Herbs
How to grow 20 essential edible herbs
Clearly, I'm a slow learner. In all the years I’ve been growing coriander – and watching it bolt to seed, sometimes only a few short weeks after I’d put it in – the simplest solution had never occurred to me: “Just eat it, and plant some more.”
That advice from Gill Gregory of Living Herbs nursery in Riverhead might seem glaringly obvious, but Gill doesn’t just mean scheduling in repeat sowings for a constant supply. She also means that there’s no point planting coriander if you’re not going to eat it at its youthful best. So there’s also no point fretting when annual herbs, be they dill, basil or coriander, shoot skyward to bloom and set seed. Just accept it, eat them, and move on.
Here’s another lesson I’ve been slow to learn: the more of your favourite herbs you grow, the more you can eat. (Who knew?) When you only have one clump of chives, for instance, you’re forced to choose between chive and corn muffins, a green-speckled soufflé, or chive and zucchini fritters.
“At times,” confesses NZ Gardener’s Mapua columnist Heather Cole of Country Trading, “our potato salads have more chives in them than spuds.” So it makes sense to Heather to plant these grass-like onions in generous rows “for easy mowing”, rather than in a single clump.
Ditto Italian parsley. Put in a whole punnet instead of a potted seedling and you can harvest it quickly by cutting across the top of each plant; otherwise you have to painstakingly pull off the outer stems, leaving the inner stems to grow on. (Heather’s a big parsley fan too; her idea of a quick green salad is to chop it by the bunch and toss it through pearl barley.)
This year, I’ve changed how I grow herbs. Instead of dotting them around my vege garden or slotting them along the front edges of our stable-block beds, I put in a large dedicated herb garden (see over the page) and mass-planted everything together.
My husband was initially sceptical. “No one can eat that much parsley,” he said, before he realised I’d also put in a 10m-long hedge of triple-curled parsley in front of my picking garden.
Some herbs do well without much care, while others are hard even for commercial growers to master, such as lemongrass and fiery horseradish, which grows like a weed but usually produces only scrawny, useless roots.
Perhaps happy herb growers have learned how to manage their own expectations. They know that with basil, for example, it’s not worth sowing early – even in a tunnelhouse – because it falls victim to its very own form of fungal wilt ( Fusarium
oxysporum f. sp. basilica), blackening the stems and causing them to wither.
At least rusty mint isn’t a major issue in my herb garden, thanks to Heather’s late grandfather, Lance. “He grew great mint in a big concrete tub by the back door, as does Dad, so I’m the third generation to grow it in big concrete tub by the back door.”
It’s such a good strain of mint, with large leaves that remain rust-free in all but the driest of summers, that when Heather propagated it to sell at the Nelson Market, it caught the eye of Tasman Bay Herbs, who then grew it commercially as a fresh cut herb.
I can also vouch for its superiority because, almost a decade ago, when I whinged in NZ Gardener about my rusty mint, they sent me a bunch to propagate too (mint roots readily in a glass of water) – and I’ve been blessed with the best mint ever since.
When coriander bolts, there's no stopping it. So why even try? Leave it in as a habitat for beneficial bugs instead