Add enough potting soil to reach the lowest hole in the planter.
- Gently remove herbs from their individual containers. Starting from the bottom, position the herbs in the holes, planning so that one cascading herb is not in the hole above another.
- Push the herbs in the side holes, adding soil from the top opening as you go. Pack the soil fairly tightly.
- Gently water the soil from above, being careful not to wash the herb plants out. Include some water-soluble fertilizer in the water.
- Plant a few more herbs in the top opening. Chives on top are fun, because they look like hair.
- Move the planter to a sunny location in the kitchen.
More questions for Jessie Mack:
Q: How do I know when my herbs are ready to be used?
A: Look for the larger leaves. They have a lot more flavor. Stay away from the tiny leaves and give them a chance to get larger.
Q: Can you transplant herbs into the ground in the spring?
A : Definitely. Outdoors, the herbs will be decorative and provide you with a large herb garden to harvest.
Q: If I use many of the leaves, will they grow back?
A: Yes, they will. But make sure that when you're harvesting the leaves, you don't pick them all from one side of the plant, or it will get lopsided. Web site resources for herbs: Herb Gardens From the Garden to the Skillet Beginning an Herb Garden Herb Directory Herb Gardening Growing Herbs in the Home Garden Basic Herb Gardening Book: The Green Guide to Herb Gardening
by Deborah Handy
Llewellyn Publishing (2000)
P.O. Box 64383
St. Paul, MN 55164-0383
Phone: 612-291-1970
Fax: 612-291-1908
E-mail: lwlpc@llewellyn.com
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