Herbs quick-wins for green fingers with questionable competence

Even I can’t go too far wrong with them. With the odd exception. It may be hard to kill off almost all herbs but that isn’t always a complete blessing. I realised early on that it isn’t a good idea to plant mint directly into the ground but I learned the hard way that the same thing is true for horseradish.

With most herbs you don’t need to be so careful. You can get a lot of reward for very little effort. If you want some rosemary all you really have to do is ask a kind friend to break off a tiny healthy shoot for you. Push your cutting into the ground at any half way clement time of the year and you will have a hard job to stop it producing a healthy bush.

Things are just as easy in the kitchen. Bung a few good sprigs of rosemary on top of slow roast lamb and poke a bit of garlic into the skin and you have one of the best dishes out. If you have a breadmaking machine, or a penchant for spending a good part of your morning exercising arm muscles you don’t normally use on kneading dough, then it is equally rewarding to strip a lot of the leaves off and include them in the bread mix. Then add even more leaves than you first thought of. The result is some of the most fantastic tasting bread you’ll ever enjoy.

Much the same trick can be played with hot frying stale bread with lots of rosemary sprigs. This magically replaces your stale bread with aromatic croutons that are ideal in any salad or with your soup.

Sorrel is equally rewarding. It grows wild if you know where to look. So if you plant it on purpose it doesn’t need much encouragement. As soon as there is even the least bit of reasonable weather around it will push up leaves from its roots with such enthusiasm that it is hard to eat it rapidly enough to stop it seeding and producing even more.

Once in the kitchen you can use it anywhere that spinach would have been nice. Especially if you like lemon on your spinach. Sorrel is essentially spinach with the lemon already added in. This makes it fantastic to wilt a few leaves into fried mushrooms. Simply rip the soft part of the leaves away from the tough stalks and chuck them into the pan for less than a minute.

Naturally there is always one exception to every rule. Just as I began to fool myself that I was starting to crack herb growing I made the mistake of assuming that I could grow parsley. What could be difficult? It has been grown in this country for so long that they even wrote a folk song about parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. The next time it is sung at the Skipton Folk Club I will not be joining in the chorus.

I’ve tried growing it from seed planted directly into the ground. Nothing comes up. Or if it does the slugs get to it before I’ve even seen the first shoots. I’ve tried sowing it on a windowsill. The seeds need chilling to make this successful. Mine clearly weren’t chilled to the correct temperature. I don’t mind taking time and care to chill wine correctly. There are some things in life that repay a bit of effort. But worrying about whether I have chilled my seeds sufficiently goes beyond my level of patience. Or competence. Either way, nothing grew.

Eventually I resorted to a more traditional approach. I bought a pot of growing herbs from the local supermarket. It gave me close to 50 plants for around a quid. I carefully teased them out of the container and lovingly planted each one in its own safe little space on the allotment and waited for my bumper crop.

Three seem to have survived the winter. I have yet to harvest a single leaf. I am hopeful that if I tend them with sufficient care and skill I might eventually manage to get almost as much back as I bought from the supermarket in the first place.

I shall not be planting any more parsley. Instead I shall be flavouring my sauce with winter savory. Easy, tasty and reliable. My kind of plant.