I love my herb garden – originally a square plot of ground in the vegetable patch, and now moved to pots and tubs in a sunny corner of the garden to make space for courgettes and lettuce – it gives me great pleasure watching the bees go daft for the scented rosemary and thyme flowers, and it makes the taste of my culinary delights so much better! My herb collection at the moment consists of about 3 small potted rosemary plants which I grew from cuttings (I have a monster Rosemary by the sitting room window which just gets bigger and bushier every year!), a pineapple mint, a pot of St John’s Wort, a pot of chives, a tub of
lemon balm, a small red clay pot overflowing with lemon scented, tiny leaved, variegated thyme, and a tall ceramic tomato pot full of flat leaved thyme. Thyme is one of my favourite herbs to cook with, and also to smell – if makes me think of sunny Sundays and when I see it in bloom, with bees hovering round the lilac coloured flowers, it makes me feel like I’m doing something really positive for the local bee population – they just love it!
Thyme comes in many different variations, from the low growing, tiny leaved varieties which fill cracks in paving stones beautifully, to the bigger, bolder, larger leaved varieties which are easier, in my opinion, to harvest and use.
I have a brick circle made from reclaimed bricks (my next door neighbour didn’t want them and passed them over the fence to me!) which is interspersed with a variegated spreading thyme – I hope that by next summer all the spaces between the bricks will be filled with cushions of green and yellow and purple flowers loveliness! A lovely place to sit in the evening sunshine, with the smell of crushed thyme underfoot and the late working bees humming over the flowers.
When it comes to cooking, it’s the larger leafed variety I use. Added to soups and stews, it imparts a wonderful aroma, and flavours the food really well – I particularly like to use it with chicken, whether roasted for Sunday lunch or in a casserole or even just sprinkled over chicken breasts before adding them to the pan. When I make butternut squash soup I always add a good pinch of dried thyme, or a handful of finely chopped fresh thyme, and it just brings the sweet warm flavour out of the squash like nothing else I know!
Growing Thyme is exceptionally easy in my opinion, as long as you don’t overwhelm the plant with too much attention. Thyme likes to be in well drained soil, and doesn’t like to have it’s feet in water, so add sand or small stones to the area where you’re planting to keep the drainage good. It loves sunshine, and will thrive in a sunny position, but make sure it’s not placed in a frost pocket, or you may loose it over winter. One good tip for growing thyme is to keep trimming it regularly, making sure, like with rosemary and lavender, that you don’t cut into woody stems, as the plant finds it hard to produce new green shoots from these. I find that it you have a house wall that gets a lot of sunshine, this is a good place to plant, or, as I have done, use the plant in cracks in your paving for prettiness, and for keeping weeds at bay. When the sun falls on the bricks or the wall, the heat stays there a lot longer than it does in the soil, and so the plant steals warmth from this source, and is more productive because of it.
Thyme is easy to propagate, and from one shop bought plant you can actually get many more – I bought a pot of low growing thyme from B&Q, took it home and divided the roots up. I ended up with 15 small plants, which I planted out in the brick circle and which are now, 2 months later, very well established. Next year I’ll dig them up and divide them a bit more! Plants for free is what I like! I have never grown thyme from seed, but it is very easy to do, again as long as you keep the conditions right. I’m not great at growing things from seed as I loose patience and end up killing the lot, but there are plenty of great websites and garden centres where you can buy seeds to grow at home. It’s not a plant that self seeds readily, but likewise won’t take over your garden in the way that mint, for example will.
Whether you grow Thyme for cooking, for looking at, for groundcover or for adding to your bath to soothe tired and aching muscles, it’s certainly a herb worth growing that will earn it’s keep in your garden and keep on doing so long after you’ve forgotten where you got it from in the first place!
Thank you for reading, Kate x
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Advantages: A wonderfully versitile herb which has many uses. Disadvantages: Can take a little while to get established, likes good drainage and a sunny position.
phoenixgreen 07.11.2006 ·
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