What is an Herb?

Silly question? Not really. The definition most dictionaries list first is that herbs are plants with no woody structure. Whether annual or perennial, they die to the ground either after flowering or at the end of each growing season. By this definition, banana trees are herbs and rosemary bushes are not.

The second, more familiar definition is that herbs are plants that are useful: as seasonings, as medicines, or for other practical purposes such as dying cloth. This covers an awful lot of ground and has its own problems — vegetables, for instance, which were included in the old herbals but are seldom thought of as herbs these days.

The bottom line seems to be that herbs are a lot like pornography: you may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.

Herbs for Shade

Most culinary herbs need lots of sunshine, but there are a few that should do all right with morning light, assuming the soil is well drained. Parsley, chervil, fennel, tarragon, lemon balm, sweet cicely, sweet woodruff, and any of the mints will grow in shade.

Hardy Herb Garden

It’s so lovely to plant herbs that will survive winter and reliably come back year after year. There are many hardy herbs that fit that bill. A hardy culinary herb garden might include chives, garlic chives, fennel, sage, tarragon, thymes, winter savory, oregano, and mint (remember to keep the mint roots contained).

A hardy medicinal herb garden might include arnica, catnip, echinacea, feverfew, valerian, and comfrey.

And some annual herbs are such rampant self-sowers that you may only have to plant them once. Borage, dill, chervil, and coriander will come back year after year as long as you let the plants go to seed. They won’t necessarily come up right where you want them, but a little untidiness never hurt anybody!

Choose your Thyme wisely

In my garden, I’ve planted creeping thyme between stepping stones for the lovely appearance. How does this differ from the thyme I have planted in my herb garden you might ask. Creeping thyme, Thymus praecox, is edible but less aromatic and flavorful that the equally low-growing wild thyme, aka mother-of-thyme (Thymus pulegioides), which is both edible and tasty. In either cased, however, plants you’ve been walking on are not generally good candidates for slipping into the stew.

Curly vs Flat Parsley

Standing in front of the display at the garden center, the question is: which parsley do you choose for your garden this year? Think of curly parsley, Petroselinum crispum, and flat-leaf (or Italian) parsley, P. crispum var. neapolitanum, as fraternal twins. They aren’t identical, but botanically they are very close, and they have the same growing needs. The difference comes later: in the kitchen, where flat-leaf tends to have a stronger flavor (and be much easier to wash); and in the small, tight bouquets called tussie-mussies, where the curly variety is a more decorative choice. Don’t make the mistake of buying large plants and then trying to transplant them. The roots are easily damaged, and if they are, the plant will quickly bolt to seed instead of making lots of tasty foliage.

Note: parsley and thyme will stay usable well into cold weather. Try not to touch the leaves if they’re frozen or they’ll go limp. Let them thaw naturally or throw them into your stew pot.

Culinary Sage

Sage leaves taste best when they are young. Tender and delicate in early spring, they get tougher and more aromatic as the weather warms. Flavor is at its complex peak when flowers are just starting to form, and that is the best time to harvest a crop for drying.

To get the tastiest fresh sage, cut early and often, forcing the plant to make lots of new growth. The essential oils that give young leaves their lemony quality are volatile. As they dissipate, the leaves taste more and more like dried sage, a combination of camphor and pine. That sounds like a flavor too tough to kill, but it too fades over time.

The Old Country Look vs Reality

You’ve seen the pictures a million times: bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beams in a country kitchen, a beautifully arranged wreath of dried herbs and flowers (or bright red chiles) within snipping distance of the stove. It looks easy and practical, as well as cozy and homelike.

But it’s not really a good idea — unless you plan to use up the goodies in a very short time. Dried foods left exposed in a working kitchen will be magnets for grease and/or dust, and their quality will be degraded by light, heat, and steam. The old-time farmers whose kitchens inspired this look had airier kitchens (no insulation) and lower expectations about cleanliness of their food.

Once harvested, fresh herbs keep best when loosely wrapped in damp toweling and stored in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, out of sight is all too often out of mind — and off the menu. To avoid forgotten-herb syndrome, pick a small bunch every week and keep it in a vase of water on the kitchen counter. Even though you know they’re as close as the fridge (or a walk to the garden), you’ll find yourself using a lot more of everything from parsley and basil to lovage and chervil when there is a beautiful green bouquet of them right in front of you while you cook.

Enjoy our previous post on harvesting and drying your herbs:

https://wordpress.com/post/gardensnips.wordpress.com/3842

Drought Tolerant

The standard rule on water needs is “1 inch of rain or its equivalent every week,” but that assumes unconfined roots and widely spaced plants. If you’re using containers, though, the smaller and more tightly planted the container, the more frequently it will need to be watered.

Annuals: Using half-barrels or other large containers is a good first step in handling drought conditions for your annuals. They can hold quite a lot of soil and therefore store some moisture. As long as you don’t overplant them, there are quite a few annuals that could thrive. Widely available choices include morning glories (give them bamboo poles to climb or plant bush varieties), nasturtiums, poppies, bachelor’s buttons, California poppies (Eschscholzia californica), moss rose (Portulaca), calliopsis, and the haageana zinnias, of which the true blue ‘Persian Carpet’ is a stunner.

There are also plants that can be described as hangers-in. They won’t thrive, exactly, but they will survive a waterless week and revive when you come home. This groups includes alyssum, geraniums, and nicotiana.

Perennials: Drought-tolerant plants, or those with minimal water needs, have become increasingly appealing, not just because they save gardeners work and time, but because in many parts of the country, water conservation has become essential.

Herbaceous perennials that manage with minimal water include artemisia, spurge (Euhorbia spp.), coreopsis, sedum, moss mullein (Verbascum blattaria), potentilla, yarrow, and yucca. Note that many plants that tolerate drought have leaves that are narrow, hairy, or silvery (or all three) — strategies to keep evaporation to a minimum. Or they may have the alternative: very thick, succulent leaves that act as water-storage devices.

Woody plants that tolerate dry soil if they’re situated in large containers include barberry (Berberis spp.), beach plum (Prunus maritima), cotoneaster, brooms (Cytisus spp.), shrub honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos ‘Elegantissima’), tamarisk, rugosa rose, juniper, and yew.

Visit our past blog posts on drought using your Search command. A sample:

Dealing with Deadly Drought

Let’s Look at Annuals

For those of us that have huge gardens of perennial flowers, adding colorful annuals is a must! However, there’s a lot of money put into those containers so some direction may be helpful.

Annuals for Small Spaces

• Sunny Spaces: Window boxes, curbside planters, and the small areas of open soil next to mailboxes and light poles are often in direct sunshine for six or more hours a day, but they don’t have room for exuberant growers like cosmos and four-o’clocks. Small annuals that should thrive in these situations include ornamental peppers, alyssum, dwarf dahlias, heliotrope, lantana, love-in-a-mist, ageratum, verbena, creeping zinnia, signet and other small marigolds, petunias, cockscomb, and geranium.
• Shady Places: Small planting areas that get only three hours or so of direct sunlight are often ideal for houseplants enjoying a summer outdoors, as well as nursery staples such as begonias, impatiens, lobelias, and torenia. Browallia, caladium, coleus, cigar plant, shrimp plant, purple passion vine, rabbit’s-foot fern, and maidenhair fern are also choices to consider.

Annuals for Fragrance

Annuals offer some of the sweetest perfumes in the flower kingdom, so if you are a fan of good scents, be sure your strolling and cutting gardens include as many of these as possible: sweet alyssum, hesperis, the annual lupine called ‘Sunrise’ (Lupinus hartwegii ssp. cruickshankii), nicotiana (Nicotiana alata and N. sylvestris, but not N. Langsdorffii), stock (Matthiola incana), night-scented stock (M. longipetala), mignonette, and sweet peas.

Petunias should be on the list, too, but be sure to read seed catalogs carefully or smell plants before buying. Some, like old-fashioned trailing singles, are powerfully fragrant, while others, including many large-flowered hybrids, are very faint in the perfume department.

Annuals That Beat the Heat

Most flowering annuals are happiest when night temperatures stay below 80ºF, but not everything gets cooked when the weather is baking hot. The following plants are extreme-summer stalwarts, providing colors when lesser plants fade (as long as you keep them well-watered):

Gaillardia, globe amaranth, four-o’clocks, lantana, Madagascar periwinkle, ornamental peppers, portulaca, salvia, sunflower, torenia, narrow-leaf zinnia (Z. haageana).

Note: Most plants, like most people, can take heat more easily if humidity is low. Even when temperatures are moderate, long runs of muggy weather are usually synonymous with fungus invasions.

Feeding Annuals

The ads on television would have us believing that you should be out fertilizing your plants once a week for good growth during the summer. However, you can get fairly good results by feeding everything once a month with a bloom-boosting fertilizer. Bloom boosters are high in phosphorus, which supports the formation of flowers and seeds.

Usually. Like all rules, this one has exceptions: nasturtiums, nigella, morning glories, and poppies, among others, will flower most abundantly if they are given no extra fertilizer at all. Just plant them in good, well-drained garden soil.

At the other extreme, hybrid petunias, million bells, and the sunflowers that are bred for cutting are heavy feeders. They need rich soil and biweekly doses of bloom booster if they are to live up to their full potential as flowering machines.

But you will have stronger plants and more flowers if you do just a bit of fine-tuning. Plants that are cut back repeatedly are being asked to put out more growth than those that simply sit and bloom, and they need more food to do it. This is especially true of cutting flowers, which lose substantial amounts of stem and leaf as well as blossoms. The more you take, the more important it will be to give the plant something to eat.