Backyard Patch Herbs didn’t start with a grand vision. It started with me, standing in my backyard, staring at an ever-growing herb garden and thinking, Well, now what?
It all began in the 1990s when I was working in museums, creating programs that explored history through plants and foodways. Herbs fascinated me—ancient cultures had used them for everything from medicine to cooking to, apparently, warding off evil spirits (a handy skill, I imagine). So, I planted a small herb garden, thinking I’d grow a few basics for my own kitchen. But if you’ve ever grown herbs, you know they don’t believe in moderation. Before I knew it, I had a jungle of oregano, thyme, and chives, all growing at a rate that suggested they had plans for world domination.
Faced with a surplus of greenery, I started drying and blending my herbs, making teas and then seasoning mixes to replace the overly salty store-bought ones. Then came scones mixes, soup blends, and even herbal cleaning products. My friends and family happily became my test subjects, and soon they started asking for more. That should’ve been my first clue that I was onto something, but at the time, I just thought I had very polite friends.
Then came my first real test: selling at the local farmer’s market in Winfield, IL. I arrived with high hopes, a table full of homemade herb products, and a batch of salsa seasoning I was particularly proud of. What I didn’t anticipate was rain (and no tent.) And what I really didn’t anticipate was that red color of the homemade labels turning into a crime-scene-worthy mess when wet. By midday, my salsa labels had run onto other herb mix labels making them all look like they had been involved in some kind of unfortunate ketchup explosion.
Despite my, uh, artistic labeling disaster, people actually bought my stuff. Not just out of pity, either. They genuinely liked my blends! That was the moment I realized this little backyard hobby could be something more. So I kept going, expanding my garden, refining my recipes, and figuring out small but important details—like waterproof labels.
By the year 2000 my garden had grown from 5 feet by 7 feet to 22 feet by 17 feet and when we moved that year, I had to rent a space to put all the plants.
Today, Backyard Patch Herbs offers over 250 unique blends of teas, seasonings, soup mixes, and more, all grown, harvested, and hand-mixed from my garden. But at its heart, it’s still about the same thing that started it all—sharing the joy of herbs (without the risk of ink-stained hands).
And, for the record, I now double-check all my labels before taking them out in the rain. And I use a tent!
