8 Things to Know About Growing Your Own Herbs

There are few things more satisfying than picking food that you grew yourself. But nurturing fruits and vegetables can be a tricky business. It takes trial and error (no matter how much you read on the subject), and requires time, energy, and some amount of space to get a worthwhile harvest. Herbs, comparatively, are quite simple to bring up. No one knows this better than Mark Diacono, who put it most succinctly when he said, “The leaves are the prize and the plant’s job is to grow them to survive.”

Herb: A Cook’s Companion. Photo by Amazon

That sentence comes from the food writer’s new book, Herb: A Cook’s Companion, a glorious encyclopedia of information on how to grow—and then subsequently cook with and preserve—more types of herbs than you have probably ever heard of before. There is a whole section dedicated to the nitty-gritty particulars of each (the varieties of fennel, the ideal conditions for lovage once winter comes, how to space marjoram seeds). But throughout, there are tips that apply more broadly to the vast majority of herbs, because it is Diacono’s belief that they are powerhouses of the garden and kitchen, requiring little work and little space for maximum reward.

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