Archives for May 2020

There is nothing quite like the flavor that fresh herbs add to dishes. Take your home cooking to the next level with this collection of cooking herbs that you can grow right in your backyard garden.

Herb gardening is one of the unsung joys of growing edibles. Not only are the plants gorgeous in their own right, but they add incredible flavors to your favorite dishes.

As an avid cook, it cheeses me off when I have to spend 2 bucks on a clamshell of herbs that are not only days beyond their picking date, but where I also only need a tablespoon or so for the dish I’m making. It’s very gratifying to step out onto the deck – I grow most of my herbs in containers on my sunny deck – and snip just what I need. It’s a true joy of summer!

These ten cooking herbs will serve your kitchen well, with growing tips and interesting plant facts. Let’s get started!

Basil

Ocimum basilicum

Possibly the most celebrated of culinary herbs, basil deserves space in your garden. A must-have ingredient for caprese salads and pesto, it’s also just a beautiful that grows all season long. Trim back when it starts to send up a flower stalk, and you’ll have fresh basil leaves until it gets chilly.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Either. Basil grows easily from seed, and young plants are usually readily available at garden centers or online nurseries (they’ll withstand shipping).
• Annual or Perennial? Basil is basically an annual when grown outside. But, inside, its life can be extended indefinitely with care.
• Grow indoors? Yes, basil thrives indoors and out, and will happily grow in a glass of water on the kitchen sill.
• Culinary uses: dry leaves for long-term storage. Goes with just about anything with fresh tomatoes (caprese salad, tomato sandwiches), pizza topping, chop into salads. Pesto.
• Pollinator bonus: Bees love basil flowers. I’ve grown 20 varieties of basil, and the bees have loved every one of them. I always grow extra plants that I allow to flower all season long, just for the bees.

Bay Leaf (Bay Laurel Tree)

Laurus nobilis

Bay leaves are a nice addition to your cooking herbs collection. Toss a dried bay leaf into soups, stews, and stocks. Use them when cooking beans from dried. Any time you need a little extra seasoning for a liquid base.

The bay laurel tree is slow-growing, so no worries about it overwhelming your space. It can be trimmed up like Bonzai plant and kept small for a container.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Buy a transplant at the garden center; it will be well established and ready for home growth.
• Annual or Perennial? Bay laurel is a tree, so it’s meant to live year-round. However, it does not do well in cold climates. I bring my bay laurel tree indoors in the winter. The dry indoor climate is not perfect, but it does hang in there and survive.
• Culinary uses: soups, stews, tomato sauces, beans, rice for infusion during cooking (remove before serving the dish). Don’t forget homemade soup stock!
• Bonus: insects generally hate the smell of bay leaves, so they’re often used in long-term storage of food products such as flour and rice. Place a dried leaf or two in the storage container – it will not impart flavor to the food.

Cilantro

Coriandrum sativum

Cilantro is probably my favorite every-day herb: it goes on and in everything, from guac and salsas to dressings to refried beans, pasta dishes, rice dishes, and fresh salads.

If you’re one of the unlucky people whose olfactory receptor genes heighten the soap-flavored aldehydes in cilantro, you have my sympathies, because there’s no real substitute for the bright herbaceousness of cilantro. Parsley is too strong and sharp, in many cases.

Don’t let that put you off from trying the ground seeds of cilantro (coriander). I hear there’s no soapy taste.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Either, but cilantro is most economical when grown from seed.
• Annual or Perennial? Cilantro is an annual, and a cool weather herb. Sow seeds early in the spring so that its greenery lifecycle is complete before June. The plant easily bolts in heat.
• Culinary uses: sauces, dressings, vinaigrettes. Mexican and Tex-Mex dishes.
• Pollinator bonus: Bees love cilantro flowers. I grow lots of cilantro – it’s often one of the earliest sources of food for bees.
• No-waste bonus: One of the things I love most about cilantro is that it’s extraordinarily efficient, in terms of edibility. The green leaves and stems are edible, of course. The plant will flower when the weather turns hot and produce seeds. Interestingly, the seeds (known in the U.S. as coriander) are edible into two of its forms: when young and green, coriander has a unique, fresh, and crave-worthy flavor that’s amazing in salads and vinaigrettes. When dried, the seeds are ground and used as a spice.

Dill

Anethum graveolens

Dill is a wonderful, versatile herb in the garden. Its feathery leaves are quite attractive when numerous plants are grown together in a cluster. Harvest the leaves and stems as you need them, leaving the rest of the plant to continue growing. At some point, the plant will send out a huge round seed head of beautiful yellow flowers that look like fireworks.

The flower heads produce seed, which can be used for pickling, or left to fall to the ground, where they will regrow next year.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Either. Dill grows easily from seed, and young plants are usually readily available at garden centers or online nurseries (they’ll withstand shipping). If you let some of the plants flower and produce seeds, those seeds will drop to the ground and sprout the following spring.
• Annual or Perennial? Dill is an annual.
• Grow indoors? Yes, dill will survive for a time indoors. It’s not the ideal environment, but it will produce in a sunny window with adequate watering.
• Culinary uses: fresh dill makes delicious dips and salad dressings. Top a summer minestrone with dill.
• Pollinator bonus: Many butterflies, including the Swallowtail, love dill: they lay their eggs on the leaves and stems, and the resulting caterpillars feed on the plants right up until they cocoon. I always, always grow lots of extra dill for the swallowtails.
• No-waste bonus: One plant creates two products: the feathery leaves, and, after the plant flowers, the seeds that can be used in pickling.

Mint

Mentha

Mint has its obvious flavor charms, but it’s also a stunning plant, with relentlessly green leaves and an attractive growing habit.

The mint family is extraordinarily large, well over 7,000 varieties, but just a few will do your garden a mighty service. Garden centers usually sell a lovely variety of culinary mint, including peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, orange mint, ginger mint, pineapple mint, and more.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Mint grows fastest via cuttings from its vast root system. Buy a plant from the garden center – you’ll likely have a choice of several of the varieties mentioned above. Mint spreads aggressively, so unless you want a field of mint, it’s advisable to grow mint in a container to keep it under control.
• Annual or Perennial? Mint is a hardy perennial. It will die back in the winter, but return reliably in the spring, thanks to rhizomes that spread underground.
• Culinary uses: teas, sauces, salads, cocktails, and my personal favorite: cucumber-lime-mint ice water (so refreshing!)

Oregano

Origanum vulgare

Oregano is a lovely cooking herb, but I’ll be honest: I grow it mainly for the pollinators. The photo below is my oregano garden – not the original intent for this space to be overtaken by one herb, but, I go with the flow where Mother Nature is concerned – and I harvest just enough oregano each spring to dry and fill its spice jar.

The real reason I let oregano live its best life here is because of the bees. Bees love oregano flowers. They will zoom right over the dazzling lavender bed to get to the oregano. Honeybee heaven.

But, of course, in terms of cooking, oregano is a must-have ingredient in your kitchen. Pizza night wouldn’t be the same without a dusting of dried oregano.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Either, but you’ll have a head-start on the season if you buy a transplant from the garden center.
• Annual or Perennial? Oregano is a perennial that dies back in the winter and returns each year, spreading as it goes. The photo above is 10-year-old oregano, about 3′ x 5′, and all started with just one plant.
• Culinary uses: Italian cuisine. Harvest branches in the spring when the growth is new and fragrant, tie in a bundle, and hang to dry. Crumble the dried leaves into an airtight jar for use all year long.
• Pollinator bonus: Because my oregano bed is so large at this point, I have the luxury of harvesting just a small portion of it in the spring, leaving the rest of it to flower. Of all the pollinator herbs in my yard, bees love oregano flowers the most.

Parsley (flat-leaf)

Petroselinum crispum

Parsley is probably the hardiest herb I grow. If left to flower, it reseeds easily and pretty much takes care of itself, in terms of returning year and year.

It’s also quite surprisingly cold-hardy, for such a fragile-leafed plant. One winter, after an extraordinarily robust growing season, which created a parsley mass about 2′ x 3′, I decided to experiment and placed a row cover “tent” over the whole thing. The plant survived well into a very cold and snowy February, when it finally succumbed to excess moisture.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Either. Parsley grows easily from seed, and young plants are usually readily available at garden centers or online nurseries (they’ll withstand shipping).
• Annual or Perennial? Neither. Flat-leaf Italian parsley is actually a biennial, which means its lifecycle is spread over two years: the first year focuses on leaf production (this is when its leaves are most flavorful). The second year – although sometimes it’s simply later in the season, rather than the following spring (depends on weather) – the plant sends up flower stalks and new greenery to nurture the flowers. The flowers will produce seeds, which drop to the ground. They’ll sprout the following spring and begin the cycle all over again.
• Grow indoors? Theoretically, it’s possible. I’ve had only spotty luck keeping a parsley plant alive through the winter, as it doesn’t particularly care for the dry environment of a heated home.
• Culinary uses: sauces, dressings, soups, chopped into salads. Adds a pop of color when minced and sprinkled over the final dish.
• Pollinator bonus: Many butterflies, including the Swallowtail, love parsley: they lay their eggs on the leaves and stems, and the resulting caterpillars feed on the plants right up until they cocoon. I always, always grow lots of extra parsley for the swallowtails, and if I find the bright green caterpillars with black stripes on a plant, I’ll stop harvesting from it.

Rosemary

Salvia rosmarinus

Rosemary is a beautifully scented plant with an attractive, upright growing habit.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Rosemary is very difficult to grow from seed. Best to purchase a transplant at the garden center.
• Annual or Perennial? Rosemary is an evergreen in some growing zones in the South, where year-round warm weather causes it to grow into a rather impressive and fragrant shrub. But here in our northern climes (such as my zone 6), rosemary is an annual. Most years, I keep it in a pot and bring it inside in the winter, where it continues for a few months (rosemary doesn’t particularly like the dry environment of a winter-heated home).
• Culinary uses: soups, pan sauces. Goes great with chicken, potatoes, steak. You can use the sturdier branches as a skewer for grilling kabobs.

Tarragon

Artemisia dracunculus

Tarragon is one of my very favorite cooking herbs. It’s actually related to the sunflower, but shares a similar flavor palate with fennel and anise, thanks to estragol compounds within. I love tarragon in salad dressings and vinaigrettes, and chopped into fresh, green summer salads.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? Transplant only. The best culinary tarragon by far is French, which can be propagated only through cuttings. Double-check the tag at the garden center: Russian tarragon is not very flavorful, and you’ll be disappointed if growing as a cooking herb.
• Annual or Perennial? Tarragon is a perennial. It dies back with cold weather but regrows from its roots in the spring. The plant can grow quite large in its growing season, but it does not spread and expand, like mint and oregano.
• Culinary uses: I think fresh tarragon is positively dreamy. Use it in salad dressings and vinaigrettes. Mince it into green salads. Goes great with chicken, seafood, and vegetables.

Thyme

Thymus vulgaris

Thyme is a lovely addition to soups and stew – tie together a bundle of freshly clipped stems and toss into the pot (remove the stems; the leaves will detach into the soup while cooking).

But, it’s also a beautiful plant. I love its straggly growth. I grow English and German thyme in the ground, and lemon thyme in a pot. I keep the pot in a high-trafficked area of my deck so that I can run a hand over it as I pass by. Its scent is amazing.

• Start from seed or buy transplant? For time savings, buy a transplant at the garden center. Thyme seeds have low germination rates and can take a long time to sprout, making it difficult to know when to give up on the effort.
• Annual or Perennial? Thyme is a very hardy perennial that’s actually an evergreen in many growing zones (including mine, 6a). Whether planted in the ground or grown in containers, thyme will, at a minimum, return each year. My container thymes die back in the winter, but my garden-planted thymes remain green all winter long, ready to cook with.
• Culinary uses: sauces, soups, stews.
• Pollinator bonus: Bees love thyme flowers. Thyme usually blooms late spring/early summer, and bees are all over it from start to finish.

If you’re new to herb gardening, this list also serves as a great starting point for your herb growing education. While herbs aren’t as glamourous as, say, a big, juicy Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato, I’ve found a lot of satisfaction in tending to my ever-expanding herb collection.

And as a devoted home cook, these cooking herbs are indispensable ingredients in my kitchen. I hope you’ll try some and enjoy the fresh bounty, right from your own backyard!

Mint is a wonderful culinary herb and a beautiful leafy green plant that’s very attractive in the home garden. It’s also a prolific spreader. To keep mint under control, it’s best to grow it in a pot. Learn how to transplant mint, whether from the nursery pot, last year’s pot (which it’s outgrown), or even dug up from the ground. Also learn about its extraordinary root system.

One of the rites of passage for beginning herb gardeners is to make the mistake of planting a crazy, propagating plant that quickly grows out of control and takes over the garden. Lol.

My mistake was lemon balm, a distant relative of (but in the same family as) today’s subject. Lemon balm spreads aggressively through both its root system and its surprisingly hardy and portable seeds. Such a mess, I cannot tell you. It took over everything, smothering even purslane and dandelions in its path. I still find lemon balm sprouts in odd places in the yard to this very day.

But I’m here now so you can learn from me: don’t set yourself up for future headaches by planting something invasive like mint in the ground. There are completely sensible and legitimate reasons for letting mint run wild – if you’re an herbalist, for example – but for most backyard gardens, you’ll want to keep it on a tight leash and keep it in – or transplant it to – a container.

Mint is a perennial herb in the Lamiaceae family, of which there are well over 7,000 varieties, from small house plants to large shrubs. Most of what you’ll find for purchase at the local garden center are aromatic mints with lovely and interesting flavors that are prized in the kitchen: the common spearmint and peppermint, of course, but also lemon, ginger, chocolate, pineapple, orange, licorice, grapefruit, lavender, and more.

I’m currently growing peppermint, spearmint, and ginger mint in my container garden as perennials – see photo above.

All of these amazing plants share one thing in common: they grow fast, and they spread far and wide via their elaborate and aggressive root systems.

A Look At Mint’s Incredible Root System

The root systems of mint have two primary features:

• fine, fibrous tendrils that drop vertically from the plant to intake nutrition from the soil, as well as anchor the mint plant in place; and,
• rhizomes, which are a type of plant stem that grows underground and can extend horizontally for great distances, producing offshoots that break the soil surface to create a new plant.

The roots themselves are nothing to shout about, as they produce the typical root ball that we’re all familiar with. But the rhizomes are something else entirely.

They’re clearly identifiable as thick stems (when not dusty with dirt, that is – see a nice shot of them in the photo below) and grow aggressively outward from the plant in a web, with the sole intent of creating new mint plants. And they’re very, very good at it.

The photo above is a one-year-old peppermint plant. When I bought this plant last year, I left it in the nursery pot and set it in some soil on a raised garden bench for the summer. Those rhizomes are just one year’s growth, winding around the interior of the pot. Imagine if those rhizomes had been free to roam the yard!

I hope the photo above drives home the advantage of growing mint in a pot. Even if you’re an avid cook or a connoisseur of mint tea or mojitos, it would be quite the feat to use up all of the plant’s leaves in one season. The average home gardener does not need an ever-more-sprawling plot of mint.

How to Transplant Mint from Pot to Pot

Mint is its best, most behaved self when kept in a pot. Even if you decide it must go in the ground, my advice is to plant it in a pot, and then plant the pot in the ground – and dig up and transplant to a larger pot in subsequent years as needed. The sole purpose is always to keep control of those rhizomes.

When to transplant mint

It’s fairly easily to know when a mint plant needs to move to larger pot. In most growing zones in the U.S., mint will die back in the winter (store the pot in an unheated garage or shed, or at least protected from wind outside). It will, in fact, look quite distressingly dead. But, hold steady.

In the spring, when the temperatures regularly warm above 55ºF, watch for mint’s revival. You’ll begin to see tiny leaves and shoots emerge from among the dead stems.

Leave the plant to do its thing for a bit. If the weather is dry, give it a light watering now and then.

Once the growth begins in earnest, you’ll see a pattern emerge. If the green growth is consistent across the surface of the soil, the plant doesn’t really need repotting.

But if the center of the pot has no new growth, with new green sprouts ringing the edges, it definitely needs to be moved to a larger pot. The rhizomes beneath the surface drive the new season’s new growth, and if the sprouts appear only around the edges of the pot, that means the rhizomes have grown outward from the center of the plant – as is their imperative to do, to spread outward – and are running around the walls of the pot (remember the photo above) because they have no room to do anything else.

Select a pot

Mint’s root ball is not particularly large nor deep, so you don’t need to step up to a significantly larger container to transplant mint. I usually just go one size up (which, in the U.S., pots sizes usually come in 2″ increments), acknowledging that the plant might need repotting again next year. Make sure the pot has a drainage hole.

Choose a pot that’s large enough for the plant to sit in comfortably, with room below for a fresh soil base of an inch or so, and enough space around the sides to fill in with new soil.

If the root ball is particularly compacted, you can gently break up the roots a bit by splitting the ball in half from the bottom up. I normally don’t, though. I also leave the rhizomes alone, even when they look quite squooshed.

Add soil

If the pot’s drainage hole is more than a 1/2″ in diameter, place a small rock, a square of screen, or even a coffee filter, over the hole, to prevent soil from crumbling out.

Add a layer of soil to the bottom of the pot, and then set the plant in the middle. Add soil around the sides evenly so that the plant remains centered. Continue adding soil up to the level of the original surface. Press the edges down to firm the soil, and water well.

Trim away dead stems

With the plant set in the pot, you can now trim away the previous season’s dead stems and branches.

Use sharp scissors or needle-nose pruners to clip away the dead stems. You can tell dead stems from live because in the spring the woody stems will have no new green growth at any of the nodes along their length. And they’ll be quite brittle. Snip as close to the surface as possible without damaging the new growth around it.

Now set the pot in a sunny location and enjoy mint’s tasty leaves all summer long! The plant will fill in quite quickly.

And those two mint plants just weeks later:

How to Transplant Mint from Ground to Pot

Normally, moving a plant from its cozy home in the ground to a container is somewhat traumatic for the plant. But, as you’ve already learned, mint is quite hardy, and can survive quite a bit of upheaval.

So, transplanting from ground to pot isn’t as fraught as it might first appear.

If you have a large bed of spreading mint, you’ll likely (if reluctantly) need to plan on just digging up and discarding much of the plants (unless you can repot them all and sell them at market!). The best time to transplant mint is in the spring when new growth has begun.

First, select a pot. If you have a growing bed, you almost certainly be able to choose a clump to fit your preferred pot. Prepare the pot with soil, as explained above.

Using a shovel or spade, identify a clump of mint with healthy, upright-growing stems and lots of green growth. If your climate has harsh winters, there’s likely a lot of dead brown stems. This is not a problem, but make sure you select a clump with green growth, to ensure you’re moving a live plant with a robust root system.

Slide downward, deeply, around the clump with a shovel or spade in a circle, just smaller than the diameter of the pot. Once the circle has been cut, lift the clump from below with the blade of the shovel to free it from the soil. Knock away any loose soil, and transfer the clump to the pot. Settle it firmly, adding new potting soil to fill the container. Water thoroughly, and let rest in a spot that gets some sun, but does not roast in its sometimes strong spring rays.

Dividing Mint

As you’re repotting your mint, you can also divide a large, healthy plant, to make two or more pottings, or to share.

If the root ball is ringed with rhizomes, gently snip them apart at the point where you want to divide the plant. Then, grasping the root ball with hands, begin separating the root ball in half, from the bottom up. Don’t worry too much about breaking the roots; they should recover just fine.

When the root ball and rhizomes have been separated into two, set the plant down and example the surface stems. You might need to guide things by snipping the stems apart for a clean break. Plant the two halves in separate pots, and you’re good to go.

2021 Update

I’m adding this update at the end of April 2021, as I’m preparing to clean up and repot my over-wintered mint plants, including those featured above.

Here’s a look at my 4 potted mints, from which I’ve already trimmed away the dead stems. Which ones need repotting? Let’s take a look:

A. This is the sweet mint in the largest pot featured earlier in this article. Although I had repotted it just last year, it had an amazing growing season in 2020 – just a gorgeous plant, big and leafy. You can see that 2021’s new growth is starting to trend towards the edge of the pot, but that there’s still an inner ring of growth towards the middle, and some dead center. It can wait another year.

B. This is the peppermint plant also featured earlier in the shorter pot. It has new growth across the surface of the pot and is fine for this year.

C. This ginger mint is definitely ready for a pot size upgrade. The majority of its new growth is not only at the edges of the pot, but its stems are actually looping outside of the edge of the soil (which is difficult to see in detail in the photo).

D. This peppermint plant (#2) should’ve been repotted last year, but was so pretty in this now-flaking-apart pot, I just held off with crossed fingers. Not only is the new growth ringing the edge of the pot, but you can also see the dead stems that had looped around the edge of the pot last year.

I hope you’ve found this look at how to transplant mint helpful and informative!