Herbs.

Herbs are grate to use in cooking and they give a good flavour to any thing that you use them in and are very easy to grow as well. So even if you do not have a garden you can grow them in a plant pot on your windowsill and use them like that.

I am lucky as I do have a good-sized garden and just out side the back door, my kitchen door I can walk on to the patio and get some kind of herb all year round. It is a luxury that I do appreciate and would miss if I had to move. Not that I would miss it for long for the good thing about herbs are you can get them to grow very easily and rather quickly in a short space of time.

So what do you start with? Well let me see.

Chives are easy to look after and just keep on growing and growing. You cut them back and they grow some more. They have a delightful onion taste and are good with salads or on hot food. Also, you plant them and next year they come back again and again year after year.

Rosemary is excellent this is a hard wood herb so you can get it all year round. Perfect for all sorts of things especially lamb. My favourite is to take some and pan-fry it with some potatoes and onions.

And if you are going to have rosemary then you will need to have some thyme. Thyme is a grate all year round usable herb that goes well with all manner of things. Beef chicken pork you name it. Use it to infuse a lemon sorbet. That is a great use of the herb as it gives a very clean and different taste to some thing you would not normally expect.

Sage is another of the good meat herbs that you can grow and it will give you a really good depth of flavour to may dishes.

Then you have mint. Mint is a funny little herb that you grow and generally is used for putting in new potatoes or a sprig on a desert of some kind. But it can be much more than that.

Take some, mix it in some mayonnaise, and then use that in a chicken sandwich, very nice. Also, you can get so many different varieties now; one of my favourites that I do grow is basil mint.

Marjoram or oregano all depending on what you want to call it. This herb is good for a number of uses as well and will grow very happily with little attention to helping it along just the odd water over the summer and it is very strong little plant that survives very well.

Once more, you can use this herb all year round as long as you do not take too much over winter when it is to cold.

Common fennel is a good herb to be growing by your back door. It grows fairly high and looks pretty and tastes grate. What more could you want from an herb.

Also you have bay. Bay is one thing they you can grow in a pot , at the moment I have four bay trees that I am training so that you get a tall thick stem and a bush of bay leaves at the top. The idea is that I could go out at any time of the year and get some for what ever it is that I need to use them in and still have plenty to use and display in the garden.

Other herbs like coriander and basil I normally grow from seed every year. But if you do not want to do this, you can now get them in pot from the supermarket, just keep them on you kitchen window, and take what you need when you need them and they last for a good six months if you look after them.

The best thing to do it not to go out and spend a fortune on herbs as you could fill your garden with them from Tarragon, curry plant, chervil, dill and bergamot . To name but a few. The thing you must think of is what do I like and then plant the herbs you know.

Once you have a bedrock of a few favourers and you know what you can do with them then you can experiment and get some more. And if you like, the idea of growing your own vegetables this is the first place that I would recommend you start.

And even if you do not know what to do with the herbs when you have them wait till summer go out and get a load of fresh herbs such as chives basil young green thyme, chop them op and put them in to a salad. Go in to your garden and watch it just grow as you eat. Nothing can be better than that on a hot summer day.