Áilín Quinlan: Pardon my smugness, but I do grow my own herbs, you know

It started with Diarmuid Gavin and a very old, second-hand book. Well, it didn’t. But, actually, it kind of did.

I’m starting to sound a bit like Roman Roy, the youngest of the three sons in Succession, which I’m currently watching, still agog, for the second time.

Of course, Roman Roy probably wouldn’t know a herb if he saw one, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with it.

Point is, it probably would be more accurate to simply acknowledge that the quote by Diarmuid Gavin and the discovery of the little second-hand book with the torn green dust-jacket - which, to my surprise, turned out to be quite well known in certain circles - really got me started again in terms of taking the whole herb-growing thing seriously.

Diarmuid Gavin advised that if you only grow one edible this year, make it a herb. That quote stuck in my head.

At the time, I was doing the window boxes thing and the flower baskets thing and the terracotta-pots-of-blooms-at-the-front-door thing and they all looked pretty and wonderfully colourful and they all required rather a lot of maintenance.

Soon afterwards, I stumbled across Ambrose Heath’s Herbs In The Kitchen published, believe it or not 1953 , an actual entire seven decades ago.

Heath was a journalist and food writer, who was born in 1891 and died in 1969. He published a whole list of books on food and drink.

He really loved fresh, home-grown herbs and believed that ideally everybody should grow and use fresh herbs in their cooking.

So all of that got me thinking about herbs all over again.

I’d always grown herbs in pots, in a humble, amateur sort of way – a pot of parsley here, a pot of thyme there, some rosemary, a bunch of sage and some mint. I also had fresh bay leaves from a bay tree in the front of the house and I used all of these with great pride in my fish chowders and my casseroles and stews and my roast legs of lamb and pies and the like.

The pots of herbs all died when I contracted covid and got dragged into the bleak tunnel that is long covid.

But afterwards, when I stumbled across the quote about herbs by Diarmuid Gavin and what Ambrose Heath had to say about herbs, I organised a proper little herb garden for myself.

Not just pots. A real raised herb garden, with soil mixed with a bit of manure (not that you necessarily need manure because herbs thrive in even the poorer kinds of soil) and importantly, some home-made removable plexiglass lids for winter protection.

I decided to write about it, because this is the time of year when everyone... well, not everyone admittedly, but loads of people, are planting stuff.

They’re walking out of garden centres and supermarkets with armfuls of plants; pots of lavender, petunias, pansies, begonias. Even the supermarkets are stocking a kind of posh seaweed compost now so we can all feel extra-smug about our potting methods.

Away with you if that’s where your passion lies, and enjoy the blossoms and the colours, but if, as Diarmuid Gavin said, you are to grow one edible this year, try growing a herb.

The thing about herbs is that, as Gavin has also pointed out, they’re generally quite easy to look after. They tend to prosper even when your soil isn’t the best. You can’t keep a good plant of mint or rocket down, for example.

Most herbs will tolerate even ignorant and incompetent gardeners, like me.

On top of that, fresh herbs are great for cooking with, plus there’s the most enormous and utterly smug sense of satisfaction to be had, for example, to be able to bang on ad nauseum to your dazzled guests about how you’re using your very own organic rosemary in your Easter leg of lamb, your home-grown basil in a tomato and mozzarella salad, or garnishing a cocktail with a handful of your own home-grown, organic mint leaves.

And let’s not forget your own lavender, of course, for jugfuls of that unbeatable aroma.

Of course, it goes without saying that nothing in life is ever simple, so after endless failures with basil and coriander – the basil kept getting black spots on its leaves, and the coriander stayed miserable and spidery - I ditched them and stuck with the hardy ones – parsley, rosemary, bay, mint, chives, thyme and sage.

I like lemon balm too, though I’ve learned that, like mint, lemon balm is best kept in a pot, because given half a chance, itself and the mint will just take over.

You can start a mini-herb garden by buying some herbs in pots, like I did. You can also start sowing seeds in a few recycled yogurt pots or takeaway coffee cups - all you have to do is sow a light layer of seeds in some moist compost. Cover them with a thin layer of compost and then, to stop them drying out on you, cover again with a layer of clingfilm. Put them on a sunny windowsill.

You can also do the root-in-water thing. I currently have a few of my father’s sage and rocket cuttings in a jar on a windowsill waiting for them to grow roots, at which point I will pot them up for eventual planting in the herb garden.

If you’re a fan of lemongrass, Gavin suggests that you buy some lemongrass in the supermarket and use the stalks as cuttings. Put the stalks into a glass of water and once the roots start growing, pot them up.

Once it’s thriving, make a Thai curry and invite your friends over so that you can let drop, ever so casually, the fact that this curry contains your own home-grown, organic lemongrass.

Nothing can beat the sense of smug satisfaction it gives you to be able to say this. Believe me.