Tasha Greer - Grow Your Own Spices

Despite our advances, theres one area of home food growing that novice and skilled gardeners still leave mostly to commercial producers. Of course, I mean the subject of this book, growing spices. Spices are like the final frontier in home food production.

Dont get me wrong; gardeners do dabble on the edges of spice gardening now. We grow ginger in pots, let dill go to seed, start garlic in fall, and more. However, even when we grow most of our own vegetables and herbs, we still tend to purchase the bulk of our spices in dried, processed forms.

Theres a good reason for this. For ages, spice trading was so profitable that growers zealously guarded the secrets of plant propagation and spice care. In fact, there are many historical accounts of intrigue, espionage, murder, and wars over the spice trade.

Thankfully, those historical protectionist attitudes have changed too. Today, growing spices has become part of our public domain no longer relegated to the role of intellectual property or trade secrets. Spice plants and seeds are available from suppliers around the world. The knowledge of how to grow spices is widely dispersed for free in blogs and videos.

My personal homegrown spice collection is stored in sealed jars and containers for year-round use.

As we know, not every bit of information on the internet can be trusted. Also, environmental conditions have a big effect on spice plant health, so not all the information is applicable to every climate.

This book is meant to help distill that abundance of information into simple, practical methods that will work for most gardeners. It also aggregates that information for over thirty spices in one place.

PRESERVING OUR GLOBAL CULTURAL HERITAGE

For the record, Im a gardener, food lover, and someone who cares about my health and our planet. I assembled this spice gardening collection, for all of you with similar loves, as a simple place to start. I also recruited my friend, herbal medicine expert, Lindsey Feldpausch, RH, to offer medicinal tips to help you cultivate better health too. However, this book is only possible because cultures and communities around the world have cultivated these plants, and the knowledge to grow and use them, for thousands of years.

As such, this work is meant as an homage to the incredible natural and human history embodied in the aromas, tastes, and health benefits of these durable delights. It is my hope that the information in these pages will help you grow spices at home. My deeper wish, though, is that by growing your own spices, youll feel a sense of gratitude, as I do, for the cultural and natural diversity responsible for this spice collection.

Unfortunately, its impossible to appreciate that diversity without also being aware that it is threatened not only by climate change, but by a climate of cultural inequality. Spices, in my experience, are a kind of window to the world. They can serve as a regular reminder and celebration of our rich global heritage and our need to preserve it.

Growing spices alone will not change the world. Growing our awareness and capacity to care for cultures different from our own absolutely can. As a gardener, I know that every plant I grow also grows me. Spices seem to have an uncanny ability to deepen my connection to the earth and all its inhabitants. I very much want this same experience for you.

FURTHER STUDY

In the same way that our homegrown vegetable movement blends our agricultural and cultural past and our technological present, this next phase of spice growing will be too. If you want to journey deeper into the histories, cultures, and uses of the spices described in this book, I invite you to visit my website www.simplestead.com.

There youll find links to the wonderful resources Ive come across in my research, plus recipes and other tasty tidbits, to help foster a deeper connection to the spices you grow and use. If you have spicy experiences, please leave comments so all of us spice lovers can learn from you.

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY

Before we delve into the details of spice growing, lets cover a few administrative matters.

First, the organization of this book is loosely based on the difficulty of level of care. Truthfully, all these spices are easy to grow in the right conditions. The more difficult spices may require special treatment outside their native habitat. For example, some perennial spices need tropical or subtropical environments and may take a few years to fruit. That means you must care for them longer and create suitable microclimates for plant health.