Growing Dill For Beginners

HOW TO GROW, harvest and preserve DILL Herb

Growing Dill is very easy. Learn how to grow Dill plants and how to use this herb. Start planting dill seeds and enjoy this decorative and tasty herb.

Growing Dill plants is easy and these plants may even become a self-seeding part of any garden or yard landscape. Tall, delicate blue-green leaved plants with a large flower head that is umbrella shaped light yellow green in color with very tiny flowerets.

The time to plant dill depends on the area in which you live as it is not frost hardy but the seed can be planted in two or three week intervals until mid-summer.

The seeds prefer to germinate in cooler temperatures and if Dill has self-seeded you may have to remove some of the plants to prevent crowding. Dill plants do not transplant well so plan carefully if you will allowing this plant to self-seed.

How To Grow Dill

When planting Dill remember this is a tall, slender-stemmed plant that may reach three feet in height. Planting this culinary plant behind smaller flowers or shorter herbs will allow you to enjoy it without it hiding other plants. They easily self-seed and may show up in other areas of any garden and occasionally other locations completely as the wind carries away the small seed.

Unlike some culinary plants, learning how to grow dill can be as easy as filling a decorative pot with soil and setting a few seeds in the dirt. Dill can grow indoors and outdoors providing year round leaves for those who live in regions where it gets cold. You can harvest dill for both leaf, also known as a weed, and its seed.

Here are more tips for starting herbs from seed.

When growing Dill indoors keep in mind that it prefers warmth so keep it in a warm room where it can get sunlight. Dill prefers a soil that is about pH 6, although a little over or under will not harm it.

Since Dill invites good insects including parasitic wasps who lay their eggs on plant eating caterpillars and bees which are great for pollination of all plants especially vegetable plants and Tachinid flies which devour other pest insects including moths, beetles and fly larvae.

Growing Dill outside during the summer and in a pot indoors during the winter will provide fresh Dill leaf year round.

Use Dill as a companion plant!

Dill grows well with lettuce, potatoes, cabbage, onions and cucumbers, and helps protect those plants from bugs that feed on them. Dill stalks can also be harvested and may be used fresh or dried as a substitute for Dill weed in refrigerator pickles and herb tea.

You Can Buy Dill Seeds Here

How To Use Dill

Each part of the growing Dill and dried plant has a unique flavor and the leaves are often:

• Added to salads, scrambled eggs, omlets and rice providing a nice change
• Used the top to create refrigerated vegetables pickles where you add flavored vinegar, dill weed and a touch of oil to raw vegetables and allow it to marinate in the fridge
• Added to vegetable dips, chip dips and sauces
• Fresh herb butter created with dill and fresh garlic makes a great spread or for toasting
• Dill leaf makes a nice tea
• The dried seeds have a different flavor and you may add them to pickles, some varieties of sauerkraut and relishes. You may also use dill seed for:
• Salt reduction by grinding up Dill seed to use instead of table salt
• Herb butters used when making bread or biscuits, by adding it to the dough or as a spread on top
• Roasts seasoned with crushed Dill, Garlic and Coriander have a very interesting flavor
• Soups, especially potato, tomato and cream based soups flavored with crushed Dill seed are a way to add variety these soups

Harvesting Dill

Dill leaves can be snipped off using a small pair of scissors at any time but be careful to leave the small flowerets.

You can dry dill leaf in a dehydrator, on a counter top or in a sunny windowsill.

Harvest dill seeds once they have set by clipping off the entire seed head. Be sure that the seeds are fully developed prior to snipping, and if you do not want Dill to grow the next year, timing is important.

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