Start a small backyard or windowsill garden with these herbs to grow and cook with at home any time of year.
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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.
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.
Garden herbs to grow
Here are ten herbs to grow that I’ve had success growing, plus tips for cooking with them.
1. Oregano
How to grow oregano
Oregano is an evergreen perennial and needs full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun). It can be watered less often than its neighbors, but don’t let the soil get super dry between waterings.
When it flowers, pinch off the small white buds to encourage the plant to keep growing leaves. You can harvest the leaves year-round.
How to cook with oregano
Fresh or dried, oregano is 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 basil
Basil needs full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun) and a bit of humidity, but well-draining soil. It can probably be watered once per week.
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 the basil 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 cook with basil
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 cilantro
Cilantro needs full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun) but will flower when the temperature gets above 90 degrees regularly. If you have mild winters, you might want to try growing cilantro in fall instead of spring. Water it frequently; the soil shouldn’t get completely dry.
Pinch the flowers off daily to extend cilantro’s life, but know that once it starts to flower it may go fast.
How to cook with cilantro
Fresh cilantro is excellent in salsa, bean corn salad, and other Tex-Mex recipes. It’s the main ingredient in chimichurri sauce.
4. Sage
How to grow sage
Sage needs full to partial sun (4-6 hours of indirect sun). It can get waterlogged with too much watering, so once per week is usually plenty.
Sage has a soft, velvety texture and is lovely to grow among flowers just for decoration too.
How to cook with sage
Fresh or dried sage adds a perfect fall flavor to your Thanksgiving turkey or sausage cornbread stuffing. It goes wonderfully with chicken or pork, particularly with apples too.
5. Mint
How to grow mint
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 and is happy in shade or full sun.
Harvest the 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 cook with mint
Fresh mint can go in a summer fruit salad or mojito cocktails. Dried mint can be added to hot tea. Fresh mint leaves would enhance anything you might add liquid mint flavoring or extract to, like homemade ice cream.
6. Lemon balm
How to grow lemon balm
Lemon balm is in the mint family (so it will be very prolific and should be grown in a container too). 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. Like regular mint, it’s pretty content with whatever sunlight it gets.
Treat it like you would regular mint by pinching off flowers and harvesting leaves regularly.
How to cook with lemon balm
Fresh leaves can be steeped in tea or added to lemonade. Dried leaves can be added to diluted vinegar for all-purpose cleaning.
Note: Lemon balm is known for lowering blood pressure, so you may want to check with your doctor or pharmacist if that is a concern.
7. Rosemary
How to grow rosemary
Rosemary needs full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun) and moderate watering with well-draining soil. You might only need to water it every other week. Too much water can cause root rot.
Rosemary is an evergreen. Some varieties grow as large as a Christmas tree while others are less than a foot tall. It will grow year-round and you can harvest it at any time.
How to cook with rosemary
Fresh or dried rosemary is delicious on chicken and potatoes and makes a flavorful garnish on homemade bread like focaccia. Use rosemary to season the chicken when making a chicken pot pie.
8. Thyme
How to grow thyme
Thyme can handle partial shade (4-6 hours of indirect sun) and doesn’t like too much water. Every other week is probably enough.
Some varieties, like the one pictured below, are trailing and look great in hanging baskets or trailing down from a windowsill pot.
How to cook with thyme
Fresh or dried thyme is a good all-purpose seasoning for chicken or vegetables. Try adding dried thyme to Mediterrannean chicken and orzo.
9. Chives
How to grow chives
Chives like full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun) and a good amount of watering. Soak the plant completely, but let it dry out before watering again.
Chives make nice windowsill container plants. The more you trim it, the thicker and more hardy it will grow. The blooms are beautiful.
How to cook with chives
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. Try fresh chives on barbecue chicken pizza.
10. Parsley
How to grow parsley
Parsley likes full sun (6-8 hours of direct sun) and regular watering. Water once or twice a week, deeply, and let it dry completely between watering days.
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 (ie. sprouts flowers) easily in warm weather and pinching off the buds doesn’t slow it down much. It doesn’t come back, so you will need to replant each year.
How to cook with 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!
Tips for storing garden herbs
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.
If you want to preserve them, fresh herbs can be refrigerated for several days. Alternatively, hang them up to dry, then store dried herbs in a jar.
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.
Once you’ve turned a few potted plants into a whole garden, use this printable herb and spice inventory to keep track of everything in your cabinet.
What’s next? Try these other fun and creative ideas on One Mama’s Daily Drama:
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!