Dill

Sow seed right where the plants will stand, about a quarter inch deep, in rows two feet apart, starting a week or two before your last hard frost. Barely cover the seed - dill needs light to germinate. Expect emergence in 10 to 14 days depending on soil temperature. Transplants can be used, but dill develops so quickly from seed that they are rarely worth the trouble. Dill germinates and grows fast enough that a direct-sown row catches up to a transplant, so there is no reason to raise it in cells. The seed needs light, which is why it gets only the barest cover.

Apply a light feeding of 5-10-5 once in late spring, at about three ounces per ten feet of row. For dill in containers, use a liquid fertilizer at half the label strength every four to six weeks instead. Dill evolved on lean, well-drained ground and does its best work in moderately fertile soil. Heavy nitrogen buys soft, floppy growth and a weaker aroma, because the essential oils that carry the flavor are diluted by fast watery cell expansion.

When the seedlings are about two inches high, thin them to stand 10 to 12 inches apart. Snip the extras at soil level rather than pulling them, and eat the thinnings. Dill grows fast and tall, and a crowded stand shades itself, produces thin weak stems that lodge in wind, and holds humid air in the canopy that invites powdery mildew - one of the few diseases dill gets.

Take green foliage any time the plant has a few inches of growth, but make your main cutting as the flower umbels start to open - the flavor peaks right there. Cut leaves at the stem, or take the whole stem within a few inches of the ground. Leaf aroma tracks the essential oil concentration, which climbs as the plant moves into flower and then falls away once the umbels are fully open and seed is setting. Wait past that window and you get stems and a flatter, more caraway-like taste.

Plant a fresh short row every two to three weeks through midsummer. Each sowing takes roughly six weeks to reach cutting size, so a new row started now replaces the one that is about to flower. Dill is an annual that declines once it flowers, and the leaves coarsen and thin as the plant pours its energy into seed. Overlapping sowings are what keep young foliage coming, because cutting will not hold a bolting plant in leaf.

Look over the umbels for aphids as the plant flowers and sets seed, and knock any colonies off with a jet of water. If you find fat green caterpillars banded with black and yellow, those are black swallowtail larvae - leave them be, or move them to a spare plant. Dill is a larval host for the black swallowtail butterfly and a strong nectar source for parasitic wasps and hoverflies, and those same beneficials are what keep the aphids in check. The flowering plant you are scouting is feeding the predators that solve the problem.

For pickling heads and dill seed, cut the flower stalks just before the seeds begin to ripen and turn tan, roughly two to three weeks after the blossoms appear. Finish them upside down in a paper bag so the seed drops as it dries. Ripe dill seed shatters off the umbel at a touch, so a head left until it is fully brown scatters the crop on the ground. Cutting a shade early lets the seed finish on the stalk inside the bag where you can still catch it.