Your Small Kitchen Garden

When the bloom is on the sage in my small kitchen garden, there are usually butterflies and bees on the blooms. I’d rather see the cabbage butterfly here than on my broccoli plants!

The bloom is on the sage in my small kitchen garden! The plants are prolific, and the flowers last for several weeks, attracting all kinds of butterflies and bees. Once your sage plants blossom, their flavor changes and it never goes back. My plants are old and woody, and they are by far the largest clump of foliage in my herb garden.

I use sage especially to flavor poultry and pork. But I also use it to make smoke when I smoke or grill meats. When my sage plants were in their fourth or fifth years, I noticed a lot of dead wood on the plants as they emerged from dormancy in the spring. I harvested the dead wood and used it in my smoker. I can’t say it imparts a noticeably sagey smoke flavor, but whatever comes out of the smoker is tasty.

Give it a try! If you add hardwood to generate smoke on your grill, or  if you run a dedicated smoker, replace the hardwood with sagebrush and decide for yourself if you like the results. If you try this, please visit again and leave a comment sharing whether your liked the flavor of your sage-wood-grilled-or-smoked food.

Four chickens fresh out of the smoker. It takes about 8 pounds of charcoal to run my smoker—whether I smoke a brisket or four chickens, three racks of ribs, and 3 pounds of sausage. So, whenever I run the smoker, I fill it to capacity. We ate two of these chickens in a few days, and two others went directly into the freezer.

I made a short video to show off my sage plants just before they blossomed. It shows where I find deadwood at the beginning of each growing season.

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