Your Themed Kitchen Herb Garden

I collect cookbooks and love to experiment with interesting dishes from other culture like a Mexican mole. Do you enjoy cooking delicious international dinners? Like me, you cultivate a lot of the ingredients if you begin your own themed kitchen herb garden.

You can cultivate the major herbs in your own garden and have the freshest ingredients to add to your recipes, or experiment on your own.

You do not need a special location for your themed kitchen herb garden. You can cultivate them in pots or in your usual garden bed.

Look no further than these suggestions for your own themed kitchen herb garden:

• Asian: From Thai and Vietnamese to Indian and Chinese, Asian cuisine has a lot of tastes and spices to choose from. Some fabulous herb plants to plant in your Asian-themed garden are lemongrass, cayenne pepper, cardamom and anise. Try the licorice flavor of anise in your next Indian meal, or use its warm sweetness in your baked goods. You can also try it in tea as well as in baking a savory-sweet cookie. The growing popularity of Asian cuisine has helped it fall back into favor in the US in the last few years.

• Mexican: Not a week goes by when I don’t chow down on a Mexican meal. Some spicy beans and rice or nachos can fast hit the location. Can you even make an authentic Mexican meal without Cayenne pepper, Cilantro and Garlic?

• Italian: What’s your favorite Italian dish? My favorite is lasagna, of course. The best I ever had was my mom’s which included all these great herb plants: basil, fennel, parsley, garlic, marjoram, oregano, rosemary and thyme. The oniony taste of garlic makes it a perfect addition to most Italian dinners. You can add garlic to your mashed potatoes and even roast it with some olive oil to eat it by itself. Don’t overcook your garlic because it loses its flavor the longer it cooks.

• Middle East: Foods from the Middle East and north Africa are only growing in popularity lately. The flavors are so varied and the ingredients are so out of the norm for most of what I usually have in my recipes, including chick peas, figs and couscous. Try these herb plants to spice up your Middle Eastern meals: cardamom, garlic, parsley, rosemary and saffron.

• German: You can have your own Oktoberfest any time you like if you’ve got all the right German herbs. For authentic German meals, experiment with these herb plants: chives, dill, horseradish, sage and thyme. As a relative of mustard, horseradish is a condiment herb that you can use for extra taste. It can also clear up your sinuses! Use horseradish to add some extra twang to beef, fish, cream cheese spreads, potato salad, mayonnaise and meat loaf.

One of the fantastic things about herb gardening it that herb plants are a gift that keeps on giving. If you remove a few leaves from your sage plant, it can grow back. Most herb plants benefit from being cut back from time to time and will likely grow bigger and fuller as a result.

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.