Backyard Cuisine

Your Backyard Herb Garden A Gardeners Guide to Growing Over 50 Herbs Plus How to Use Them in Cooking Crafts Companion Planting and More

Your Backyard Herb Garden A Gardeners Guide to Growing Over 50 Herbs Plus How to Use Them in Cooking Crafts Companion Planting and More

“Your Backyard Herb Garden captures all the excitement of herbs and makes them easy to grow and enjoy.”–Susan McClure, author of The Herb Gardener

“A skilled gardener and teacher, Miranda Smith knows her subject well, writes about it easily, and obviously enjoys the special charms of herbs. She conveys all this in Your Backyard Herb Garden. Her no-nonsense advice on soil building, fertilizing, pest control, and watering is pure gold. She also covers harvesting and using herbs in teas, vinegars, cosmetics, potpourris, crafts, and more. Do try Miranda’s rose geranium jelly!”–Bertha Reppert, author of Growing Your Herb Business and Herbs with Confidence, and herbarist in residence at The Rosemary House, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania
— Review

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Everything you ever wanted to know about herb gardening
The book is full of great details on everything you could think of related to herb gardening. From selecting a garden location to preparing the soil to selecting the herbs to harvesting and preserving, it’s all covered. At times there are too many details, but it’s a great book for a beginner or experienced gardener.

5 Stars Great Book
The book describes how to grow, harvest and uses of each herb in the book and it covers all the main herbs and more. Excellent descriptions as well as illustrations on how to do everything so even for the unexperienced grower it would be easy to learn. Very happy with my new book.

4 Stars Herb Growing for the Clueless
While the book doesn’t cover as many herbs as I had hoped, it gets to all the major ones. More importantly, the information provided is thorough and presented in a non-overwhelming, easy-to-read way. Each page tells the reader how easy the plant is to grow, whether it can be grown in a container, what zone it grows best in, how to harvest, propagate, and store the herb, and all sorts of other pertinent info.

The first portion of the book covers planning one’s garden, planting techniques and gives instructions for several methods for using herbs (flavored oils, teas, etc.). There are plenty of useful charts throughout which make this a great quick reference guide.

The author safely shies away from giving too much information on medicinal uses for the herbs, so those looking for information and instructions regarding herbal remedies should definitely purchase another book in addition to this one.

5 Stars Complete information
A very useful book for the home gardener. A quick guide for growing, harvesting and using herbs.

5 Stars Concise, but useful
This is a relatively small book at about 150 pages, but it manages to pack in a lot of information very concisely. It’s beautifully illustrated with color photographs and drawings.

The first 2/3 of the book includes general herb gardening background and use of herbs tips: how to choose plants, pick the location, general design principles, planting instructions (including some nice tips on extending the growing season), propagation, harvesting, drying, pests and diseases, etc.

It also includes suggestions for common culinary uses, such as salads, herbal vinegars, flavored oils, teas, jellies, honeys, and breads. These are not an extensive set of recipes, but more like master recipes with some suggestions for how you can mix them up with variations.

The book also includes suggestions and recipes for health and beauty products (again, not an extensive collection). This section includes potpourri, sachets, bouquets, dried arrangements and insect repellents.

The last 1/3 of the book has individual pages on about 50 different herbs. These individual pages tell you a description, how to grow, harvesting instructions, suggested uses, tips, cultivars, and also includes a quick key on the level of care required (using a 4 glove rating system), if it attracts beneficial insects, whether or not it is ornamental, whether or not it can be grown in a container, how much yield you can expect to get and how easy it is to grow.

The back of the book contains a few pages of resources for laboratories, vendors, herb associations and other books or literary resources.

There are lots of charts and sidebars and overall I found this book to be very useful and easy to access. It doesn’t have the level of information needed to make this anything other than a quick reference book though.

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