Mad About Herbs

Free Seeds

To celebrate their garden at The Chelsea Flower Show, The Children s Society and Royal Horticultural Society are offering families a free pack of flower seeds to brighten up their garden or window box. You can find out more here.

Thanks to Shirl at IndigoShirl, I found a great website that has an opportunity for 7 to 14 year olds to win money for their school in either Amazon or Garden Vouchers.  The idea is to grow your mint from the free seeds that they provide, then add as much value to it as possible, sell it and record the process.   You can see lots of imaginative uses that school children came up with on their website.  To get your free mint seeds, visit Planet Science.

Unfortunately I've only just found this site so it may be a bit late to get your mint plants to a usable size; the deadline for sending in your results is Sunday 6th July and the seeds can take anything between 2 to 6 weeks to germinate.  Mint doesn't actually come true from seed which is why you should take cuttings if you are after a particular variety of mint so I'm not sure what type of mint plant the seeds provided will create!  You could however try doing the challenge for yourself and see what you can create from a mint plant.  Feel free to leave me a comment if you give this a go. 

Charming Chives

Chives (Allium schoenoprasum) are one of my favourite and most used garden herbs.  I've just taken this photo of the chives in my garden and as you can see the bees are loving the flowers.  The article below is one that appeared a year ago in my newsletter.  In it I cover how to grow, harvest and use chives.

Parts used

Leaves, flowers and bulbs.

Description

A decorative, clump-forming and fully hardy perennial, with slender clustered bulbs, cylindrical hollow green leaves resembling thick blades of grass with decorative purplish-pink flowers in summer. The flowers come in several colours: white, yellow, pink but more commonly purplish-pink.

Site: Sunny or partial shade, Soil: Moist, fertile and well drained, will tolerate poorer soil.

Height: 10 to 60 cm, Spread: 30cm

Can be used as an edging plant.

To grow

Sow seed in March or April in trays or pots in a cold frame covered with glass or polythene. They can also be grown in windowboxes if kept well watered.

Transplant in small clumps when the seedlings are large enough to handle into pots and grow on until ready to plant out. Alternatively, thin out to approximately 20 cm apart. Water in dry weather and mulch the soil each year or more often during the growing season.

It is best to remove the flowers to promote the growth of the leaves and improve their flavour.

Existing clumps can be divided into clumps of 3 to 6 bulbs and re-planted every 3 to 4 years. Chives die down in the winter so a clump can be potted up in Autumn to provide an indoor supply.

Chives can be grown in pots indoors but they need a cold period, so when the leaves die down, place the pot outside for a month until the roots freeze before bringing indoors again. (Tip: if you water them with warm water they will think it is spring and start growing again thus giving you a winter crop).

Harvesting

You can cut the leaves once the plant has reached at least 15 cm in height, always leave approximately 5cm on the plant for regrowth. The easiest way is to grab a bunch and cut across with scissors or a sharp knife. Flowers can be cut as they open. Cut back 3 to 4 times during the growing season and give a slight 'haircut' at least once a month to encourage growth.

Preserving

Put chive leaves in a sealed plastic bag to retain crispness and refrigerate for up to 7 days.

To freeze chopped chives, put them in ice cube trays, fill with water and freeze. Once frozen, pop out the cubes and store in a freezer bags. These can be added direct into soups or stews.

Alternatively, wash and place in a freezer bag, remove air, seal and freeze. Crumble frozen chives before thawing and adding to your cooking.

Culinary Uses

Chive leaves and flowers give a mild onion flavour so they can be added generously to various dishes. They are best uncooked or added towards the end of the cooking time (they tend to lose their colour and flavour if cooked too long).  If you are using the flowers make sure that you separate out the petals and sprinkle them over your dish; if you add a whole flowerhead to your salad it will be too strong!

Chive leaves snipped or chopped finely taste great sprinkled over salads, in egg dishes, sandwiches, soups, rice dishes, potatoes (especially potato salad or on baked potato), avocado, courgettes, fish and seafood. They can also be made into a chive butter or used to flavour cream cheese.

Sprinkled on food they are said to stimulate the appetite and aid digestion. They contain some iron and vitamins and are mildly antiseptic.

As a Companion plant

Plant to deter aphids, apple scab and mildew.

Grow near to carrots to enhance their flavour and deter carrot fly.

Plant near roses, grapes or tomatoes.

An infusion of chives left overnight then strained can be made and sprayed on roses to prevent black spot and to get rid of aphids. It needs to be sprayed on 3 times a day and also after heavy rain to be effective.

Ornamental

Chive flowers look attractive in arrangements and dry well. The flowers usually retain their colour when dry.

Chives make a useful and neat edging for a border or herb bed.

Household uses

An infusion of chives can be used to rid a bathroom of mildew, any excess should be refrigerated.

Dried chives also repel moths.

Copyright 2007-2008 Madeleine Giddens

Herbs in Borders

If you don't have space for a separate herb bed, there are many herbs that will look great in your garden borders.

These photos show a selection of herbs that had been planted into the borders in our garden by the previous owners.

This is my favourite one, it is Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens); I originally thought it was the True alkanet (Alkanna tinctoria).  Thank you to Debs Cook of Herbal Haven for pointing this out.  You can read much more detail and clear photos of the differences and uses on her blog.

This is garlic mustard also know as Jack-by-the-hedge.  It has a mild garlic flavour which is great for gently spicing up salads.

This one is Sweet Woodruff; ready for harvesting the flowers to dry for use in pot pourri and other crafts.  It is low-growing and doesn't mind being planted in shady places.  The scent is subtle but lovely and the flowers such a beautiful vivid white.

There are a few patches of these dotted around the borders; they are called Perennial Cornflower (Centaurea montana) and are good for ground cover but are not edible although in some parts of Europe it is used medicinally.

How to make Rosemary Syrup

One of my ezine subscribers requested this recipe and I thought some of you may want to try it too.  One word of warning; rosemary is a very strong flavour so you don't need much of it.  I made it to drizzle onto a lemon cake and it was different but nice.  Rosemary goes particularly well with oranges so you could use this syrup drizzled onto some freshly cut orange segments.

This method can be used for other herbs as well although herbs with more delicate leaves do not need to be simmered after adding to the mixture; just leave them to infuse for half an hour.

Cut and wash 3 to 6 sprigs of rosemary.  You can put the whole sprigs into the sugar solution or strip the leaves from the stems, bruising or chopping them to help bring out the flavour; you will need approximately 3 tablespoons.

Place 200gms sugar in a pan with 200ml water and bring to the boil until the sugar has completely dissolved.

Add the rosemary to the mixture and simmer gently for a further 5 minutes.  Remove from the heat and cover.  Leave to infuse for at least half an hour then strain out the leaves.

This syrup can be stored in a jar which can be kept in the refrigerator for about 1 week.  If it is for use on a cake,  prick the cake all over with a thin skewer or toothpick and drizzle the syrup over so that it completely soaks into the cake.

Hmm, lemon balm syrup or mint syrup sound tasty, might try that next or maybe I should make cough syrup instead, there seems to be so many people with coughs and colds at the moment!

If you have any favourites or other ways you use syrups, feel free to leave a comment below.

Herby birthday books

It was my birthday last Sunday and for some reason I got lots of herby books! Now why would anyone think I was interested in herbs?

Seriously though, there's some great books there, I can't wait to give them a read and try out some recipes.

You can find more information and reviews about most of them in my Amazon bookstore.

The Edible Wild Plants & Herbs book is a lovely book and  great if you want to get into wild foods, it has plenty of recipes, 400 to be precise! 

Culpeper's Herbal has been on my wish list for a long time so I'm looking forward to reading that one.

I've been told that I have too many herb books, is that possible?  I don't think I'll ever stop learning new things about herbs!  If you have any favourite herb books, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment below.

Back pain and Herb Garden Update

I had a wrestling match with some ivy on one of our fences (the ivy is behind some  shrubs); the ivy won so I ended up with back pain which lasted a good week.  The moral of this story is not to twist and pull!  I'm all better now so I got stuck in to all the gardening jobs I hadn't got round to like sowing seeds inside and outside, transferring seedlings and plants.  The photos are of my garden as it is now; there is still a lot to do as you can see but I'm getting there slowly but surely!  It will look much better once the plants are all in and I've got some gravel down on the paths.  The herb area used to be an area of lawn but it is now an area split into four main beds with one central bed, I've yet to reclaim the border along the fence!

This photo is one of the beds which has been more or less planted up, I've just got to be patient and wait for it to fill out!  I ended up buying some thymes and purple sage to get a quicker effect but all the green sage plants were grown from seed so will take longer to become established.  I'm calling it the 'Med Bed' (as in mediterranean) because it mainly has plants that don't mind dry and sunny conditions.  In it I have thyme,  thyme 'silver posie' , lamb's ears, cotton lavender, feverfew, sage and purple sage forming a cross shape to create four small areas for annuals.  So far I have sown coriander 'leisure' and 'moroccan', dill and marigolds.  The fourth area is for sweet basil; this will be something new for me because I normally leave basil in pots because it doesn't normally like being transplanted so I'll sow some seeds direct and transplant some to see what happens.  On the left hand side of the bed are oregano, lamb's ears, feverfew and sweet marjoram; one that I bought plus some seedlings that I started about 6 weeks ago.  Along the two shorter edges are a row of rosemary cuttings that I've had for a while in pots.  The aim is to keep the structural herbs; rosemary, sage, marjoram and oregano, cotton lavender, thymes trimmed and provide some shelter/shade to the roots of the annuals so they are less likely to bolt.  Not sure how this will look/work out because of the different growth stages of some of the plants but it's fun trying it out.

Just out of shot is a pile of dead branches which are the remains of a very large berberis that we removed; we're still being prickled by the vicious spines that fell into the borders.

This is the central bed with an Apothecary's Rose in the middle, chives around the edge (to deter  aphids from the rose).  There are also some violets and heartsease plants in there.

 

The salad burnet has grown rapidly and the flowers are about to open.

I'll add some more photos of the herbs at a later date either into the photo album or somewhere like flickr.  Any recommendations for photo storage welcomed!