Blooming Blooms

Here’s how to outsmart – and repurpose – those unwanted blooms mucking up your herb garden

By Bev Bennett
CTW Features

Blooms can rob herbs of their natural oils and flavors - here's how to combat them. Image courtesy iStock

A flowering garden is one of the great pleasures of late summer, unless the blooms are on your herbs. Once herbs develop those tender little buds their potency is diminished.

"You don't want flowering because it robs the herbs of their essential oils. [The flowers] might turn the herbs bitter," says Nancy Clifton, horticulture program specialist for the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Ill.

If you want to preserve the potency of the leaves and extend the culinary life of your plants, you'll want to nip herbs such as basil, cilantro and dill. As soon as you see buds forming, snip off the budding heads with small sharp scissors or with your fingers.

"You have to pinch herbs like basil and cilantro to keep them from flowering, and that's hard for gardeners to do," says Tammi Hartung, who operates Desert Canyon Farm, a wholesale organic farm in southern Colorado.

If you're one of those people who can't bear to kill off blooms, you'll be relieved to know that flowering herbs have their own appeal. You can use the blossoms in everything from recipes to sachets, say the gardening experts.

Herbal flowers make great vinegars, says Clifton. She also suggests sprinkling the flowers of rosemary and basil on soups or salads as garnishes.

"Sage has a very pretty flower. You can use it in [a] floral arrangement. You can also dry flowering herbs, such as lavender," says Clifton.

In ideal situations, as herb flowers dry they drop off seeds that develop into next summer's plants. Much depends on the weather and the appetite of the birds in your garden.

You don't have to wait a full year to see results from cilantro, which may form its second crop in a single season, according to Hartung.

"Enjoy the flowers and let them seed. The seeds will fall and sprout to form a second crop in early fall. You'll see new cilantro sprouting where the old cilantro was growing," says Hartung, author of "Growing 101 Herbs That Heal" (Storey Publishing, 2000). (Cilantro seeds are better known as coriander, a spice that tastes like lemon and caraway seed and is used in baked goods.)

You can also plant a second crop of annual herbs, including basil and epazote, a pungent herb that has a flavor similar to cilantro. The herb, which is better known in the Southwest, is used to season dry beans.

"It bolts when it's hot, but you can plant it again in late August or early September when it's cool and when you think about cooking beans again," says Hartung.

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