When it comes to making a homemade meal, having your own herbs to hand can quickly transform a dish. Although fresh herbs are relatively inexpensive to buy in most UK supermarkets, they can quickly spoil quickly and lose their taste. Instead, whole herb plants are often a more affordable and sustainable option in the long run, and are also widely available in UK supermarkets.
While they’re usually sold as a plant in one pot, you can easily take the plant apart and repot them as individual plants for even more growth, which will help them last even longer, too. They also make for a low-maintenance addition to a vegetable patch or garden, and if you sow them now, they can be continuously harvested throughout the summer and added to a number of fresh dishes, from salads to pasta dishes and delicate tarts. But there’s one thing you should be doing to ensure your herbs continue to grow bigger and bushier so you can get the most out of them.
One gardener has shared what you should be doing with herb plants to get even more from them to avoid them becoming sparse and stalky in a video posted on TikTok.
Lee Bestall, who runs the account @thenortherngardener, said there’s one trick gardeners should know when it comes to harvesting herbs this summer. Like any plant, herbs need to be pruned, but he warned gardeners not to do one thing.
“Here’s the trick: don’t just pick the tops. If you only ever snip the soft tips for cooking, you’ll end up with leggy, straggly stems that look sad and taste worse,” he said.
While the excitement of seeing herbs come into bloom might deter you from trimming them back, if left alone, the plant will simply start to go stalky and begin to flower, after which they have no more culinary value.
Instead, Lee encourages gardeners to be “bold” in pruning their herb plants in order to avoid “stalky looking plants”. Although you likely only need “those beautiful new tips” for cooking, you should continue to cut the plant back to ensure it can continue producing a full harvest.
To do this properly, Lee advises “taking off what you need to use as herbs but also cutting back quite hard, almost to ground level” and making sure to do this evenly so that plants can continue to rejuvenate.
Repeating this “right through the summer” will encourage new foliage to return in a matter of weeks, preventing plants from going woody and stalky and ensuring herbs “taste good all season”.