Grow Your Own: The Mixologist Simple Syrup Collection
My cocktail-loving friends at Log House Plants have put together a collection of plants that are particularly worth growing for infusing in simple syrups and for making infused vodkas and liqueurs. They’re a wholesale nursery, so they’re growing the plants for sale at retail garden centers and gourmet grocery stores on the West Coast. Look for them in your local indie garden center/grocery store, or order them online from the Territorial Seed Company, who has joined in this effort and put together a great collection of cocktail-friendly plants and seeds. Here’s what we...
Read MoreDrinkable Herbs
We’re continuing to work our way through a year’s worth of grow-your-own cocktail ingredients, moving on this month from flowers to herbs. Let’s start with some of the sweeter, more floral herbs you might mix into a drink, and next month I’ll move on to the savory herbs. Autumn is a great time to plant any of these. Just water them until it starts raining, then stand back and let them take care of themselves through the winter. Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) Also called ‘licorice mint,’ this tough little perennial is, in fact, a member of the mint family, and the...
Read MoreAnise Hyssop
Also called agastache or licorice mint (Agastache foeniculum) This tough little perennial is, in fact, a member of the mint family, and the leaves do taste and smell of licorice or anise. It’s completely hardy on the West Coast and will survive winter temperatures as low as -25F. In summer, the plants thrive on sun and very little water, pushing up flowering stalks that reach a couple feet in height. Because it’s such a widely adaptable plant, you’ll find that anise hyssop does just fine in partial shade as well. These plants have been the subject of a great deal of hybridizing,...
Read MoreBooks by Amy Stewart
The Drunken Botanist
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