Hi, guys.
This is Sheridan with Garden Guys and Gals.
And I want to tell you about some of my top five
favorite herbs.
My number one, of course, is basil.
I love basil.
It comes in a bunch of different varieties, shapes, colors,
flavors.
This is sweet basil.
It has this larger leaf, kind of ruffled leaves.
You can get a purple version of this.
You can get one that's called Purple Ruffles that has really
rippled edges.
This one is one called Cinnamon Basil.
And there's, of course, Thai basil.
You can even get them really tiny in this variety called
Spicy Globe.
So they're a great addition to the garden.
I love to use them for pesto.
So it's something that I always have, and I'll
have multiple varieties planted because I can use them
for different things.
Like, the Thai basil those really good with Thai cooking.
You can see that it puts out a little flower stem at the top,
and that will reduce my leaves that are being formed.
And I want to really create a nice bushy plant
with lots of leaves and not so much of this flower.
If you want to let it go to flower, it's great.
It has beautiful purple or white flowers on it.
But what I can do to help myself is just
go through and snip wherever these flowers
are going to appear.
And what will happen is it will force the plant
to grow outward and get really nice and bushy.
But this is absolutely one of my most favorite plants,
just the smell and the aroma.
And you can often catch me in my own garden just
picking off a leaf and giving it a good little nibble
and tasting what it tastes like.
So plant some basil in your garden and you won't regret it.
Hey, guys.
This is another one of my favorite herbs
to have in my vegetable garden area.
This is rosemary.
And a lot of people think the rosemary won't overwinter
in Utah, but it does.
This was planted last year, last spring, a year ago.
And you can see it's beautiful.
It's growing.
It's filling in really nicely.
This is a variety called Arp, A-R-P.
So it's sold in a lot of our local nurseries.
You can see it does have a little bit of winter burn,
so what I do is I just come in, cut off
some of these little areas that did get a little burned
from the winter.
This will also promote some nice bushy growth when I do this.
But this is one of those plants that I like
to walk past and just smell.
It's aromatherapy for me in the garden.
You can see that it will produce these beautiful little purple
flowers, purple-blue flowers on the stems,
and that's another attractive feature to them.
You can actually use them as a landscape plant
if you want to and don't even want to worry
about it being an herb.
But it's a gorgeous plant to add to your garden.
Great for cooking.
So go out.
Find that Arp variety, put it in your garden, and enjoy it.
Hey, guys.
I want to tell you about another one of my most favorite herbs.
This is Italian parsley.
So you can usually grow parsley in two different forms
here in Utah, this nice flat leaf Italian parsley,
or you can grow the curled or ruffled parsley.
I like the flat leaf just because it has a better flavor
and taste to it.
It doesn't taste like you're eating a garnish, which
some of us may not want to do.
But it's a really beautiful plant, really
conducive to cooking in Italian cooking, that type of thing.
I throw a lot of it in my spaghetti sauces and things
like that at home.
So this has been overwintered.
This was planted last year, and it will
start to produce some stocks.
Let me show you what happens.
See these stalks?
These big, fat stalks start to come up from the base,
and they'll create flowers.
So we do have to cut those back if we want to overwinter them.
Here's one here starting to create a little flour
on the top.
So I just go through and cut this.
These are really easy to harvest.
When I want to use this in cooking,
I just run out to the garden and snip off a handful.
And then I have enough for whatever
I want to cook that night.
You can plant this annually.
Then you don't have to deal with the woody stems that come up,
or you can use it as a perennial and just come out and clip
those stems as they form.
If you allow those stems to keep forming and form that flower,
it will flower, and you will have parsley everywhere
the next year, so you do have to stay on top of it.
But a great plant for incorporating
into your herb garden and for cooking.
So if you have the chance to throw
some parsley into your herb garden,
I highly recommend that you do it.
Hey, guys.
Sheridan with Garden Guys and Gals here
with another great herb selection for your garden.
So this is sage.
This is what we call common sage.
It's the culinary form of sage that we use.
There are a lot of sages and other plants in the sage family
that we use out in the landscape.
And you can also use this as a landscape plant.
You can see it's big.
It's bushy.
It's totally filled in.
This was planted last year in our Edible Demonstration Garden
at the USU Botanical Center.
And you can see it looks gorgeous.
It overwintered really well, and it's actually
putting up some blooms.
So you can see, I'm just going to sacrifice this one for you.
You can see that this has this gorgeous purple flower that
will start to sprout up from this mound of greenery
that we have here, and we're going
to have this gorgeous purple color in the garden.
This is really easy to harvest for cooking.
I can just come out, grab a couple of leaves.
You really don't need much in your cooking
because this is a really strong type of herb.
But you can harvest this, drag it into your house,
cook with it.
You can actually even dry this.
This one dries really, really well.
And you can dry it, crumble it, preserve it
however you want to you.
You can put it in oils to preserve it and use it
in your cooking year-round.
So this is one that I highly recommend having in the garden
not just because of its culinary attributes,
but because it is absolutely gorgeous.
And come to visit the Edible Demonstration Garden
when this is in bloom in a few weeks,
and you will see how incredible this plant is
Hi, guys.
Sheridan Hansen here again with another great selection
of herbs for your garden.
This is the last one that we're going to talk about.
This is thyme, and thyme comes in a wide variety
of colors and flavors.
You can get Mother of Thyme.
You can get Lemon Thyme.
This is just a nice common thyme that we
used in the edible demonstration garden
to demonstrate some of the herbs that you
can grow in your garden.
You can see it creates this nice mat,
kind of this big mounded area.
And this is several plants that we planted together.
It's actually blooming right now.
It produces these darling little just barely
blue blooms on these little stems.
And it's really easy to harvest.
Once you get it established, you'll
have it for a very long time.
It's perennial.
It will stay in your garden for a long time.
You just very quickly snip off a bunch.
And when you go to use it in your cooking, in your dishes,
you just hold the stem and strip the leaves.
It helps if it cooperates.
So you just hold the stem and strip the leaves like that,
and you end up with a bunch of darling little thyme
leaves to add to lemonade, to add to all of your cooking.
It's a wonderful herb to add.
So really easy, low care, low maintenance.
It doesn't have a lot of problems.
You can just plant it, water it, and just kind of forget it.
And you end up with this gorgeous plant
that you can harvest from year-round Thanks for watching.