Growing Herbs

I've been growing herbs since the mid 1980s, when I discovered that many were interesting to grow and easy to sell. In the summer of the year before I had Youngest, when the older two were at school I used to pick raspberries to be frozen for a PYO fruit farm and then went on to sell the herbs there and then after we moved to the smallholding I grew for several years to sell at the gate and at the Suffolk Smallholders Annual Show. Eventually I found all the greenhouse space was needed for starting tomatoes, cucumbers and all the other things we  grew for selling and ended up only sowing parsley and basil each year.

Way, way back I wrote a page for Suffolk Smallholders Society monthly newsletter all about which herbs I would grow if I only had room for a few. Back then we had a huge herb garden which was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time but needed too many hours spent on it to be sensible for a busy smallholders. We cleared it all when the Bay tree centre-piece got to 15 feet tall and more than 8 feet wide!

I can't find a copy of the page I wrote years ago so started again and I can't find the list of herbs we had growing - I'm sure it was more than 20 different ones - several were more like weeds than herbs - Tansy for instance.........I had to pull it out from the flower garden for years after removing the herb garden.

Anyway,  if I only had room for a few Herbs they would be............

Parsley
Slow to get going from seed, it's the one thing that I make sure to buy a new packet of seed each year. It can be sown quite early and there are all sorts of old wives tales about the best methods of getting it to germinate. I usually pour really hot water over the compost before sowing (the old way was to pee on it!) then sow quite thickly and cover with a plastic lid, then keep it in a warm place.
I prefer curly leafed rather than flat-leaf but proper chefs usually seem to use the flat-leaf sort. Parsley will often survive through the winter outside in a sheltered spot giving some new growth early before running to seed in June - that's when I pull up the old clump and start using the new plant. My favourite way to use it is in potato salad and fish-cakes.

Chives
First to reappear after winter, so bits can be snipped to add to sandwiches before there's any other sign of green stuff. Difficult to start from seed but once you have one clump you can easily divide them and re-plant. I like to have two clumps around the garden, so one lot can be left to flower for the bees and another can have all the flowers taken off so there are no thick un-edible stems. Also use this in potato salad and with scrambled egg in sandwiches.

Mint
Either grown in a pot - which it hates, or left to spread in the ground .....depends how much room you have. Another herb hard to grow from seed but once you have a pot it should last years and is ever so easy to propagate from a rooted cutting. If grown in a pot dig out some with a root on to move into a new pot each year. If grown in the ground it might take over but I just  pull out some  each year. If you cut some down when it starts to run to seed in late summer then new growth will appear for the autumn. I use this when cooking new potatoes from the garden and for mint tea. I've tried umpteen times to get Peppermint to grow for me but found it always crossed with the common spearmint so ended up all the same. (I remember a slightly tetchy discussion with a man at one of the Suffolk Smallholder's shows when I had Eau-de-Cologne mint for sale. "How can there be Eau-de-Cologne mint - it's a contradiction and impossible". Oh no it isn't!)

Basil
I love pesto stirred into pasta and tomato/basil sauces also for pasta so always grow some. It needs heat to get started and then a warm place to grow. Some people swear by a pot on the windowsill but whenever I've tried that it's got invaded by greenfly. I nip out the flowering tip when they get to about 9 inches tall to get lots of branches. There are lots of different types of basil but I reckon the big green leaved Sweet Genovese is the most useful. I've seen on youtube that it's easy to take cuttings from basil just by growing in water - must give it a go although I don't need tons.

Thyme
No matter how many times I bought a pot of this to plant in the garden at the smallholding (another herb fiddly to grow from seed) it never lasted more than a few years. Yet in many places in the country it grows in the wild and often seeded itself easily at the smallholding so that I could dig up seedlings to sell. Lemon thyme is lovely but I don't think it's as hardy as common thyme. On moving here I found a patch of common thyme growing in next to no soil right by the paving slabs at the edge of the patio and it's looking well again this year. So maybe at the smallholding the soil was just too rich. Most useful with chicken I used to put a big handful inside the chicken when roasting and more between the skin and breast. Don't use it so much now as I rarely roast a whole chicken.


I've also got a very large Rosemary in the flower garden, some Lemon Balm and Common Sage at one end of a veg bed and lots of golden Feverfew that comes up every year in the rose garden. And of course Laurus Nobilis........... the Bay Tree.

And another good reason for having herbs..........There's a class in the Produce and Flower show for 'A Vase of Herbs' which I entered last year and came second. Hope to do one better this year! And today is the day to decide what to enter as entry forms have to be taken to the village this evening.

Last years 2nd place

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Never Heard Of It.

The local Hospice charity shops have teamed up with a plant nursery to sell plants at their shops.

I was in Stowmarket so had a look at what they had for sale. Among the common herbs I spotted this

Olive Herb? Never heard of it, but it had to come home with me so I could find out more.

On Wiki it said
Santolina rosmarinifolia, the holy flax, is a species of flowering plant in the daisy family Asteraceae, native to south western Europe. It is a dense, compact evergreen shrub growing to 60 cm (24 in) tall and wide, with narrow, aromatic green leaves and tight yellow composite flower -heads carried on slender stalks above the foliage, in summer.
The specific epithet rosmarinifolia describes the leaves' passing resemblance to those of rosemary, a distantly related group of plants.
In cultivation it is useful as groundcover or as an edging plant for sunny, well-drained situations. It dislikes winter wetness, and can be short-lived. The cultivar ‘Lemon Fizz’ and the dwarf cultivar S. rosmarinifolia subsp. rosmarinifolia 'Primrose Gem' have gained the RHS's Award of Garden Merit
Also known as olive herb or Wadi tops, the leaves of S. rosmarinifolia can be used in Mediterranean dishes and cocktails to add an olive-like flavour.


On an Australian website I found this

Botanical name: Santolina rosmarinifolia

Olive Herb is a cold hardy, perennial, woody, and the bright green leaves that have an intense olive aroma. It adds an interesting, alternative flavour to salads and is a tasty addition to Mediterranean meals, especially when you don’t have any fresh olives to hand.
At the end of February (guess that would be late summer/early Autumn - August/September in this country) Olive Herb develops small yellow button flowers that last long, look pretty and are well suited as a table decoration.
The leaves are the best part of the plant to use for flavouring. The flowers have less licorice flavour so are not suitable for use.
The Olive Herb is a hardy perennial plant and is low maintenance. The flowers don't remain on the plant after they are finished so the plant always looks tidy.
Olive Herb needs a sunny to partially shaded location and makes an attractive edging plant.
We recommend for best results that you feed the Olive Herb every 4 weeks with an organic fertiliser.
Plants grow 30-50cm high.

It also got a mention on a German Nursery website and in the States, and I found this on Youtube........
The lady is explaining about these 'erbs! that she has found for sale on Amazon.

Then I remembered that upstairs on my bookshelves on the landing was The Bible of Herb books - Jekka McVicar's book and of course, there it was.....part of the Cotton Lavender family

Love it when I find out about something I'd never heard of before, even if it is probably just a marketing ploy!........... Olive Herb sounding more useful than Holy Flax.

When labeling this post I discovered that Herbs are not mentioned in the list of labels I've used (except for Basil and Parsley) . Must remedy this as I love growing them and ought to write about others I grow. I was growing and selling herbs even before we moved to the smallholding!

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Didn't Do Much

In the end I didn't go very far over the Bank Holiday Weekend.

Car-boot sales of course -  the Big one at Needham Market was HUGE and I came home from that via the Art Exhibition (photos tomorrow).  The small local boot sale wasn't as big on Sunday as last week when I was there selling, I was home after looking round  by 9am and they've started having sales on Bank Holiday Mondays too and that was even smaller - home by 9 again.

All together at all the boot sales I spent a grand total of £10.60p

I found...........................

A bright pink ceramic pot  for 50p to put my money plant in on the bathroom window-sill. The plant had been in a brown -glazed flower pot (with a bit of plastic in the bottom to cover the hole) and I'd been searching for a replacement for months - it's still not big enough but better than brown.

The brown glazed flower pot now has a baby Bay tree (£2) in it. I've got a Bay tree that came here in a pot and is now nearly four feet tall so it will be too big to move when the time comes. This new one can be potted into increasingly larger pots for several years ready for whenever I decide that an acre is too big.

Someone had lots of  my everyday crockery - Johnson Brothers Summer Chintz - for sale. I wasn't short of plates and didn't need teeny coffee cups, a serving dish or very small bowls but she did have one breakfast bowl, which seem to be the thing that gets broken more often- so that was 50p.

I picked up this little set of lift-the-flap books for £1. Willow loves lifting flaps in books.

Any minute now I'm about to become a Great Aunt when my nephews partner gives birth, she's a few days over due already poor girl. I found this (for £1.50) to send down to London when my sister goes to visit her first grandchild.

 This, below, is a plastic "float" inside a net. I bought it for 50p in the hope I could get the net off and use it for the green glass globe I bought from an antique shop when we were on holiday. But no - there's no way to undo the net so I've hung it up outside anyway......it looks like glass from a distance!

 Is there anyone out there who knows how to make a macrame net like this?

Another Kilner flip-top bottle to use for the Limoncello I'm planning for the Christmas Hamper presents - another 50p.

I bought a big tub of strawberries for £1 - they needed eating so no picture and a large  slice of banoffee cake - that's gone too so no picture of £1.10p worth of cake either. Yes I'm a greedy guts!

And then this,  ahem, yes it's another bit of Portmeirion Holly and Ivy ware. Its rather large - that's a £1 coin in the middle -  and should have a bowl in the centre making it a plate for things - crudities?-  to dip in something - hummus?.

 I didn't really intend to buy it but as it was £2 - it seemed a shame to leave it.(poor excuse!)

Problem - it won't fit in the dining room cupboard! Too wide..............

I now  have 5 Holly and Ivy things, 4 from boot-sales/charity shops and one was  a Christmas present............ officially a collection?...............bother!

Many thanks for comments yesterday.Smoked Paprika is now on my shopping list

Back Tomorrow
Sue

The Seed Catalogues

They've all arrived, so I went through the seed tin and wrote a list (always a list!). I don't need much but do like to pick the varieties.

D.T Brown are local to Suffolk, have some good choices and cheapest postage. I need beetroot,  tomato, cucumber, sweet red  'pointy' peppers, leeks, curly parsley, nasturtium and basil. Then maybe sweetcorn...... and here's a weird thing........... I could have sworn that sometime last year  I bought a packet of mini sweetcorn to grow to use for stir frying BUT the packet in the seed  tin are ordinary corn cobs. I even mentioned finding them at a car boot sale in a blog post. So why aren't they what I thought they were? ............No idea.

I'm ordering a big plum type Tomato that I've not tried before called Big Mama , a mini plum that I grew last year - Sungrape. and for something completely different a yellow grape variety called Ildi . I've just 2 cucumber Euphya seeds from last year so have ordered some Louisa, another variety I've grown in the past. Sweet Peppers will be Bullhorn Mix. I have a few very old leek seeds so I'll get some new and a new large pack of beetroot to add to the pack of Bolthardy left from last year. The rest  - parsley, nasturtium and basil I can get from anywhere and probably cheaper - as long as I remember to write them on a shopping list.  D.T Browns don't have a mini sweetcorn so I'll look elsewhere for them, my Essex friends love to grow lots of corncobs so I could pass the packet onto them because I don't want to grow the big cobs.

Apart from the above the other things I'm planning to grow are the same as last year...... French Climbing beans and Runner Beans - both from seed I saved from what I grew. Aubergines, chard, Mange tout peas, lettuces and courgettes.I also have  4 butternut squash seeds to hopefully grow better than last year when only 1 plant survived and produced just 1 squash!

Back Soon
Sue

Bacton Fayre

I must be very competitive because I've been entering village shows  whenever I can since the 1980's and in the 80's this one  was just a produce show which I used to enter when we lived in the village, before we moved over to the coast.
It always clashed with Knodishall's own  Produce show - 1st Saturday in August - so we never got back to have a look. In the meantime it has turned into a big village event with all sorts of things going on and is held on a big meadow rather than in the school, as it was 25 years ago.

 

I took my entries over just after 9am. I entered

• 5 Runner Beans
• 5 Tomatoes
• 6 Cherry Tomatoes
• 2 Cucumbers
• 3 Courgettes
• 2 Peppers in the Any Other Vegetable Class
• A Vase of Herbs
• A Marble Cake ( WI Members only)
• A Jar of  Chutney

I didn't have much hope of winning anything except maybe with the tomatoes or peppers.............the cucumbers were huge, probably to big to be perfect, although they were a good matching pair. The courgettes were definitely too big and one had begun to turn into a marrow and the Marble Cake was a right mess. Never made one before and I used to have a rule of not entering something I'd not made before! The jug of herbs looked OK - rosemary, a few bits of sage as the bush has really suffered in this weather, basil and parsley.

Won a second place prize with these

Then I picked some more tomatoes to sell on the WI Produce/cake stall and took a couple of jars of chutney for selling too.

 I'd volunteered to help on the WI stall so went back just before noon, the flower show marquee was closed for judging  but when they let everyone in I found I'd won...............................
3 Firsts, 2 seconds and 2 thirds!

The biggest surprise was the Marble cake. Although it looked a bit rough from the outside the judges cut it in half and it did look well marbled inside and tasted good too. Although there were only 3 entries ................3 entries from a membership of over 30................what's the matter with people............................. not bothering to enter. Obviously not as competitive as me!

Prize winnings of £6! as it costs £1 per person and 25p per class  to actually enter, the winnings are not quite enough for a holiday but I was very pleased.
The WI prize isn't among these as it gets awarded at the WI meeting.

I had  a really good day at the show, so more photos of some of the other things there in tomorrow's post.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

How Does My Garden Grow

The patio between back of house and garage and the corner with pots and the shabby chic ladder which after 4 years is looking much more shabby than chic. I'll need to give it a coat of colour stain sometime

The Greenhouse with tomatoes on the right, cucumbers straight ahead and peppers and aubergines on the staging on the left. Also in there are pots of Basil, a pot of parsley, French Marigolds to attract in the hoverflies that eat greenfly, some small Heuchera that will go out when they are a bit bigger. There is also an Abelia which I got last year, it says it's slow growing and that's certainly right as it's taken a year to get from 3 inches tall to 6 inches tall and I bought it to go in a pot on the patio as it's a shrub - Ha! Might have to wait another 3 years until it's shrub size!

The Vegetable beds on the part of the garden behind the garage. Colin sowed a whole bed of beetroot, so there should be enough! I have mangetout peas in the next bed plus climbing French beans, with canes up ready for the runners.The next bed is courgettes and leeks plus the last couple of spring cabbage. I need to take down the frame work of netting that's round it. The fourth bed is potatoes with rhubarb at the end and in the distance the bigger soft fruit bed.
The House is next door neighbours, almost all their land is in front of their house beside my garden. They want to buy part of the field behind the house but other neighbours in the lane have tried to buy a bit of field without success. Apparently the farmer who owns it is a grumpy bloke who won't even discuss it!

The old raspberry canes that were here when we came, they are covered in fruit this year, I'll need to chuck a net over the top in a few weeks time, that's what the stakes are there for.

Orchard and Polly. These trees were here when we came. A family apple, another apple, 2 pear and a plum. We added 3 more various apple and 2 apricots - one of which is looking very sorry for itself.

Looking back at the veg beds from the soft fruit bed, with the garage on the right and the back of the house. The oval rose garden and my cutting garden are on  the other side of the greenhouse.
There are sun flowers surrounded by canes and string in the middle of the fruit bed because I couldn't find anywhere else to put them

There are also lots of shrubs over the other side of the orchard and mustn't forget the meadow and new trees. The tall poplar trees in the centre of the picture with Polly in the orchard are down the right hand side of the meadow. Our land is L shaped with the house in the corner where the two bits of the L join. The garden is the bottom of the L and the meadow is the upright of the L. I'll draw a map one day!

Back Tomorrow
Sue