🌱Things happen fast in the garden. I just try to hold on and enjoy it all each summer as time flies by. I'm grateful beyond measure for the gorgeous yield that unfolds before my eyes. In my garden are exciting culinary herbs from around the world as well as heirloom vegetables and edible flowers. Let's take a look together!
Jump to:
- 🪴Shiso varieties and captivating scents
- 🌿A multitude of basil colors, scents, and flavors
- 🍃Worldwide mints with so many wonderful scents
- 🌱More distinctive culinary herbs in the garden
- 🥕Veggies ripening in the garden
- 🌻Edible flowers you can grow and enjoy
- ✨More gardening and recipe posts you'll love
- ✏️How is your garden growing?
Here are some garden gems in the garden this summer:
🪴Shiso varieties and captivating scents
Above are two of my shiso varieties in the garden: hojiso from Japan, and 38n-kkaennip from Korea. Shiso, also known as perilla, is such a delightfully fragrant and flavorful herb in the mint family Lamiaceae. It's especially enjoyed in the cuisines of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
I have several varieties of shiso in the garden, in gorgeous shades of green and red. I'm developing several exciting recipes with these special herbs. This is a rewarding and easy-to-grow herb for both your garden and your cooking.
🌿A multitude of basil colors, scents, and flavors
After starting out like gangly teenagers as they always do, my 45 varieties of basil are finally beginning to thrive. It's so thrilling to see, smell, and taste these gloriously unique varieties from all over the globe.
I'm so excited to begin documenting the scents and flavors of these varieties to share with you. And to compare them to the 38 phenomenal types that I've grown previously: 38 Types of Basil to Grow in Your Herb Garden, Part 1. This post also includes details about each variety.
I love the truly stunning spectrum of colors and flavors among all 83 types that I've grown the past few years! And there are, of course, still many varieties I still have yet to grow. Here are some of them I've captured in photos:
The basil garden is filling in beautifully with these distinctive varieties from all over the world with unique leaf shape, color, and scent.
Basil varieties from left to right and top to bottom: scent leaf, ouzo, African nunum, mammoth sweet, New Guinea, green globe, opalescent, Toscano, and feleny.
Freshly-trimmed basil tops.
Basil varieties from left to right and top to bottom: punsch, green ruffles, East Indian tree, valentino, Peruvian, besobela coarse, West African, reyhan sabz, and Malawi camphor.
There are so many distinctive and captivating scents, flavors, and colors!
Basil varieties: golden mountain sweet Thai and everleaf lemon.
I'll soon be trimming the basil flowers to encourage the plants to continue their lush vegetative growth. (And these flowers are amazing in iced tea, salads, dressings, simple syrups, desserts, etc. So I never let them go to waste!)
This regular pruning will allow the plants to grow spectacularly large as they maintain optimal flavor and leaf tenderness. I hope I'll have several more weeks to enjoy them and watch them thrive before the nighttime temperatures begin to drop, starting their yearly decline.
To see photos, details, and scent notes for each of the varieties discussed here, please check out: 45 Types of Basil to Grow in Your Herb Garden, Part 2.
🍃Worldwide mints with so many wonderful scents
The mint is growing beautifully! I'm currently growing 54 varieties from all over the world. This includes beloved heirlooms and exciting niche scents as well. The plants are now tall and strong enough for me to trim off the tops to encourage side shoots to form. And, like with the basil, to prevent the plants from becoming woody or diverting their energy to flowering. We want to preserve tender leaves and flavor while we can.
I'm really looking forward to smelling and tasting all of these! And for my local readers, you know I'll need taste testers soon to help me document all of the wonderful nuances of each one. This'll be such a fun project to share with all of you.
For a look at the 17 mints that I've grown previously, and taste-tested various combinations of them in a classic mint liqueur recipe, please check out my post Homemade Crème de Menthe Guide: 6 Versions Reviewed.
🌱More distinctive culinary herbs in the garden
And here are more of the unique culinary herbs in the garden:
Grandview catmint and Texas hummingbird mint agastache.
Lemon savory and Lebanese za'atar thyme summer savory.
Mt. Carbine lemon leaf. One of the most fantastically-lemon-scented herbs you can experience.
🥕Veggies ripening in the garden
And here are the veggies ripening this summer:
Freshly-picked baby carrots and dirty nails, my epitome of happiness! I've planted my carrots too intensively, which gives me the opportunity to thin them out and enjoy these babies early in the season. This allows the remaining carrots in the ground to grow to full size. These small ones are so wonderful and tender in their bejeweled tones.
🥕For an irresistibly fresh carrot recipe, please check out my post Heirloom Carrots with Chermoula (Carottes à la Chermoula).
🌶️And for a really flavorful worldwide heirloom pepper guide, please check out my post 31 Peppers to Grow, Harvest, Dry, Smoke, Grind, and Enjoy!
🍅For an easy, delectable summer pasta with heirloom tomatoes, please see my post Easy Vegan Pasta with Garden Heirloom Tomato Sauce Vierge. It's so quick and flavorful, and we all adore it. We've been really enjoying it! And the post has photos of a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes from my garden.
I managed to salvage a few fresh fava beans before the black bean aphids took over all of them. Despite crop rotation, these pests have found my favas 2 years in a row. And I only have so much time to keep blasting them off with a hose.
I've also picked pods of both these fava beans and also some peas that were past ripe, to save the seeds to plant next year.
Here's a really opportune and special weed find! This is purslane, growing among my newly-planted Spanish thyme plants. This delightful green is crisp and fresh, with a lively savory and tangy flavor. Purslane is a common weed in many home gardens.
I've bought seeds for both green and golden purslane, but these have shown up in my garden all on their own. Such a wonderful treasure.
One way we like to enjoy purslane is raw, lightly dressed with hazelnut or walnut oil and coarse sea salt. My son Remy invented this method when he was little, and he called it "salad and bot." We still enjoy salad and bot, which has expanded in our family's definition to include any salad green dressed in this delightful way!
Here are some yellow shallot flowers. They arrived along with the huge load of seed garlic I'd ordered, and I hadn't even remembered planting them or the red shallot variety alongside. Such a nice surprise!
The potato plants of my 28 heirloom varieties in the garden are really coming along well. I love the charming flowers, which along with the leaves can often show a nod to the potato color. This all blue variety above is especially revealing, in both the bloom color and the veining on the leaves.
To see how all of these varieties turned out, as well as photos, details, and taste-testing notes for each one, please check out🌱28 Heirloom Potatoes to Grow with Taste Tests.
🌻Edible flowers you can grow and enjoy
The edible blooms are really brightening up the garden beds. Here are some beauties in the garden:
And here are some snapdragons that I started from seed under my grow lights. They germinate slowly, but there's such a gorgeous array of colors available to experience when growing them this way!
I hope your garden is thriving right now. I'll keep sharing what I'm growing, along with flavorful plant-based recipes from around the world as well.
✨More gardening and recipe posts you'll love
Looking for other recipes like this? Try these:
✏️How is your garden growing?
I'd love to hear. Please let me know in the comments below!
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