Stephanie Mahon - Grow Herbs: Essential Know-how and Expert Advice for Gardening Success

Planting out a variety of pot-grown herbs, such as lavender, chives, sage, parsley, and thyme, is a particularly easy and effective way to start a herb garden.

A herb is a plant with a purpose. We call any plant a herb if it is valued for its savoury, sweet, aromatic, or health-promoting properties. They are the most versatile, multi-functional, and generous plants you can get, with a broad variety of flavours, scents, and characteristics. The leaves, flowers, stems, roots, and seeds of herbs have been used all over the world for thousands of years in many different pleasing and practical ways. These plants are grown to flavour food and drinks, and to make medicines, herbal remedies, fragrances, and home and beauty products. The more you use herbs, the more adventurous you will become with them.

Growing herbs to use in the kitchen when you cook and prepare food and drink gives you the means to banish bland or boring meals from the table forever. Rosemary adds a depth of flavour to roasts, simple salads take on a new dimension with the addition of herb leaves and flowers, while drinks from tea to cordial come alive with the addition of fresh mint, lemon verbena, elderflower, or borage blooms. Its so satisfying to be able to add your own home-made bouquet garni to a stew, to use fresh basil leaves that youve just picked to make a pesto sauce, or to garnish a dish with chopped parsley that you have raised from seed.

When it comes to herbs, the only limit to what you can do is how daring you want to be. Growing your own herbs gives you the perfect opportunity to try new ideas and recipes with old favourites like dill or basil. Alternatively, you can try out new and exciting flavour combinations, take some risks, and experiment by growing and using herbs you might not be so familiar with, like hyssop, lovage, sweet cicely, Vietnamese coriander, or shiso.

Make your own fresh bouquet garni by tying together a bundle of herbs with string, and add them to soups and stews.

HELPFUL FOR HEALTH

As well as tasting great, herbs have been used throughout human history to aid and heal. These beneficial plants contain powerful chemical compounds that are still used today to create modern life-saving medicines, and make soothing essential oils and complementary health supplements.

By growing and using herbs you are also promoting your own good health, because they are an excellent way to add bags of flavour and bright, fresh colour to food and drink, both sweet or savoury, thus helping you to reduce your intake of salt and sugar.