Well, as firefox would say, this is embarassing! After saying I was cutting back on seeds this year, because of time and space constraints and all that, I went out and spent £30 on seeds from Chiltern Seeds. If you add to that the seeds I saved last year, which I will try to propagate if only to see how viable the harvest was, it becomes, frankly, all a bit much!

Here’s the list (just as they come to hand):

• nasturtium
• marigold
• ammi majus ( a large white umbellifer – high class relation of cow parsley)
• snapdragon, for window boxes
• daisy ‘pomponette’
• carthamus tinctoria (saffron thistle), a nice golden flower, good for dyeing, and which dries well and looks cheerful for ages
• cornflower
• wallflower ‘blood red’
• white trailing lobelia, for window boxes
• molucella laevis which has good green bracts for drying
• forget-me-not
• shoo-fly plant – of limited herbal use, but has intriguing inky blue seed pods
• clary
• chervil
• sweet peas, in two varieties, one called ‘flamingo flamenco’ and the other a dwarf for hanging baskets
• sweet cicely
• red valerian
• honesty
• chives
• sweet rocket
• bronze fennel
• avens ‘herb bennet’ whose root is scented
• welsh poppy just because I love them
• basil
• parsley
• coriander

At some point I will have to sort them into batches of early (started in the house), mid-term (in the greenhouse) and late, and make sure I know what the special requirements of each are, and work out where I’m going to put them all —-

If anyone would like any seeds or young plants, I’ll have way more than I need myself, so do get in touch.

In the current frost (down to -8 in Dunblane and Kilsyth, though not as bad as that here) the herb-related activity is still in the house. I succumbed to the lure of the supermarket and bought a pot of parsley yesterday, which I used to make tabbouleh and cacik ( a yogurt and cucumber salad, flavoured with mint, parsley and garlic. You may remember my rather grudging notes about parsley last summer  but now I’m ashamed to say I’m a complete convert. It was so light and flavourful and full of sunshine! There will be a lot of parsley in the garden this year, and some pots in the greenhouse to keep us going through the winter. And my lemon verbena plant, which I brought inside because the greenhouse is unheated, has burst into new leaf, and there are pots of hyacinths and tete á tete daffodils blooming. Surely spring can’t be too far away!