21: I so used up all my garden-related titles last summer

Kelly may be the first person ever to call me "extraordinaire" in reference to, uh, anything! I was so excited that I couldn't contain all of my half-baked advice in her comments, so I am going to answer her question here.

In my opinion, the best thing to grow in your garden is...

... drumroll please...

... an answer Kelly already suggested for herself: herbs! Here are my reasons:

- They are incredibly easy to grow. Herbs are so strong that insects don't like them and will leave them alone. Dill is even considered a bug repellent if you let it flower. (Big exception: Japanese beetles. The little bastards were all up in the basil by the end of the summer, but I had enough basil that I uprooted an entire infested plant and got rid of it, and that pretty much solved the problem.)

- You can start them from seed easily. This makes you feel like a master gardener, to magically make tiny seeds become plants, and is also cheap.

- They are the best value. One little bunch of cilantro is $1.99 at the supermarket; $1.99 worth of cilantro seeds will yield more than you can eat in an entire summer.

- Unlike tomato or squash or any plants that bear fruit, the edible parts regenerate if you keep them trimmed, so you can get more and more and more from one wee plant. (I learned the hard way about which part of the plant you should trim, by the way, which I can share with you when you get to that stage.)

- Herbs you grow taste exponentially better and stronger than those you buy at the supermarket. Real true fact.

- People like to get herbs, and they are easy to give away. I never knew quite what to do with the bumper crop of tomatoes, because they were too heavy and delicate to drag to work, but it was no problem to give away an entire trashbag of basil. Your coworkers make pesto and then they tell you they love you.

- The variety is really fun, and they don't take up that much room. You can plant just a few seeds of a lot of different kinds of herbs and have many options. I found myself wanting more of some and less of others, and that's way more doable than if I wanted 20 different varieties of squash or broccoli or something.

- They freeze well whole. I had no idea this was true until too late for some of my stuff, but you can freeze whole cilantro and then just use it straight from the freezer as though it's fresh. Not quite as good, but still more than passable.

Now comes the part when I reveal I may not have any idea what I'm talking about: I don't know a thing about container gardening. It is really different than in-the-ground gardening because of drainage and soil aeration and all sorts of other things. I have never been as good at keeping potted plants alive as I was at keeping the garden alive. I highly recommend You Grow Girl, which is such a useful book that you can forgive its embarrassing and poorly punctuated title. She has a lot of container-gardening tips in there, and just generally makes a lot of sense.

Ironically, Kelly herself will be calling me in 2 minutes to mach schnell me about doing my reading, and... yeah, clearly I haven't been. No one will call me "student extraordinaire." But gardening is so lovely to contemplate during the TWENTY-DEGREE weather we're having right now. Seriously, Ithaca, I get it, it's cold here. Point taken. Time to move on. I want to grow some rosemary already.