Belsinger Susan - Grow your own herbs: the 40 best culinary varieties for home gardens

Herbs brought us together , first as colleagues, then as friends. We both love growing herbs and other plants, spending time in our gardens, and visiting other gardens. We especially like to prepare and eat good food. Over the years, we have come to respect each others highly developed sense of smell and taste. When we are together, we go on ad infinitum about botanicals, sensory experience, and cookingwe are flavor and fragrance junkies.

Collectively, we have more than a century of experience in gardening and cooking. Art started growing things when he was six as the child of what would later be called hippies (but in the late 1940s were merely considered poor survivalists), and he has dabbled in herbs ever since. Susan cooked at her grandmothers side, starting as a little girl and throughout her childhood, but she didnt have her first garden for growing herbs until she was twenty, and she taught her first cooking class at that age.

Art, a recently retired professor of botany at Delaware State University, still occasionally teaches botany and horticulture, and he continues to enjoy researching and writing about herbs. He learned to cook when young because, with two busy parents who were just trying to keep the family afloat, he got tired of eating bologna sandwiches. While he grew up on traditional Pennsylvania German dishes, Julia Child on TV was an epiphany, and he hasnt stopped since.

Susan has written countless books and articles on gardening, herbs, and cooking, often focusing on the garden-to-kitchen aspectsgrow, harvest, and create recipes. Recently referred to as a flavor artist, she has shared her passion for herbs and cooking through teaching and inspiring others with sensory experiences. Art has been her mentor, guiding her in the botany, science, and chemistry of all facets of herbs.

We have written this book for new or inexperienced gardeners who like to cook and for cooks who are intrigued by the idea of growing their own culinary herbs. Herbal enthusiasts will enjoy it as well. We offer our choices of the best herbs for home gardens and share our passion for cultivating and cooking with herbs, in hopes of helping readers understand how easy it is to grow seasonings that can add signature flavor to all kinds of dishes.

A wicker basket can be a good place to house potted herbs.

Like any endeavor, growing plants can be intimidating if youre a beginner. Heres the good news, though. Were not beginners, and were eager to share what weve learned over our decades of experience growing and bringing out the best in herbs. We have sorted through many species and varieties of culinary herbs and have selected forty varieties that we believe are especially good choices for anyone wanting to grow their own culinary seasonings.

We are passionate about using herbs in the kitchen. We know them by their appearance, their leaves, their shapes and colorsand we know them intimately through sensory experience. Weve been wooed and enchanted by cultivating these inimitable plants and we hope you will be, too.

One of our favorite things about herbs is the pay-off to effort ratio. Creating delicious foods with herbs from your own yard can bring wonderful rewards and satisfactionyet growing your own herbs does not require excessive maintenance. Of course, even if growing your own herbs wasnt relatively simple, the aromas and flavors alone might be worth the work. Homegrown herbs add a unique depth of taste and variety of nutrients to countless foods and beverages.

Fresh herbs from the garden, snipped, tied, and ready for drying.

If youve grown flowers or shrubs or houseplants, you may have found it enjoyable, but cultivating herbs for culinary purposes provides a level of gratification few other homegrown plants can offer.

Anyone with a spice rack knows the expense of dried herbs. And fresh herbs from a farmers market or grocery store can run several dollars for one small packet. An herb you grow yourself (even if you start with a plant and not seeds) will likely cost much less at the outsetand provide harvests throughout the growing season. If its a perennial (comes back year after year), it will stretch your savings even further. And by preserving your harvest, youll also reduce the cost of buying dried herbs.

Growing herbs at home offers an extra benefit that store-bought versions cant: the scents that waft through yards and windows during the growing season. Breathing in the collection of aromas that rise as you gather herbs for supper is immensely satisfying. And besides, you always guarantee that they are organically grown.

Then there are the mouthwatering smells that fresh herbs bring to meals. Did you know that smell is not only a precursor to taste, but actually an integral part of it? Without smell, we cant sense and savor the full flavor of a food. In fact, taste is about 90 percent smell.

Here is a simple experiment to understand this proposition. Pick an herb leaf, but do not rub it or sniff it. Hold your nose closed with your fingers and do not let go. While holding your nose, take a little nibble of the herb leaf. Do you taste anything? No? While still holding your nose, take another nibble to be sure. Same results? Now let go of your nose and breathe. You will be amazed to experience the herb fragrance and flavor filling your nose and mouth. Now you understand how smell and taste together result in flavor.

In the herb profiles, we try to touch on each plants smell and then describe the flavor, which is the aroma and taste combined. These sensory experiences will help you the reader, gardener, and cook, to imagine the herb flavors and inspire you to use them to create wonderful food and flavor combinations.