Your Kitchen Herb Garden

If you love to cook, you will probably want to start you own kitchen herb garden. I keep my kitchen herbs clustered near my kitchen door so that I can step outside and cut off a leaf, stem, blossom or other piece for my dinners.

Pull down a few of your favorite cookbooks and read through the ingredient lists when you get ready to plant your kitchen herb garden.

These are some awesome herbs for your kitchen garden:

• Chives: I love raising and cooking chives because they are so uncomplicated. From seed to cooking pot, these are simple all the way around. You can cut off the tops of the herb and it will keep on growing. It is awesome for cooking special dinners or sprinkling on your baked potatoes.

• Dill: Dill is one of those utterly foolproof herbs that you just can’t go wrong with. Your dill plant is a self-sower, so if you are providing the full-sun and well-drained dirt it likes and you don’t want more and more dill plants, cut off the blossoms before they go to seed. The whole plant is edible, from the seeds to the stems, including the leaves and flowers. The dill plant also tastes awesome in your tuna salad or chicken salad.

• Cayenne Pepper: Because this sizzling hot plant will grow to more than 3 feet high, you will want to plant it so that it doesn’t block the sun for another plant. If you live in a climate that has frost during the colder time of year, you’ll want to bring your cayenne pepper plant indoors. When starting out with cayenne pepper, you do not have to get it, you can start with seeds indoors and then plant the young pepper plant outside. As summer winds on, harvest your peppers as soon as they begin to ripen, because they will easily and quickly rot on the plant.

• Tarragon: I like the awesome taste of tarragon. I make a scrumptious mayonnaise-based vegetable dip with tarragon that never fails to please. Start with a young plant and cut leaves and stems whenever you need them. Your tarragon leaves can be cut and frozen in a freezer bag to use later in your sumptuous dinners.

• Cilantro: This star of Mexican cuisine can add a lot of flavor to your next salsa, tacos or Mexican chicken dish. You can successfully raise cilantro from seeds and harvest leaves in any month of the year, which you can add to your delicious Mexican entrees. Cilantro can also grow well inside during the colder time of year. The leaves near the bottom of the herb have the best flavor, so start here when you harvest the leaves for your next Mexican dinner.

• Welch Onions: These little onions are similar to scallions and have a pretty, mild taste. I have used them in dishes more for their appearance than any other quality. Leave a lot of room for your Welch onion because they tend to grow in big clumps.

Good luck with your herb gardening. Be sure to let me know how your herb garden grows.

Here is more information on Fresh Herb Gardening. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Herb Gardens.