My favourite herbs & why I like them – Diary of a Rocket Gardener

Also known as flat chives, these are right at the top of my list. They flower later on in the season than standard chives, which means they produce loads of leaves to use in the summer before the flowers arrive. Their flavour is somewhere in between wild garlic and normal chives, and I really love throwing a big handful in with wilted greens of any kind. I don’t even bother to chop it, I just chuck it into a pan whole with some spinach or kale and treat it like a vegetable in its own right. I grow them in a dedicated herb bed which gets good sunshine through the day and they do brilliantly.

It was a bit of a toss up between lemon balm and lemon verbena, but I have chosen lemon balm because I love the look of the leaves and find it grows a little more reliably as a perennial, where lemon verbena can be a bit more delicate. I love nothing more than to rub the leaves between my fingers for the scent, and a small sprig steeped in boiled water makes a very soothing herbal tea – a good one to impress guests. I grow it in a couple of large pots outside the kitchen as it has a tendency to take over (much like mint)

You can’t see them in this photo, but African Blue Basil produces lovely flower spikes. It is one of those herbs that you catch lingering in the air on a summer’s evening when you’re watering your veg or pulling up a few weeds, and it seems to attract bees really well too. I quite often grow some in pots, and I have planted it in a flower bed before as well as it is lovely looking. The flavour is fairly similar to standard basil so you can use it in much the same way, but it is a little easier to grow outdoors and I do find it a bit prettier.

This is another one that I like to plant in flower beds, as the red flowers are really quite striking. What I love about this herb is that it genuinely smells like pineapples. It’s extraordinary. It’s another one that makes a fun herbal tea, and I always mean to try making ice cream with it (although I still haven’t got around to actually doing it yet, but I bet it would taste incredible.) If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, it’s a really good choice and it is very easy to grow, either in pots or in a bed.

This has been one of my faves since I first discovered it in Rocket Gardens’ range of herbs. It’s not a flavour that everyone loves, but if you like mint and you like coriander, then it’s kind of somewhere in between, and it is just great chopped up and added to a curry. I also really like it finely chopped and mixed with yoghurt, much like a tzatziki – it has a cooling quality to it and works well like this. It’s fairly shrubby, so I have always grown it in flower beds or borders where it can reach its full size quite happily within a year or two. It’s not fully hardy, but has lasted around three years for me here in Cornwall where the winters tend to be quite mild.

There’s nothing particularly glamorous about parsley, but I’m including it in this list because I find it such a useful all-round herb. There are very few dishes that don’t work with parsley, whether it’s wilted greens, a veg stew or curry, an omelette or a roast. I prefer to plant it in the shade along a north-facing wall as I find this way it keeps going for longer before putting out flower stalks. I try and grow quite a lot so that I can harvest big handfuls at a time, often to make a chimmichurri style sauce.