People who love food always have a need for good quality herbs in order to flavour cooking through the likes of creating a bouquet garni or just adding some rosemary to a lovely lamb dish.

That said, the reality is that little packs of herbs are normally fairly outrageous in cost, meaning that people often end up buying dried herbs that offer far less flavour and satisfaction for cooking.

For those who are slightly less needing to penny pinch, you can buy fresh herbs which are fine but still lack that little bit of freshness that you get from something that has been freshly cut.

With this in mind there is an easy(ish) solution: grow your own herbs. You can do this in your own kitchen, you can do this in your garden, and most importantly you can keep the majority of them for many, many years once planted (and who knows you may even burn off some of that Sunday lunch digging in the plants!).

People are often concerned about the amount of effort required to keep them alive and if they will actually taste like the preserved herbs that you can buy (fortunately they won’t!). The reality is that if planted in an area that is open and will receive rainfall you will find that the herbs, once watered in to begin with, will not require a huge amount of love unless you wish to thicken them up and increase the amount of produce you will get – something that you will be doing anyway if you are using your herbs.

Given all this, costs will be very low when buying in your original herbs (or even lower if growing them from seed) and will give you that extra satisfaction that although you might not have been lucky enough to have had a hand in getting all your food from nature to plate you can at least make a small contribution, as my herb garden below has shown me after growing from a very humble beginning.