SUSIE’S GARDEN
When seeds are in short supply, you needn’t go short of herbs…
This spring, seed companies have been inundated with orders for vegetable and herb seed because so many people want to grow as much of their own produce as they can.
Here at Susie’s Garden, we are lucky to have an allotment-sized vegetable garden and part of that area is devoted to herbs for cooking. Flavoursome and nutritious, most herbs are easy to grow. However if you are finding it difficult to buy seed, there are other ways you can increase your plants.
We use chives a lot, cutting them up with scissors and using them to top soups, salads, omelettes and potatoes. If you have a clump of chives, you can make numerous new plants by simply digging them up, pulling them apart into separate bulbs, cutting off the leaves for eating and then replanting in smaller groups. From one clump, you can have a lovely long line of productive chives within weeks.
Mint is also very quick to increase and in fact benefits from being divided and replanted. It can become congested in a pot and grow less well, so it’s a good thing to do. There are lots of different flavours from the prettily striped ginger mint or zingy peppermint to Moroccan mint, which is the best for mint tea.
Lemon balm has a delicious fresh taste. We add it to green tea which makes a very refreshing drink, and it’s another herb that is simple to propagate by division.
When garden centres are closed, we need to find inventive ways of producing more herb plants – so you can divide supermarket herbs. Because they are raised from seed, there’s a mass of young plants packed into one pot.
These can be split and repotted or grown in a window box, so try this with parsley, coriander, thyme and sage. It’s especially useful for basil which can be tricky to germinate.
I have a strong-growing and beautiful scented rosemary bush that I bought cheaply three years ago in a supermarket as a growing herb for cooking. Now I am able to take cuttings from it to make even more lovely rosemary plants.