Some thoughts on herbs: oregano and thyme

It's coming up on three months since I first planted seedlings in my Farmstead, and of those original twelve I still have six plants, including oregano and time. When I was first looking into hydroponic gardening, among the many consumer-scale systems out there I saw several fairly small devices, set up for growing just six or seven plants sometimes. Typically, I'd see them advertised primarily for herbs, since they were small enough there wasn't much space for larger plants like lettuces to grow. I didn't think just growing herbs would be very useful, since you can't make a salad out of them, so I ended up going with the Farmstand for more growing space. However, now that I've lived with the ability to pick fresh herbs for a few months, my stance on them has definitely softened a bit.

Oregano at the top, thyme near the bottom.

While I probably still wouldn't get a system for growing exclusively herbs (the ability to pick my own salads daily is just so good!), I've come to appreciate fresh herbs a lot more. Generally herbs, by their nature, work well with the “cut and come again” method of progressive harvesting over time, which I prefer over harvesting a whole plant at once. And they can really do a lot to spice up a dish! I used oregano and thyme to approximate a crude za‘atar for some lamb I cooked last week, and it came out quite well, and reminiscent of the real thing (which usually includes some additional herbs, such as the eponymous za‘atar plant). When making a breakfast omelet I sometimes sprinkle in some thyme or crumbled oregano or sage leaves, or chopped garlic chives. I've used the herbs I grow (including dill and bunched green onions in addition to the ones already listed) in a number of recipes: tuna or egg salad, soups, pasta sauce, even sandwiches. Having fresh herbs at hand is a much more valuable tool in the chef's arsenal than I appreciated before.

Having said that, I wanted to talk about the two herbs in the title, oregano and thyme. You can see them in the photo above (a photo of the Farmstand from the opposite side than in photos in previous posts); oregano is the plant in the center near the top with the hanging stems, though it's somewhat difficult to make out due to being encroached on by sylvetta arugula from the left and celery from the right. Two tiers below it, occupying much of the bottom of the photo, is thyme. Now, these plants superficially seem pretty similar. They're both somewhat bushy, with similar patterns of pairs of leaves branching out along their stems. They have a fairly similar flavor, as well, both somewhat pungent, almost spicy. However, while similar in form, they differ in scale, and that turns out to make a huge difference to how easy they are to harvest.

Oregano, as you can see at the top, has fewer (and slightly thicker) stems and larger leaves. (They're perhaps around the size of a postage stamp when fullly grown.) It has maybe 10–20 stems growing out, which makes it pretty easy to snip one off and pull the leaves off it for use. Thyme, on the other hand…thyme is a monster. A hydra, with dozens, probably well over a hundred stems all clawing their way outwards., and any one you clip off just grows two more stems from the stump. The leaves are perhaps a tenth the size of oregano, and the stems are much thinner, which makes it harder to strip the leaves off—the thin stems often tend to break, and the leaves hold on proportionately better than oregano leaves do. In general, I find stripping thyme leaves much more aggravating than oregano. (I've got an “herb stripper,” a small metal device with differently-sized holes which you can pull stems through, to strip the leaves off, but it's unfortunately not much better than using my hands for thyme.) I do like the taste of thyme—it's especially good paired with meat—but I sigh a bit inwardly whenever I'm clipping more than one or two stems for use. The one good aspect to thyme's increased vigor is that there's so much of it that I can afford to be a lot less efficient in harvesting it—if I lose 30% of the leaves on a stem because I couldn't be bothered picking each tiny leaf off individually after going over it once, no problem, I can just snip another few stems to make up for it.

I'll probably continue growing both oregano and thyme (and other herbs) in the future, as I've quickly grown accustomed to the taste, and I've got enough lettuce varieties already that I can spare some slots for herbs. (They're both prolific enough that I might see about harvesting a bunch of leaves from both plants and drying them for saving, which would be neat and potentially make a nice gift). I've just been musing recently about how two plants, so alike in form otherwise, can be so different simply due to their different size scales. And if you're thinking of trying hydroponic gardening, but can't afford (or fit in) a large system like the Farmstand, maybe give one of those smaller systems a try, even if just for growing herbs. A hui hou!