Little Kitchen Herb Garden

My definition of “herb” comes from having worked at a 17th-century living history museum, Plimoth Plantation, where pretty much anything other than field crops was given that appellation. Lettuce, sorrel, spinach and burnet were “sallet” herbs, and the kitchen gardens were filled with all manner of edible and medicinal plants.

When I moved to this old farm seven years ago, I planted a large herb garden, bringing slips of many of those old-fashioned herbs with me – elecampane, lemon balm, wormwood, rue, teasel, tansy, comfrey, and so on, along with the more typical kitchen herbs. This good-sized bed is perhaps 100 feet from the house; call me spoiled, but it seemed awfully far on a cold evening or a rainy day to dash out and fetch a handful of this or that while cooking.

And so a more functional kitchen herb garden was born, just three or four steps from the kitchen deck. So much better! Here I keep the perennial culinaries that I use – sage, thyme, chives, winter savory, oregano, sorrel, salad burnet – and plant the annuals that are often plucked just a few leaves at a time: spinach, kale, basil, cilantro, rosemary, bronze fennel. During the winter, our coffee grounds are easily tossed into the annual beds, and a layer of finished compost in the spring keeps everything happy.