Growing culinary herb gardens in Idaho is not tricky, but there are steps to follow

One of the most useful gardens you can grow in our area is a small culinary herb garden. It should have full sun exposure for at least six hours each day and be able to be watered twice a week. You can grow thyme, sweet marjoram, oregano, chives, sweet basil, sage, summer savory, rosemary, tarragon, mint, caraway and other basils such as Mexican, Thai, and Tulsi or holy basil.

Sage will take the most room per plant, but you’ll likely want several basil and summer savory plants. I’ve come lately to the use of summer savory in bean soup, but it’s a marvelous addition.

Some gardeners use tabletop gardens, planting them on a one-plant-per-square-foot basis. Mint and its relatives such as lemon balm can and will take over unless you watch it very closely. Some folks plant mint in a pot, and turn it around at least once a week, lest roots sneak out of the drainage hole and set up shop in an adjacent location.

The basils are more than frost tender; they dislike temperatures colder than 38 and might die when temps dip that low. For that reason, never store basil in the refrigerator, or you’ll have black, slimy leaves instead of green aromatic ones. Basil chopped with oil for pesto freezes fine. Some say freezing pesto with garlic yields a musty flavor, but you can add garlic after thawing. Don’t set basil plants outside before June 1, or at least be prepared to cover plants against frost.

Some of the other culinary plants such as sweet marjoram, tarragon and rosemary may not be hardy enough to survive our coldest winter temperatures. Grow those crops as annuals or put them into cold frames or a greenhouse for winter. Incidentally, don’t bother with Russian tarragon. That herb can be germinated from seed, but the flavor is quite poor compared to the cloned tarragon.

For maximum flavor, do not coddle your culinary herbs with a lot of water and/or fertilizer. Many of them are native to wind-scoured slopes of Greece and Italy. Basils are usually harvested and used for their leaves, so the more leaves, the bigger your harvest. To build up a good quantity of leaves, nip out the growing top of the plant after it has developed four true leaves, and continue pruning and harvesting as it grows. Prune off any flowers or even flower buds as they appear. Harvest before flowering the morning of a dry day, after dew has evaporated, for best flavor.

This act of pruning the tips of basil shows you quickly what effect it has. That is, growth hormones such as auxins that had been supporting top growth then travel back to lower buds to stimulate branching development and growth. This also happens with tree branches, vines and other plants. Pruning the tip of any branch spurs more branching toward the trunk of a tree or root of a vine, and those new branches can enlarge a harvest, for example.

Pruning off the growing tip of a vine such as squash, melon or cucumber stimulates branching back toward the base of the plant. The normal progression of squash, melon or cucumber formation is that the male flowers appear first and the female flowers later. Some growers claim female flowers appear only on a vine’s side branches, so nipping off the tips of vines leads to earlier and more fruiting and harvest.

And on this topic, you can tell the male flowers from the female by looking at the back of a squash, cucumber or melon flower. If it has a straight stalk culminating in the blossom, it’s a male. If there’s a tiny squash, melon or cucumber between the stalk and the blossom, it’s a female.

If bees and other pollinators are scarce, or a chill kills pollen, female flowers drop off because they haven’t been pollinated, so it may be up to the gardener to pluck male flowers, pull off petals and rub the pollen-bearing anthers onto the stigma of the flower to obtain fruit. It’s far easier and more efficient to let bees do the pollinating, so take good care of our bees. That means be very careful with pesticides. Follow label directions, and be aware that with most pesticides, you’re also killing beneficial insects.