under cover

It's glorious to have all these wonderfully sunny autumn days - but never forget that the frost is lurking about most mornings now.
We've brought out the fleece to keep our herbs snuggly and protected. This includes the smaller herbs in the greenhouses which are just getting to a decent size but not quite ready to be planted out yet. Frost is a swine for destroying your herbs, particularly bay as I learned from bitter experience last year. One minute they are fine, the next they’ve gone brown and turned their toes up. If you’ve got a bay in a pot, and the forecast is for -5C or below, you’re best off bringing it indoors, not just covering it and hoping for the best. Young myrtles, too, will thank you for a cosy respite from the chill winds. Again, learned from bitter experience (and am still quite cross about it, a year on...)
Indoors, the tender herbs like scented pelargoniums, lemongrass and pineapple sage are setting up home nicely for the winter - not to mention filling the room with some fab scents!

Hello Autumn

This week, we have been mostly...


Enjoying country walks



Gathering elderberries for liqueur




Unveiling our new meadowsweet soap, which pleasingly looks like it has a happy face on it



Loving the final scarlet flush of tangerine sage



Enjoying cosy nights in

Sometimes, a nap is the only answer

This is Myrtle, our little cat. Her hobbies include 'helping' us with the herb garden, plus catching mice, birds and frogs. Here she is, taking a break from the dizzy whirl of catdom with a nice nap. Today's so cold, wet, and miserable I rather feel like joining her.

Seeds, plans and mainlining rosemary tea

One of the (many) things I love about herbs is that they are so easy to get free plants from. Half the time you don’t need to do any work - they’ve done it for you.
Evening primrose, borage, alchemilla mollis and marigolds all self seed like mad so most of the work is making sure you can pot them on before they get too big and get grumpy about being transplanted.
Borage, especially, seems to get the hump if you let it get a hold then go and dig it up. It’s best to get it while it’s just putting out its first, bristly leaves, about the size of your thumb. Dig it up and pot it on, give it plenty of water and it will soon romp away.
We’ve left it far too late to do any potting on of the white borage in this border but they are just so pretty when they flower that I can‘t say I mind too much. You can see what I mean about the self-seeding, though (at least, you can if the picture's uploaded properly).
We had flowers on ours in October last year, so you never know. At least the weeds don’t get a chance to get a look-in and if they don’t bloom we will just make a liquid feed out of them.
Elsewhere in the garden, it’s all about harvesting seeds and renovating. I’m fed up with the way our garden looks - it’s too staid, too flat. Need more levels, or focus, or…something. Pity that I'm utterly rubbish at garden design. Hey ho. I’ll have a think. Or leaf through lots of books and steal ideas, more like.
Seeds from our once-stately angelica plant have been harvested and are being dried. Felt guilty about not leaving any for the birds - they love them - so bought a fat feeder to make up for it. Richard’s planning to make candied angelica from the stems. Hmm. Let’s hope it fares better than his yarrow beer, which exploded in the kitchen last year. The place smelled like Everard’s Brewery for a month.
I’m keen to try root cuttings for sweet cicely, it will be interesting to see if they do better than the seeds which I’ve just collected.
Right, back to work. Have taken to drinking shedloads of rosemary tea with honey. It works a treat. Better than pro-plus, I can tell you.

Back to School

September’s here and it is back to school. I’m back studying - and this time (unlike during my teenage years) I’m actually enjoying it. And not just because it’s a fabulous excuse to indulge my borderline obsessive love of stationery, whatever the other half says.
I’m halfway through the RHS Level 2 qualification which has been fascinating. I'm still a confirmed herbophile (if that's a word) but it's been a treat learning new stuff and reading so many inspiring books and learning different ways of doing things, being able to visit a garden and pick out what works and what doesn't, and why.
Now I’ve also just received the first part of my herb course with the Horticultural Correspondence College. It looks amazing and I can’t wait to get started! Am slightly concerned about fitting in two courses, coming up with herbal soaps for our Christmas markets and sowing for next year’s herbs, though. Perhaps I should cheer myself up with some snazzy notebooks....

soap, soap and abbeys

Lots of experimenting going on at Cooks Lane: new products being prepared for Christmas - and tried out at some of the sales we have/are doing in the next few weeks. We have a new lavender and ylang ylang cold-pressed soap that made its debut at Eastwell fete last Saturday - and sold out.

But the herbs have not been forgotten. We have some lovely young myrtle plants, some African blue basil and, at last, some sellable ginger mint, that are coming good just as the herb-growing season is winding down. Typical.

Still, there are a number of sales coming up. On Saturday, for the first time, Cooks Lane Herbs is taking on two sales on one day. Sian will be in King's Hall, Market Harborough, with some of those lovely soaps, while Richard is at Launde Abbey, near East Norton, with the herbs. We are both at Launde Abbey on the Sunday and bank holiday Monday with both soaps and herbs. A good chance to stock the garden/kitchen with herbs before the real bad weather sets in or to pick up some early stocking fillers.

Polytunnels and greenhouses, I reckon, are like London buses. You wait ages to get one, scrimping and saving before taking the plunge and putting one up. Then you quickly realise what genius they are and before you know it there’s three of them in your garden at once.

Take us: we started three years ago with a modest little greenhouse as we started growing herbs and last week, found ourselves trying to put up a 3m x 4m polytunnel in the back garden in lashing rain and howling winds.

If you count the tiny three-tier ones from Aldi, currently jostling for space in the patio, that makes five.

And there’s still not enough room!

We even have a waiting list of herbs waiting to go in – because with cuttings being taken nearly every day it’s a real struggle to find the space. Our window ledges are crammed to the rafters with softwood cuttings taken from rosemary, curry plants, lavender, southernwood and sage, to name a few.

Softwood cuttings are as the name suggests, the soft tip growth of the plants. Take cuttings in the morning – pinch off about 10cm of a non flowering shoot which has three or four pairs of leaves on it, and pop it straight into a plastic bag so it won’t start to stress too much and wilt.

Pinch out the top of the cutting, which will encourage the plant to branch, and next trim off the lower leaves.

Cut the stem near a leaf node (where the leaf meets the stem) and put it into a prepared pot of compost mixed with a good mix of grit. You can use rooting hormones, but to be honest we have never found them necessary.

Cuttings taken at this time of year may take a bit longer to strike, but they generally don’t wilt as badly as those taken in late spring/early summer. You can tell when they’ve taken if you see new growth coming from the centre of the plant.

Rosemary cuttings like this will take a couple of months to root. They like hot and humid spots, but out of direct sunlight, so a greenhouse or polytunnel is ideal. Be careful though - don't overwater rosemary or you could kill it.


Pretty soon, you won’t be able to stop yourself from walking through the garden wondering what new plants you could get free!