What can I do with my herbs? How to grow, use & enjoy these versatile plants

THIS spring a young man's - and woman's - fancy should turn to vegetables. Judging by the new batch of garden books, we're creeping into a back-to-the-land movement, rather like what happened in the 1970s but without the macramé. Yet - we'll soon be making plant holders. Again. This being America, we've also found a way to cultivate that competitive edge. What the wine cellar was to the '90s, the root cellar will be to this decade. Same concept, come to think of it: Climate control. Rotation. Status. Expense. By the time you read this, of course, serious gardeners will have sown their oats and tomatoes, but determined neophytes can still catch up. If you aren't yet turned on by vegetables, there are plenty of books designed to do the job. A worthy entry to the garden-porn category is ORGANIC KITCHEN GARDEN (Conran/Octopus, paper, $16.99), by Juliet Roberts, published in association with England's Gardens Illustrated magazine and the BBC. It covers the basics in about 10 pages, including a concise chart for a four-year crop rotation. Some of us will have further questions. Like the magazine, the book doesn't disappoint visually. I have yet to figure out why beetroot is so much more handsome in England than it is here. But frankly, the mature hanging cantaloupe whose weight is supported by a hand-knit net looks like something you might see on the beach at Cannes. Many garden books are visually arresting but lack focus. They cover lots of ground, yet never get below the surface. If you need a book to show you the difference between a radish and a cabbage, may I gently suggest that you put off the whole garden-building enterprise and spend a season reading the labels at the supermarket? Once you know which end is up, the experience will be more enjoyable. You're ready to join the vegetable brigade when you have made your peace with the business of sunk costs. You may be shovel-ready, but you'll need a reliable shoulder to lean on. Many old-time baby boomers swear by their mildewed copies of "Crockett's Victory Garden," but Jim was a bit too loose with the malathion for some tastes. Well, it was the 70s. Who knew? These days the indispensable guide is the newly revised 50th anniversary edition of RODALE'S ULTIMATE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ORGANIC GARDENING (Rodale, paper, $24.95), edited by Fern Marshall Bradley, Barbara W. Ellis and Ellen Phillips. In honor of the way we (should) live now, there's an opening chapter on green gardening, and who doesn't want to plant carbon sinks and use gray-water? The book marches through its business, Acer to Zucchini. The chart of common organic fertilizers is nifty, especially for those of us who can ferret out that blood meal we've lost in the pantry. Scarification, permaculture, crop rotation and cover crops are clarified. Diagrams are used judiciously. How the editors neglected to include a more substantial entry on vermiculture is beyond me, but they do mention, in the section called "Improving Your Soil," that earthworm egg casings may lie dormant "as deep as 20 feet in the soil for as long as 20 years." Golly. IF you insist on growing flowers, or as they are frequently referred to with disdain by vegetable gardeners, ornamentals, then you should own UNDERSTANDING PERENNIALS (Frances Tenenbaum/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), by William Cullina. I know, I had the same reaction: another book about perennials? But this book really is, as the subtitle insists, "A New Look at an Old Favorite," and my copy is already well thumbed. If you slept through "Rocks for Jocks," this is a chance to learn what soil is composed of, why it's acid or alkaline and why you should care. Cullina will straighten out your understanding of roots, bulbs, rhizomes, stolons, corms and tubers; he clarifies osmosis, photosynthesis, secretory structures, nitrogen fixes and plant hormones. Trust me, however much you think you know, he knows more. His description of crassulacean acid metabolism, wherein cacti, yuccas, agaves and sedums open their stomata at night when it's cooler in order to "bind carbon dioxide on special molecules much like we bind oxygen on hemoglobin in our blood" had me on edge for hours. Sedum? This is happening in my own front yard? Perhaps I was extra sensitive, having just read Roald Dahl's unnerving story "The Sound Machine," in which a "nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man," invents an instrument that picks up the screaming of the rosebush in the garden next door as it's pruned - a "throatless, inhuman shriek, sharp and short." Cullina is an engaging, clear and congenial writer. The father of three children, he's a self-described Gen Xer who spent his youth "tramping around in the woods"; he constructs his own furniture and buildings, makes his own pottery, brews his own beer and grows his own vegetables. His desire to do right by the world shines through every paragraph. This book will give you, too, the courage to take a knife to the plants you love; in dividing, you will multiply. What more can you hope to understand from perennials? Our favorite underground friends make a guest appearance in THE COMPOST SPECIALIST (New Holland, paper, $9.95), by David Squire, which even supplies directions for making a wormery out of a plastic dust bin. No gardener who isn't composting can be taken seriously, so this is an essential guide. After reading pages and pages about the virtues of wood compost bins versus plastic and wire mesh, I was relieved to learn that I could simply dig a hole in the ground, dump in the kitchen scraps, rake on some leaves and call it a day. By now, between the sharp demands of the roses and the throaty cries of the cabbage, you've probably neglected your lawn. The aptly named Nancy Gift advises you to love it and leave it. Her charming collection of essays, A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant (Beacon, $23.95), includes a recipe for dandelion wine. I can thank Gift, a highly trained weed scientist, for the day I gave up on my lawn and planted clover, whose seeds are alarmingly small, tinier even than the poppy seeds on my bagel. Who knows where the clover will end up? Who cares? Gift makes the lowly prostrate spurge come alive, and her meditation on poison ivy is poignant She writes about her children, her students and her neighbors. This is a woman who has a rip-roaring fight with her parents over spraying herbicides - because of the violets - and worries about "nature deficit disorder." Not that we can summon much attention for yet another three-word problem, but I sympathize with her point that children spend more time cooped up than chickens. Speaking of. Everyone seems to be hauling chickens into the garden these days. Are they really that easy to raise? One of my neighbors in Rhode Island has let loose a flock of guinea hens. They roam all over the road, getting to the middle and freezing in place, trying to recall why they wanted to cross. You have to sit patiently in your car until their brains shift into gear. These guinea hens are drama queens, their black feathers festooned with white polka dots, and are terrific on tick patrol. Judging by this crop of books, gardeners everywhere are groping around in their backyards for fresh eggs. I'm jealous. Then again, all I have to do is reach into a cooler and leave a couple of crisp bills in a coffee can. Like me, many people have become herbalists by mistake. Herbs are, after all, the largest group of plants that get excited about poor, dry soil. My soil. I always have rosemary and mint growing somewhere - including, just now, under my car. Herbs are the most gratifying way to get started as a gardener. There are lots of cookbooks that answer the question, when faced with an acre of cucumbers, "Now what?" but finally we have a book that tells us how to wrangle all that sage. WHAT CAN I DO WITH MY HERBS? How to Grow, Use and Enjoy These Versatile Plants (Texas A&M University, $19.95), by Judy Barrett, is a pretty and useful summer companion. Here you'll learn how to dry, "deter with" and "soothe with" herbs. You'll discover how to make teas, and receive suggestions for using them in jellies, cookies, salads and skin creams. You'll even get a recipe for mint julep - and I can't imagine a better place for a stiff drink than a vegetable garden. BECAUSE you need to brace yourself for what's on the horizon: THE BACKYARD HOMESTEAD (Storey, paper, $18.95), edited by Carleen Madigan. This fascinating, friendly book is brimming with ideas, illustrations and enthusiasm. The garden plans are solid, the advice crisp; the diagrams, as on pruning and double digging, are models of decorum. Madigan makes it all look so easy. Halfway through, she puts petal to the metal, and whoosh! At warp speed we're growing our own hops and making our own beer, planting our own wheat fields, keeping chickens (ho hum), ducks, geese and turkeys (now we're talking) and milking goats, butchering lamb (wrapping it with that nifty "drugstore fold" - diagram included - while we're at it), raising rabbits and grinding sausage. Oh, and tapping our maple trees, churning butter and making cheese and yogurt. Peacocks, anyone? Need I say more? Well, yes. Stock up on some knitting books because next winter you'll want to grow your own sweaters, too. If you really intend to go all out with the homesteading thing, I'm partial to Ed and Carolyn Robinson's 'HAVE-MORE' PLAN (Storey, paper, $9.95), first published in the 1940s and available in a new edition. It remains charmingly dated - "You will find the price of suitable land ranges from $100 to $1,500 an acre" in suburban Connecticut Then again, there's something enduringly quaint about the whole idea of killing your own turkey when there's a perfectly good A.&P. a mile away. But that's beside the point. What is the point? Novella Carpenter knows the answer. The point is life - and death. Her book, FARM CITY: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Penguin, $25.95; available in mid-June), is easily the funniest, weirdest, most perversely provocative gardening book I've ever read. I couldn't put it down. Carpenter started her garden on a vacant plot of land in her derelict neighborhood - complete with characters living in abandoned cars - in Oakland, Calif. Her tone is clear, relaxed and amiable; she's hilarious in describing the foibles of her friends and her '70s-era hippie parents. Though always entertaining, she occasionally lapses into the grating lingo of the blogger, but toward the end, as she contemplates the place of her garden in the greater scheme of life, she shows what she's capable of and the writing soars. We're in post-Edenic mode here, extreme gardening with a generation for whom Code Orange means a yam. Carpenter begins with a few vegetables, and, as always happens, the garden quickly grows to include fruit trees, melons and flowers. Things get really interesting when she brings home the turkeys, ducks and goslings. They're coddled, but make no mistake: they're meant to be her dinner. One night, a possum kills a duck and a goose. Carpenter is surprised by her fury: "Channeling my rage, remembering the cuteness of my ducks and the goose who would rest her head in my lap, I raised the shovel and came down on the opossum's neck. After a few thrusts and, I admit it, grunts - head separated from body. I had my bloody revenge." Winter cabbages from "Organic Kitchen Garden." Top, a landscaping plan for the authors' homestead, from "The 'Have-More' Plan." O.K., I did put the book down. Her fantasy of impaling the creature's head really got to me. But I have to admire Carpenter's uninhibited and honest confession. After she takes her ax to Harold the turkey (Maude succumbs to a Rottweiler), I began to wonder about the wisdom of this entire homesteading enterprise. There is a lamentable sort of "¿Quién es más macho?" spirit around these days among gardeners and foodies alike. If you can't face killing an animal, you haven't earned the right (or as much of one) to eat it - or so the argument goes. By some miracle of transubstantiation, those who have killed are able to digest their meat in moral superiority. Where exactly does compassion come in? I'm not sure what's gained by this exercise, which Carpenter goes on to repeat with rabbits. The pattern of nurturing an animal, becoming fond of its personality, then killing and eating it, begins to seem like a neurotic (psychotic?) compulsion. For those of you who will never understand how a kind, sensible, resourceful and loving young woman can stick a meat thermometer into a turkey who was a sweet companionable and trusting member of her household, I offer as penance THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE: The Truth About Food (Norton, $24.95). In explaining what it means to be vegan, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson makes the argument that we eat meat - and any animal product, including eggs and dairy - only because we're in intense denial of the horror we're perpetrating on the creatures with whom we share our planet. You be the judge. But don't blame me if you have nightmares after your lamb chops. When does gardening become farming? When are you no longer having dinner parties and running a restaurant instead? For those who are ready to graduate beyond coffee-can retail, the incomparable Eliot Coleman is back with THE WINTER HARVEST HANDBOOK: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses (Chelsea Green, paper, $29.95). I'm not one to quibble over the details of a "T-post anchor and homemade attaching bracket for securing the corners of a new rolling greenhouse design." Suffice it to say that this serious, meticulous, inspiring farmer and writer solves the problem of growing lettuce in Maine - in January. Anyone living near Coleman's Four Season Farm is thrice blessed - 1) to live in intense denial of the back-breaking effort he or she is 2) being spared in order to acquire what is surely 3) the tastiest most wholesome and pure food available. Coleman's opus is as much a call to action for town planners to embrace local farms as it is a bible for small farmers. This book is for people who know what they're doing. The rest of us, by now too exhausted to cultivate even our own gardens - which are never going to be big, bold or bad enough anyway - can turn with relief to THE NEW TERRARIUM: Creating Beautiful Displays for Plants and Nature (Clarkson Potter, $25). Written by the beloved Tovah Martin, author of "Tasha Tudor's Garden," with beguiling photographs by Kindra Clineff, this attractive volume contains everything you need to know about growing plants under glass. Keep your nail scissors handy. There's added value in finding uses for all the stuff you've picked up at flea markets. Never mind cloches. Hurricane lamps, vases, goblets, sorbet cups, candy dishes and fish bowls can be pressed into service. Anything can be coaxed into a glass vessel - ferns, begonias, ivies and violets, to name but a few. I warn you, though. Too much of this and you too will hear the tiny, crystalline sobs of primroses and mosses ringing against the foggy walls of their bell jar, clamoring to be released into the cool, clear air of a garden. Dominique Browning's most recent book is "Paths of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener."