Herbs Ideas, Tips & Guides

Earlier this year I was absolutely horrified when the flat footed fence fitters trampled all over my wild garlic. It was just starting to leaf out, and I don’t know why the sudden garlic smell wafting up from their feet didn’t give them pause, but it didn’t!

When I was growing up, one of my favourite meals was gammon with parsley sauce. So when I started my own kitchen garden, I was determined to grow plenty of parsley. But even if you only have a few containers on the patio, it’s easy to grow plenty of parsley that’s much fresher and cheaper than the herbs on sale at the supermarket.

Header image: *Psyche Delia*/Flickr, CC BY-NC

It has been a month since we set up the AeroGarden and started our journey into space gardening. It came with three herbs – basil, dill and parsley. The basil was the first to burst into life and has been the fastest growing. I trimmed the top of one of the young plants at the end of July, and it’s probably ready for another trim now. The parsley was the slowest to germinate and isn’t remotely close to catching up, but it is growing well now.

Once the cool chillies were removed from the planters at the front of the house, it was time to put them to their intended purpose – a high rise herb garden within reach of the front door.

Throughout history, herbs and spices have been extremely popular, used as medicines and aphrodisiacs as well as making their way into dinner. A plant that the Romans (and ancient Greeks and Egyptians) would have been familiar with was Silphium. They thought it was the finest of all seasonings, as well as a top notch medicinal plant. The Romans got a taste for meat from animals fed on Silphium, and it seems that the herb may well then have been grazed into extinction. It never seemed to make it into cultivation. Another possible explanation of Silphium’s disappearance is that a change in the Mediterranean climate meant it could no longer thrive, and died out naturally. According to Pliny, the last known Silphium plant was given to Emperor Nero as a gift.

The original plant crew for the AeroGarden: Cuttings mission was garden mint, sage and rosemary. As I expected, the garden mint was the first to root, and is growing well – to the point of crowding the others out! Sage rooted second, and is putting on new growth. Rosemary was slow to root, but has now done so and is starting to show some new leaves!

Myrtle (Myrtus communis) is a plant that has been on my ‘to grow’ list for years now, although it has yet to make an appearance in the garden. In the UK it is often grown as an ornamental plant, an evergreen shrub up to 3m in height and width. Given a spot in full sun and well-drained soil, it produces pink buds that open into white flowers with multiple gold-tipped stamens, followed by blue-black berries. It is hardy down to -10°C, and in mild areas can be grown as a hedge as it tolerates regular clipping. The species has the most frost tolerance; some of the named varieties are less hardy, but there are also smaller varieties that will tolerate being in a container long term, and so can be moved into more sheltered accommodations for the winter.

Did you sleep well last night? You would not have felt so cosy if your mattress had been infested with bed bugs (Cimex lectularius), an ancient pest that is making a comeback in the modern world, complete with pesticide resistence. Looking for a new solution to this age-old problem, scientists from the Universities of California and Kentucky took their inspiration from reports written in the first half of the twentieth century (sadly not available online) that describe the use of bean leaves (in Eastern Europe) to trap bed bugs so that they can then be destroyed.

You can tell it’s March, because the windowsills are full. We moved offices at work, and I had to bring some of my plants home, and now the tender, over-wintered perennials are fighting young seedlings for space. It’s time for some of the hardier specimens to brave the great outdoors, but after a winter indoors they’re a little soft. They need hardening off before they can make it on their own, and there’s still a distinct nip in the air (and a risk of frost for several more weeks).

The new grapevines I ordered (from Victoriana Nursery Gardens) arrived last week. The planters for them should arrive this week…. I want the vines to grow over the arbour, and we’ve chosen a pair of wooden planters that can be fixed to the arbour, so that the whole lot can be moved together should the need ever arise. The vines are going to be long-term residents of the garden, after all. It won’t be too long before I can enjoy cooking with vine leaves, although a decent crop of seedless dessert grapes might take a little longer.

A few weeks ago I was talking about my desire to have more mint in the garden, a plan which is still a work in progress. It’s hard keeping mints in small pots happy in a hot, sunny garden. Ultimately I’d like to plant them into bottomless pots, sunk into the soil along the fence, but work on that area of the garden has stalled whilst we take care of other things.

With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.

I have been sent two very different books on healing plants to review this spring. The first is ‘The Herbal Apothecary’. It’s written by JJ Pursell, an American “board-certified naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist”, and published by Timber Press.

We’ve been making a lot of progress in the garden this year, including processing many of the plants in pots that travelled from the old garden, and were waiting to find a permanent home. Some have moved on yet again, to a friend’s garden. Some pots were filled with nothing but weeds, and have been emptied into the green waste bin. As the clutter subsides, it’s easier to keep track of what I’ve got, and where it is. One of the pots that has resurfaced from the chaos holds ‘Minogue’s Onion’, a slightly mysterious species that was given to me by the late Patrick Whitefield. He described it in Permaculture Magazine a few years ago, but never uncovered its scientific name. It’s a perennial allium with the flattened leaves of a garlic, and forms a clump of strongly-flavoured (he said) salad onions in the winter. In the summer it forms small, round bulbs, which you harvest by digging up the clump and replanting a few to allow it to continue. They don’t need peeling, apparently, which sounds appealing. The plant is supposed to die back in summer; mine hasn’t yet. I have never seen it flower; I don’t think it does.

I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking since my Inner Womble made beer bread a few weeks ago, and in fact the remaining breadcrumbs are still in the freezer. But now I am freelance and I have a bit more time and energy to experiment, and am keen to Womble my way through the stack of ingredients that’s lurking around in the kitchen.

It’s hard to believe that it’s three months since Sustainable Didcot’s Incredible Edible volunteers took on their first big challenge and planted up a herb garden in the centre of Didcot.

Increasingly, we’re being told that we can green up our lifestyle by growing some of our own food. Articles everywhere suggest that everyone can grow a few herbs on the windowsill, but if you’ve never gardened before then that’s not as simple as it sounds. Here is a basic run down of what you’ll need, and what you’ll need to know, to grow some easy culinary container herbs.

Just over 3 weeks ago, I started the AeroGarden on its latest mission – rooting herb cuttings. Unsurprisingly, the mint was the first plant to take root, which it did in under a week.

I used to have a broad-leaved sorrel in the old garden, and the chickens were the only members of the household who enjoyed it. I briefly had one in the new garden, but it always looked awful and we didn’t eat it, so I removed it.

At the beginning of the month I was helping to survey some planters in the centre of Didcot that Incredible Edible Didcot (a group within Sustainable Didcot) had been given permission to plant with edible herbs as their first Incredible Edible community planting project.

For the last couple of years, two dwarf buddleja ‘Buzz’ bushes have been attracting butterflies into my front garden. This year, they’re gone. Removing them was not a decision I took lightly, but I wanted that space for fruit. However, insect populations are crashing, and since we and the rest of the ecosystem rely on them, it’s time to take their welfare seriously. Creating a butterfly garden is easier than you think, and even a kitchen garden can attract butterflies and other insects. The best place to start is with the way you garden – ditch the pesticides and start growing organically (when you poison ‘bad’ insects you wipe out the good guys, too) and leave the peat in the ground where it is a valuable wildlife habitat. Peat-free composts have improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and there’s no reason to use peat in a garden.

Space research can take you to some odd places. Siberia isn’t known for being a hospitable environment, and cosmonauts used to go into space with a gun in case something went wrong with their re-entry and they wound up having to defence themselves from bears in a Siberian forest. Even so, Russia has built a new spaceport there (Vostochny Cosmodrome), to reduce dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan.

Continuing with my goal of reading one of the unread gardening books on my shelf every month this year, I choose Salad Plants for Your Garden by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix as my book for May. It has been in my possession for two years since I bought it in a charity shop; it was originally published in 1998.

At the beginning of the month I did a series of posts for National Gardening Week, exploring some of the early spring harvests from the garden. The season has moved on since then, and as the asparagus plants are still young I have stopped harvesting them to let them grow. The purple sprouting broccoli harvest was also coming to a natural end, and so I removed the plants to put in a second bed of potatoes, and to use one bed as a temporary space for hardening off my summer squash, sweet peppers, sweetcorn and new PSB plants.

I wilt faster than my plants in the heat, so I haven’t been spending much time in the garden during this heatwave. Most nights we get the hosepipe out and water, to stop plants shrivelling from drought. We haven’t had any significant rain in weeks, and there’s none forecast (although we might be treated to a light shower on Friday!). The weeds are thriving without water, though – how do they manage that?

Over the summer I was reading Botanical Brain Balms, a book by Nicolette Perry and Elaine Perry on ‘medicinal plants for memory, mood and mind’. It brings together a wealth of information on plants that can help us sleep or stay calm, ease our pain, improve our memory, and even provide us with mind-altering experiences. Some of the plants are exotic, in that they won’t grow in the UK climate, but which you can find on the shelves of the health food shop, but many are familiar garden plants. Each entry contains a description of the plant and its habitat, a round-up of history and folklore, and the results of modern scientific research proving its effectiveness. You will also find the key ingredients (chemicals) that provide the effect, how to use the plant and any relevant safety notes. There are even some recipes, including a sage, pine and mint cleaning spray to improve memory and concentration, a happy face cream, and teas, biscuits and cocktails.

One of the plants I would never want to be without in the garden is parsley – it’s one of my favourite herbs.

I loved this Instagram post from Alys Fowler so much, I just had to share

Last year I wondered how well we would cope with rationing, and now Ryan and I have decided to try living on a modern version of WW2 rations for a while. We’re both interested in the wartime era, although from different perspectives. Ryan loves the aircraft and more militaristic aspects of it, I’m fascinated the Home Front and Digging for Victory.

Not long ago, I was summing up our first two months with the AeroGarden, our ‘space garden’. I noted that, although it’s a really good way to start small batches of seedlings for the larger Hydroponicum, in its seed-starting configuration the noise it makes drove us potty.

Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet. 

If you have trouble sleeping from time to time, then there are plants you can grow in your garden that will give you a helping hand. Whether you sew them into a scented sleep pillow or brew them into a relaxing cup of tea, these herbs are all easy to grow favourites.

It’s two months (nine weeks, actually) since our space garden landed, and Ryan and I became pseudonauts. For the first seven weeks, it grew the selection of herbs it came with – Genovese basil, dill and curly parsley. The basil was the quickest to grow, and the most vigorous. The dill was second and grew tallest. The parsley… well, at the end of seven weeks it was just about getting going.

On 21st November, the AeroGarden started making more of a noise than usual, emitting a high-pitched whine. When I showed Ryan, he immediately spotted that the pump was barely making any bubbles, and diagnosed a blockage in the aerator.

The weather can be lovely in September, allowing us to carry on harvesting summer crops, which can make it difficult to pull them up and make room for winter ones! We may be able to put off thinking about winter, but one fact we can’t escape is the shortening days. They will soon be too short for most plants to put on any significant growth, which is why winter crops need to be in the ground as quickly as possible.