Top 5 Culinary Herbs to Grow in Your Garden

Herbs are a delicious, low-calorie and healthful way to add zip and flavor to your meals. They can bring ordinary meats and salads to a gourmet level, and provide unique and new tastes for your diners. Growing herbs is easy to do, and can provide you with all you can eat very inexpensively. Everyone has different tastes and may list other must-haves, but here is my list of the top 5 Cannot-Do-Without herbs to grow for cooking.

Chives

Chives are a mildly onion flavored herb. The plant looks a bit like long thick grass of a deep green and has pale purple, pink or white blossoms that are also edible. Chives are an every day herb in my kitchen and they really enhance the taste of potatoes and eggs. They're wonderful in dip, and are a nice addition to salads. Pretty much any dish that would taste good with onion, but wouldn't stand up to the tang of a raw onion can be improved by chives. Another benefit of this plant is the fact that it's one of the first herbs up in the spring, and is a hardy perennial.

Basil

Basil is a classic Italian flavor that is indispensable in marinara sauces, and is also the base of pesto sauce. I like to grow basil because the prolific plant is easily store for the winter, by preparing and freezing servings of pesto sauce. Freezing pesto sauce allows the summer to come back again, even in January, because the green bright taste of the basil really holds up well. Basil is an annual that thrives in hot temperatures and grows very large and bushy in one season. It can be dug up and kept in the house if desired.

Cilantro

When I serve salsas, quesadillas, and nachos cilantro is always put to work in my kitchen. The bright lemon-y tang of cilantro is a complement to the sweet tomatoes and biting onions that are used in Mexican cooking. Cilantro is also a hot weather loving herb, and it will not stand up well to any very low temperatures or frosts.

Mint

Peppermint is my favorite mint flavor, but there are many varieties of mint, all with their own taste. Mint is great in ice cream, steeped in tea, and muddled for a mint julep. Mint leaves are also good for digestion, one reason they are often used to garnish desserts. Mint is an invasive plant that will never go away once it's got a hold in the garden. For this reason, it's best to plant mint in a large pot, where it can't get away, or in a secluded place where nothing else needs to grow.

Stevia

Stevia is a naturally super-sweet herb that is very low in calories. It's gaining in popularity, and is pretty useful when making smoothies and teas. It adds a lot of sweet flavor and eliminates the need for extra calories from sweetening with sugar or honey. Stevia is a semi-tropical plant, and should be treated as an annual in any climate that experiences cold winter temperatures.

These may not be the old stand-by Scarborough Fair herbs, but they are my favorite culinary herbs to grow for myself.