Keep sowing herbs

Regular small sowings will keep you in fresh, young herbs all summer long.

Time to sow: spring-summer

Growing a handful of culinary herbs in the garden, in pots or in window boxes, can transform a range of cooked dishes and salads with no effort at all. Just a sprig or two of fresth-picked herbs will add oodles of flavour to any recipe.

Many perennials, such as thyme and rosemary, can be cropped year after year, but some of the top culinary herbs are annuals and need to be sown fresh each year. These include coriander, basil, chervil and dill, but all these are also prone to producing flowers, setting seed and fading very quickly, well before the season has finished. 80, ideally, you should make about three or four repeat sowings, about 3 weeks apart, to keep the fresh young leaves coming.

Sow seeds thinly on the surface of moist compost from spring onwards, cover with a thin layer of compost and put the pots on a warm windowsill. As the seedlings appear, re-pot the herbs into bigger pots and move them outside. Start picking leaves as soon as they are big

enough for cropping.

TIP Dill and coriander readily run to seed, but the seeds are actually very tasty,

so save those from the fading plants while harvesting leaves from the new sowings.