Growing fresh herbs is a simple way to start gardening or enhance your existing garden. Not only are they easy to grow, but they add a ton of flavor to your meals. Snip a few fresh herbs while cooking dinner for a quick addition or dry them to save for cooking year-round. Here are ten herbs to grow that I’ve had success growing, plus tips for cooking with them.
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Herbs are the perfect plants to grow in your garden. They grow in containers of all sizes, indoors and outside. If you keep them trimmed, most stay small and are easy to care for.
If you’ve been dreaming of a garden or want to add some herbs to your existing garden, here are ten that I love and think are excellent to grow. Best of all, they’re useful for all kinds of recipes.
I live in Texas, so my two favorite resources for all things gardening are the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension and Neil Sperry’s Gardens. If you live in Texas, especially the DFW area, you can most likely find what you need between the two. If you Don’t live in Texas, I recommend you look into local gardening resources. While a lot of things are similar no matter where you live, a local expert is really handy.
10 herbs to grow
1. oregano
How to grow it
Oregano is an evergreen perennial and needs full sun. It can be watered less often than its neighbors. When it flowers pinch of the small white buds to encourage the plant to keep growing leaves. You can harvest the leaves year-round.
How to eat it
Fresh or dried, it’s essential for marinara. Combine it with a few other herbs for an Italian spice blend that’s great on chicken, pasta, and bread.
2. basil
How to grow it
Basil needs full sun and a bit of humidity, but well-draining soil. It doesn’t like the really hot, dry part of summer so you may want to grow basil in a container so you can bring it indoors. Like oregano, you should pinch off the flowers so that it will keep producing leaves. To harvest, I try to cut off the pairs of leaves that have a new pair growing right next to them.
How to eat it
Fresh basil is a key ingredient in pesto sauce. It’s also tasty on a sandwich with fresh mozzarella and tomato slices. Fresh or dried, basil also pairs with oregano for marinara or an Italian spice blend.
3. cilantro
How to grow it
Cilantro needs full sun but will flower when it gets above 90 degrees regularly. If you have mild winters, you might want to try growing cilantro in fall instead of spring. Pinch the flowers off daily to extend cilantro’s life, but know that once it starts to flower it may go fast.
How to eat it
Fresh cilantro is excellent in salsa, guacamole, and other Tex-Mex recipes. It’s the main ingredient in chimichurri sauce.
4. sage
How to grow it
Sage needs full to partial sun. It can get waterlogged with too much watering. Sage has a soft, velvety texture and is lovely to grow among flowers just for decoration too.
How to eat it
Fresh or dried sage adds a perfect fall flavor to your Thanksgiving turkey. It goes wonderfully with chicken or pork, particularly with apples too.
5. mint
How to grow it
Mint needs to be grown in a container. Left to go wild, it will… and fill your entire yard if you let it! Mint is a perennial so it will come back each year. It benefits from more water than most herbs. Harvest leaves often to encourage more to grow. Mint comes in flavored varieties too so you might want to look for chocolate mint or pineapple mint for a really unique scent and flavor.
How to eat it
Fresh mint can go in a summer fruit salad or mojito cocktails. Dried mint can be added to hot tea. Anything you might add mint flavoring too would be enhanced by fresh mint leaves.
6. lemon balm
How to grow it
Lemon balm is in the mint family (so it will be very prolific and should be grown in a container). It can grow into a fairly large bush, so plant it where it will have room to grow but not take over. It has a lemon/mint smell and flavor.
How to eat it
Fresh leaves can be steeped in tea. Dried leaves can be added to diluted vinegar for all-purpose cleaning. Lemon balm is known for lowering blood pressure, so if you are on medication you may want to check with your doctor or pharmacist.
7. rosemary
How to grow it
Rosemary is an evergreen. Some varieties grow as large as a Christmas tree while others are less than a foot tall. It needs full sun and moderate watering with well-draining soil. It will grow year-round and you can harvest at any time.
How to eat it
Fresh or dried rosemary is delicious on chicken and potatoes and makes a flavorful garnish on homemade bread like focaccia.
8. thyme
How to grow it
Thyme can handle partial shade and doesn’t like too much water. Some varieties {like the one pictured below} are trailing and look great in hanging baskets or trailing down from a windowsill pot.
How to eat it
Fresh or dried thyme is a good all-purpose seasoning for chicken or vegetables.
9. chives
How to grow it
Chives make nice windowsill container plants. They like full sun and a good amount of watering. The more you trim it, the thicker and more hardy it will grow. The blooms are beautiful.
How to eat it
Chives are just small green onion sprouts. They taste just like green onions so they can be snipped fresh to top baked potatoes, mix into dressings, or sprinkle over meat.
10. parsley
How to grow it
Parsley likes full sun and regular watering. It attracts monarch caterpillars so you may want to plant extra just for them! One little caterpillar will go through a lot of parsley. It bolts {sprouts flowers} easily in warm weather and pinching off the buds doesn’t slow it down much. It doesn’t come back and you will need to replant each year.
How to eat parsley
Dried parsley is an ingredient in an Italian spice blend. It also makes a nice all-purpose seasoning for chicken or vegetables. If you don’t plan to eat it yourself, it is the favorite food of monarch caterpillars!
I grow most of my herbs in the same part of my backyard garden, just outside my kitchen door. The others sit on the shelf above my kitchen sink. The trick to using them daily is to keep them where you can see them. While I’ve heard that herbs picked in the morning have a stronger flavor, I tend to pick mine when I start cooking supper simply because that’s when I think about it.
For herbs that are very prolific, you may want to pick them daily or every few days, even if you aren’t using them that often. This encourages the plant to keep making leaves. You never want to pick so many that the plant can’t feed itself though; leaves absorb the sunlight that helps them grow bigger.
If you are looking for herbs to grow as a beginning garden project, I recommend choosing just one or two to start. You can always plant more, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed when everything starts changing at once.
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Thank you for the wonderful post! I love herb gardening, and need to get back to doing more of it. Parsley, cilantro, fennel and rue are all “nesting” plants for the Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly. That’s where they lay their eggs, and the caterpillars will devour plants right down to the main stem! We used to raise native butterflies, so we planted a ton of these herbs. We had to protect the ones we wanted to used for cooking by putting them in a cloche 🙂
You’re very welcome! Herb gardens are so flexible and rewarding. It seems every time I plant parsley that it gets eaten up by monarch caterpillars. I think I should probably just plant a whole bed of it!