Herbs and/or Weeds
What amazing variety of plants can be easily grown by children, beginner gardeners, people with no garden at all, food lovers, chefs and commercial producers, provide year round produce for culinary, medicinal and cosmetic use and make every patch of garden look great? The answer is: Herbs!
What amazing variety of plants can be easily dismissed by children, beginner gardeners … but provide year round produce for culinary, medicinal and cosmetic use and may compete with every inch of your garden? The answer is: Weeds!
The truth is herbs can be weeds and weeds can be herbs!
Creating your own herb garden is an adventure and a wonderful pleasure. You can decide whether you want it formal or informal, totally culinary or medicinal. As herbs are basically ‘wild plants’ it makes sense to grow them in conditions comparable to their natural habitat. And I risk to be controversial here, possibly very controversial, and say:”Herb spirals are a thing of the past and Weed gardens are the future.
Herb spirals look always good on paper, but are much too small and rarely deliver in the long run, as yes weeds are taking over. And the weeds are most likely daisies, dandelions, silverweed and the infamous hairy bittercress.
That’s all good and well you may say, but what do you suggest?
OK here is the idea:
Basic is good, at least for starting off. My suggestions for growing basic culinary herbs are: Grow Chives and Parsley in the garden with your vegetables and plant them in the corners of your bed of carrots or onions. Grow Coriander, Dill and Basil in the polytunnel, the first with your lettuces, the second amongst your cucumber and the third with tomatoes. Grow Mint, Thyme, Rosemary, Sage, Oregano and Marjoram as perennials in a herb garden or as border plants or in big pots or half barrels.
How to grow?
Herbs can be grown from seed indoors in a seed tray using a good seed compost. You can also sow outdoors once the soil has warmed up in late spring. Buying herb transplants is an easier but more expensive start or you can now try softwood cuttings to propagate Rosemary, Sage and Thyme. Cut a shoot from a non-flowering tip of the plant, remove the leaves from the bottom third of the cutting, make a hole in the compost, insert the cutting up to the leaves, water and cover with a clear plastic bag.
Be careful with growing Mint as this vigorous plant easily moves from a very prolific herb to a very invasive weed. The one found growing in most gardens is spearmint which is often used on roast lamb. Peppermint is stronger and makes a good tea.
Note that Oregano & Marjoram are perennial bushy plants that attract bees in the garden.
Give (edible) Weeds a chance!
And regards weeds, give them a chance, give them a place. Last year I literally stumbled over Silverweed, especially on the footpath of our herb garden and that triggered another culinary “discovery”, because my wife Gaby uses this very clever weed to make the sensational silverweed cashew mayonnaise. And did you know that Silverweed has the highest content of vitamin C of all the weeds.
I can tell a similar story about Fat Hen, a weed one of my neighbours complained about, when he found the weed between his strawberries. A bit of reading up made of interesting news: High in Magnesium and Calcium and vitamin A and C and higher in protein than most vegetables. Eating Fat Hen Gazpacho was delicious!
As for Chickweed that I have to keep under control in our polytunnel, it is very high in Vitamin C, contains protein and is as high in vitamin A as the ‘superfood’ Broccoli. That let’s me tolerate it and it now features in our salads and more recently in Green Smoothies.
We already use Dandelion for homemade lemonade and eat the young leaves in salads.
And here is the latest: Edible Burdock. We cultivate this plant for the first time in our new weed garden for the simple reason of getting at the roots and plenty of it, because together with the roots of Dandelion, we want to dry and grind them as a coffee substitute.
And we haven’t even mentioned Nettles and Nettle Seeds the Irish Ginseng!