14 Best Annual Herbs to Grow

Herbs make a wonderful addition to your landscaping and garden beds, and we can think of a slew of reasons why you should add some of our favorite annual herbs to your garden. Here are just a few.

Fresh herbs will elevate your cooking. Homemade pesto, fresh basil on pasta or pizza, guacamole sprinkled with cilantro, fresh dill on salads, salmon or pickled cucumbers. We could go on, but the possibilities are endless when you’re cooking with fresh herbs from your garden.

They’re pretty and smell nice. Some herbs have the benefit of not only tasting great, they also have pretty blooms that smell great. Try calendula, chamomile, borage and nasturtiums to add color and fragrance to your garden.

Many perennial herbs attract pollinators and can deter insects. Basil, dill, catnip and cilantro lure pollinators as well as beneficial insects that can prevent unwanted pests.

Herbs make great companion plants for your vegetable garden. Cilantro does a great job of protecting tomatoes, eggplants and green beans from garden pests such as aphids, hornworms and thrips. Cucumbers, zucchini and watermelons like to live next to nasturtiums while peppers, carrots and okra benefit from basil companions.

Herbs can be grown indoors or outside. They adapt easily to life in containers, so grow them on a windowsill or outside on the patio.

Herbs can be used in containers, hanging baskets and window boxes. Herbs come in a wide range of sizes to fit just about any pot, planter or hanging basket. Give each one its own container or combine several of your favorites in a larger planter to create a mini garden.

Herbs don’t take up a lot of space. Some herbs yield a surprisingly large amount. One large container of basil or parsley should keep your summer cookouts tasting great and provide enough for you to freeze for use in the winter. Just be sure to pinch back their leaves often so they continue to grow bushy and not bolt.

Craving a pop of color in your herb garden? Tuck in some borage. This blue-hued bloomer turns heads wherever its pretty flowers pop up. Both leaves and blossoms boast a cucumber flavor. Harvest young leaves, though; older ones are too fuzzy to chew. Plants self-sow freely, so if it’s happy in your garden, you’ll have it forever. Deer leave borage alone and pollinators can’t resist it.

This pretty bloomer brings peppery flavor to the salad bowl or dinner plate. Harvest young nasturtium leaves or flowers (petals only) for eating. Some gardeners pickle flower buds and seeds to use as a substitute for capers. Grow nasturtium on lean soil. Too-rich soil or ample fertilizer causes plants to produce all leaves and no blooms. Keep an eye out for aphids — remove them with a spray of water.

Savor the flavor of pineapple in the green leaves and bright red blooms of pineapple sage. This is a tender perennial in Zones 8 to 9, where it may die to the ground in cold snaps. In the rest of the country, treat this bloomer as an annual. Flowers appear in early to mid-fall, just in time to feed migrating hummingbirds, which flock to the red flowers. Young leaves have the strongest flavor. Use leaves and fresh or dried flowers.