grow your own herbs

I am half way through tidying up the herb bed for the winter.  The herb bed is at times practical, containing mint, parsley, chives, sage, and a small bay tree, all of which I did use in cooking at some point during the summer.  There is also a large amount of lemon verbena, which I have never found any practical use for, and a lot of origanum that I haven't cooked with either, being vague about its provenance or culinary properties.  The answer would be to try a bit, since I don't suppose it would kill me.  As I was tidying up I found a thyme plant that I'd forgotten about, looking amazingly healthy and bushy amidst the undergrowth, so I could start cooking with that. There is some lavender, purely decorative because I dislike the flavour of lavender in food, but no rosemary because that lives somewhere else.  There were originally several flavours of mint, but I have forgotten what they were, and according to Jekka McVicar on the radio if you grow more than one variety together and let their roots touch they will all taste the same anyway.  There is some borage, whose flowers I have still not frozen in ice cubes and used to decorate drinks. Everything runs or seeds itself dementedly, the parsley going to seed very quickly because the soil is really too dry for it, and the borage only a quarter of the size of the borage that sprang up next to the compost heap last year.  Mint is not supposed to like dry soil, but it survives pretty well, being a tough plant.

It is just the sort of herb bed that Christopher Lloyd would have disliked a lot, floppy, structureless, and messy for much of the summer, despite my best efforts with rusted iron tripods of clematis (not entirely successful) and a diagonal path of mixed paving slabs and cobbles. Insects adore it, though and once the origanum and lemon verbena and mint flower it is a mass of wild bees, honey bees, and butterflies.  It looks pretty too, in a floppy, messy way, but by now the parsley stems are yellow, the sage has the jagged spikes of spent flower stems jutting up among the new foliage, the origanum is brown, and the chives are being infiltrated by grass pretending to be chives.  Time for a big tidy, stems with seed heads to the bonfire, stems I can salvage without seed heads to the compost heap, grass seedlings and the latest crop of wild vetch and plantain in the council brown bin.

I planted a horseradish root out of a little nine centimetre pot a few years ago in a fit of enthusiasm after reading some book about eastern European cooking.  It was a stupid place to put horseradish, since the bed is mulched with gravel and not intended to be dug up, and how else do you harvest horseradish root?  The horseradish has shown what it thinks of the sand by staying sedately where it was planted and only slowly growing larger, when if it was happy it would be running yards in all directions.  If I were ever to manage to get the vegetable plot back into production I would move the horseradish there, planting it in a bottomless pot if I were feeling especially bullish about its prospects.  In the meantime we have not had horseradish and beetroot or any of the other things I was probably imagining when I bought it.