Culinary Dill
Anethum Graveolens

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
570 seeds per packet

days to maturity: 40 days
plant spacing: 4 plants per square foot
sunlight requirements: 6-14 hours
look out for: aphids on new growth
harvest notes: harvest outer leaves as needed or whole bunch as “cut and come again”
annual

Pickles, salad dressing, seafood, potatoes, and cucumbers: these are just a few of dill’s culinary dance partners, making it a favorite in the herb garden. It’s flavor is never better than when you pick it fresh from your garden. Another good reason to grow this graceful plant: The umbel of delicate yellow-green flowers attracts beneficial insects, from pest-eating wasps to colorful butterflies and once they’re pollinated theyll produce you dill seed, either for use in the kitchen or for planting next season. Dill in home gardens rarely has pest or disease problems, but black swallowtail butterfly larvae depend on dill as a food source. If they show up in your garden, you can concentrate the caterpillars on a few plants, and reap a double bounty - dill and butterflies! Dill is a plant that can be grown in “bunches” which means instead of planting 1 dill seed that makes 1 dill plant you plant about a dozen dill seeds together and basically treat them like they are one plant. You can either go through and harvest exactly the mature fronds that you need for the kitchen one by one, or you can grab the whole “bunch” of fronds and cut a few inches above the base. this is called “cut and come again” and 2-3 weeks later the plant will regrow and can be harvested again. For a continual source of dill throughout the season we recommend having at least 2 plants and replanting them every 6 weeks or so through spring.

For dill seeds we consider a “plant” of dill a cluster of about 12 seeds. So, when we say you plant 4 plants per square foot what we mean is, 4 clusters of dill plants. This is how all farms and nurseries grow dill, because dill tolerates being crowded in this way. You can also throw a whole bunch of dill seeds in a few square feet of garden space and they will almost form like a dill meadow that you can harvest from as you need fresh fronds.