Greetings from Locked Down Sydney!

 

It's been a long time (April 21) since I posted anything here in my gardening blog, which is semi-retired, just like me.

But as I finished this morning's final phase of the "weed then mulch" marathon, it occurred to me that it might help pass the time, maybe also provide some inspiration for gardeners who are cooped up at home due to covid lockdown restrictions, if I posted something here.

So what I plan to do every few days is to post something from my garden that I hope might of be interest, and maybe even motivate you to get out in the sunshine, which is good for both your mental and physical health (if you wear a hat!).

For starters, I'm starting off with a pair of panoramas of my freshly weeded and mulched garden, as it always looks very nice after new mulch has been spread around. 

Mid August and both the frangipanis are asleep, so it looks a bit bare. In the foreground the bonsai curry leaf tree has enjoyed the winter, and in the right foreground the strawberry patch is flowering and looking promising. That's Pam's nasturtium patch middle-left, and middle right is the hardest working part of the garden, the pots of rosemary and thyme.

On the right ride of the garden is another of Pam's nasturtium patches, while behind them the Geranium 'Big Red' patch continues on its merry spreading way. The only care it needs is cutting back. Right foreground, the remains of our two very productive broccoli plants. The stumpy/stalky one on the right looks like that because this week we cut off all the leaves and cooked them up, Southern USA "collard greens" style — and they were delicious.

So that's your introductory guided tour. In coming days I have lots of spring flowers to show you, plus some garden jobs to do now, lots of problems in the succulent patch, South Africans at their glorious best, Pam's mum's garden refugees, crops on the go, garden critters, and I am sure several more things that I'll come across as spring warms up.

Hang in there locked-down gardeners! If you have a garden, even if it's just some pots on a balcony, they're the perfect project to take on now. Spring is well and truly in the air, the temperatures are rising so any effort you put into getting plants to grow will be rapidly — and beautifully — rewarded.

Thyme management

Wandering into the kitchen yesterday afternoon, I was greeted by the very pleasant sight and smell of a lot of thyme drying on some paper towels. What was Pam cooking? I wasn't sure, but at least I knew it was going to have lots of thyme in it.

Even if Pammy didn't use all this thyme, I was still pleased to see how much she harvested, because that's what I like to do — harvest a lot more thyme than I need each time I plan to cook with thyme. We have no shortage of thyme growing here, as you can see below, and a key trick to keeping it so lush and bushy is that we cut it back all the time, and never worry about cutting off too much each time we get some for the kitchen.

This is just one pot of thyme, sitting on the path under the clothesline, in the sunniest part of the garden. It's spilling over the edges of the pot and trying to send roots down in the nearby garden beds and even into cracks in the paving. It's a weed at heart. 

Like our thyme, the rosemary and sage are also doing well here, and part of the trick of keeping them growing abundantly is to harvest often, or cut them back often even if you don't need that much in the kitchen. I feed these potted plants just once a year, but I do water them often and cut them back often as well.

I have a particular affection for thyme, it's the herb I use most often (along with parsley). It smells so nice as you wash and prepare it, and it's such a versatile flavour, too.

Well, what did Pammy do with her many branches of thyme? She dropped them into a baking dish with an inch-deep puddle of olive oil in the bottom, then added lots of cherry tomatoes, and baked them in a preheated 180°C oven for about half an hour. Then she boiled some farfalle (bow-tie) pasta, drained the tomatoes of their olive-oily, herby bath, then tossed the cooked cherry tomatoes through the pasta. It was a side dish, but at the same time the star of last night's meal. Thankyou Pammy, thankyou thyme.

Loving it here

Do you have a plant in your garden which just thrives and does well, no matter how little you care for it? (And that's not counting weeds, of course!).

Here in Garden Amateurland our happiest little person is that humble herb, thyme. Several years ago, it was almost taking over the joint, spreading across the pathway and loving life in a most fragrant and deliciously useful way.

This photo was taken back in 2010, and at least two-thirds of the plant is actually sitting on our pavers. Just the small portion on the far left had roots in soil. It's a good example of how in the wild thyme spreads itself over rocks on sunny hillsides. It's a sunbather of a plant.

Well, in 2012 we dug this herby marvel up and planted one remnant in a pot. It had to go as this is where our succulent patch is now located, and that big bush really was enough thyme for a thousand families, and there's just Pammy and me here doing the cooking and eating.

The wide, shallow pot of thyme still loves life here just as much as when it was in the ground, and it has spilled over the side of the pot and its roots have managed to find some soil in the gap around the base of our clothesline (that green thing poking up on the left side of the photo). 

It might just be my imagination but I think the thyme growing in the ground, around the clothesline, is a bit more fragrant than the pot-grown herb.

The pot-grown thyme is a bit more lush and green than the in-ground stuff, and that's because I do water the pot regularly. I guess the thyme in the ground must get some extra water from splashes and the moisture leaking through the drain holes in the pot, but it's just a tough plant that is doing great with hardly any help or encouragement from me.

I probably use thyme in the kitchen as often as I use parsley or basil, which is a lot. So all my regular harvesting of leaves does constitute pruning, and it certainly does make the plant bushier. Every now and then, if I haven't been cooking a lot lately, I do give the plants a very quick and crude haircut, grabbing handfuls and shearing them off with the secateurs. Into the compost it goes, and the aroma of the whole exercise is sensational.

I wish I could tell you the secret of keeping thyme thriving and lush, but I think that would mean that somehow I can take some of the credit for the fact that this little herb just loves almost everything about this backyard, but I suspect that least of all, it's me.

Splashing out on herbs

It's amazing what a difference a pot can make to a plant's personality. In the case of my traditional 'Mediterranean' herbs such as rosemary, thyme, oregano and bay leaf, they have turned out to be very different plants to care for, compared to how they grow in ordinary garden soil. Yes, of course they need more maintenance in a pot, but I am surprised how thirsty they are. They all love a drink (well, at least in springtime they do).

Let's put this discovery another way. Since I have started watering these potted herbs a lot more often than I ever did in previous years, they are much happier. And yes, I am slow on the uptake sometimes. (Just ask Pam!) 

Much happier now that it is being watered
every morning, the rosemary is lush, deep
green and very fragrant to be around.

As I water the rosemary now, I can smell its 
sharp scent wafting around in the air.

Same goes for my potted bay tree. More water
this season has produced more growth, and
much nicer looking foliage. 

The thyme is flowering its head off at the moment. It needs the
most clipping to stay bushy, plus, you guessed it, water.

I've already done a blog posting recently on this potted oregano
patch, but it needs lots of watering as well.

Though hardly classic Mediterranean herbs,
the two pots of mint (common mint in the
foreground and basil mint behind) lap up the
water like a pair of thirsty hounds. 

When I grew rosemary, oregano and thyme in the ground I never watered them. Sydney's relatively abundant rainfall took care of all their needs for many years. And so I always thought of them as almost drought-proof and definitely not thirsty. I knew that transferring them to a pot would mean I'd have to water them more often, but I have, until now, underestimated how much water they need.

And so, Aussie gardeners, if your potted Mediterranean herbs aren't looking too terrific this spring, think about giving them more water more often. It might be what they desperately need. 

I'm not sure what they want once summer comes around, but my new hunch is that it will be more water than I gave them last summer...

Just the right amount of oregano

If you like growing herbs, as I most definitely do, I'm sure you will have encountered the minor problem of having too much of a good thing on your hands. That's especially true if all your herbs are growing in the ground, rather than in pots.

When I had my oregano, thyme, sage and rosemary plants growing in the ground, I had far too much oregano, thyme, sage and rosemary, up to 100 times more of each herb than I could ever sensibly use in the kitchen. The benefits, however, were that these herbs were lovely garden citizens. They flowered their heads off, they sent up delicious scents as you brushed past them, and they really didn't need much help from me at all. And they flavoured hundreds and hundreds of delicious meals as well.

But they did take up a lot of space, and in my tiny garden I decided a few years ago that I'd grow all these herbs in pots, and it has proved to be a good move. The same herbs are all still happily here and enjoying the spring sunshine. The oregano in particular looks a treat at the moment. It's just the right amount, one pot-full.

What a pleasing mound of green it is in this wide, shallow pot.

The only thing it's not doing this spring is flowering, and that's
because my oregano plant pays a visit to the barber's shop
four or five times a year, and that clumsy barber called Jamie
cuts off all the flower buds in late winter.

This is what its flowers look like, little pink clusters which pop
up on stalks in late winter and early spring. I took this photo
a few years ago when our oregano was growing in the ground,
spreading like mad and flowering its head off. Back then I
had far too much oregano but it was a delight to have around.

This is another "from the archives" shot of the oregano trying
 to take over the succulent patch, back in its in-ground days.

If you read my most recent posting on sage, I recommended it as a garden plant, and I can easily do the same for oregano. It makes a good, easy-care ground cover provided it's in the sunshine most of the day, and the soil doesn't suffer from sogginess. It'll eventually misbehave, like the stuff pictured above, and will take over neighbouring beds if allowed. However cutting it back isn't an especially tough chore, nor is it needed more than once or twice a year at worst.

In fact, one of my early successes as a "learner gardener" many years ago was the way I slowly "marched" a patch of in-ground oregano from one spot in the garden to another spot a metre or two further away. All I did was cut off the left-hand side of the oregano patch regularly, but I let the right-hand side keep on spreading. After about 12 months the whole patch had "moved" to its new spot. I felt like I was getting there as a gardener with that little selective pruning ploy!

So if you're looking for a ground cover, oregano might do the trick. It's easy to find seedlings in garden centres, but you can also buy seed. In fact my potted oregano patch is seed-grown. I think that's part of the reason it's so lush. There's probably half a dozen plants in that one little pot, and that's a lot of youthful, pent-up energy in there.

Gone potty over herbs

After my previous blog posting on the new 'Herbs & Spices' book by Don Burke, as well as my own potted herb garden, one of my regular and most thoughtful commenters, Shivangni Sharma, got in touch with me via email (as she usually does) to ask: "Why did you pot up the herbs? I keep lamenting that I don't have ground to plant them! Is it a blessing to be forced to grow in pots?"

It was perfect timing by Shivangni, as that topic was something I was thinking of discussing in my last posting, but as that post was becoming over-long (as usual) I decided to write something next time.

No, it's not a blessing to be forced to grow herbs in pots, Shivangni. The simple reason I have moved my herbs from being planted in the ground, to pots, is lack of space. My in-ground herb plants were so big and vigorous that they were taking up too much space. I wanted to grow more different plants, especially succulents – and Pammy wanted more flowers – and so with our little garden just 9 metres long and 7 metres wide, the beautiful, fragrant herbs were taking up just a bit too much space. Grown in pots, they still provide more than enough flavour in the kitchen, but they let me grow more succulents, and Pam can have more lavenders, tibouchinas, gardenias and other flowers.

The in-ground herbs are beautiful plants, and if I had a bigger garden that's where I'd always grow every one of them - in the ground. But before I say goodbye to my in-ground herbs for a while at least, just one last look back over the shoulder at them...

Here's a perfectly good reason to grow herbs in the ground.
This photo of my former sage plant (now in a pot) is still one
of my favourites. But herein lies the problem. This is enough
sage for a hundred cooks' needs. It's over one metre wide.

I went mad over curly parsley borders. I filled up the blank
space in the middle with lettuce, silver beet and marigolds,
but my real mission here was a curly parsley border.

The thyme became a marvellous monster.
Only the left third of this plant is growing
in soil; the right-side two-thirds of it is
loving the hot life on the pavers. It thinks
it's in the Mediterranean, with its roots in
a patch of dry, crumbly hillside and the
rest of the plant behaving like a sunbathing
tourist, stretching out and sunning itself
on the rocks. Happy days.

Summer's a lovely time for herbs here, such as this combo
of basil behind a curly parsley border, shallots to the left and
a wall of blue-flowering sage in the background.

So, Shivangni, I have made life a bit harder for myself by growing herbs in pots. They are a lot more work in pots, so much easier in the ground. But my garden is small and so the workload is only relatively greater. The space created by removing the sage and the thyme has made my new succulent garden possible, and Pam has more lavender and tibouchina to enjoy. And we still have enough herbs to cook with.

There's only a few tricks to growing herbs in pots. The main one is the same one for growing herbs in the ground. Constant trimming to keep them bushy is the main game. Don't think of yourself as your herbs' gardener. Think of yourself as their barber. Trim herbs whether you need them for cooking or not. All herbs benefit from regular trims.

The second trick is pot feet under pots. Good soil drainage is vital to keep most herbs happy (with the exception of that cunning swamp fox, mint).

I was almost going to write that the third trick is sunshine, but there's enough exceptions to repeal it as a rule. For example, mint likes semi shade, chervil is the same. While parsley loves sunshine it copes remarkably well with only partial sunshine, so too oregano, and tarragon is a bit of a wilter in the hot afternoon sunshine, so giving it some respite from the strongest Aussie sunbeams is a good thing for it. 

Most of the other popular herbs can be called sun-lovers, and if yours are not getting enough sunshine and they're not doing well in your garden, that's the problem!

Finally, if you missed my previous posting on my current gaggle of potted herbs, which prompted Shivangni's question, it's here. That posting was also a thinly disguised plug for this book, pictured below, which I helped to produce, and which is on sale now. It has so much info about herbs and spices, I'll understand if you'll never have to read my blog postings on herbs again! Actually, I won't understand! It's just the kind of nonsense that salespeople say that they don't really mean. But they say it anyway.

Spicing up the herb garden

I've been waiting for a chance to do an update on my herb garden, as it has changed a lot in the last year. The big change is that almost everything is growing in pots now, instead of in the ground. Now is the perfect time for the update for two very good reasons. The first is that it's spring, so everything is growing well and looks nice for photos. 

The second reason is that a new book on herbs and spices, by Don Burke, is going on sale next week, and as I worked behind the scenes helping Don to put the book together, I want to tell you all about it. Pictured below is the book cover, but I'll tell you all about it at the end of this blog post. Before my not-very-amateur burst of rampant commercialism, it's onto my potted herb garden show-and tell.

French tarragon is happy as larry in its new, wider pot,
replanted there during midwinter when it was just a bunch
of snoozing bare roots and runners. It has such a nice
mildly aniseedy flavour that is heaven with chicken, or eggs.

Oregano, grown from seed just on a whim, looking lovely
right now. It was looking straggly about six weeks ago, so
I cut it back all over and now it's at its finest. That's the big
secret with herbs in general, but potted herbs in particular:
cut them back often, a light cut once a month works wonders.

Chives in front, lemon thyme left and sage in flower, right.
The sage is from my original in-the-ground mother plant. I dug
up a section with a rootball and potted that up. It took a while to
bounce back, but it's happy now in its terracotta pot.

Another 'sprog of mum' plant, my common thyme is a roots-
and-all chunk of the former large mother plant, replanted and
doing well in a wide, shallow pot. This is one plant that I
cut back very regularly, to keep it low, dense and bushy.

The rosemary is a cutting grown from the monster size parent,
and I am cruelly trimming it to encourage dense, low growth,
as it can grow to silly sizes if you let it go unchecked. Rosemary
has such a strong flavour you never need much in any dish.

Moist mint is happy mint. I have two pots here, one with common
mint, the other with spearmint, and both need major cutbacks
about three or four times a year. I cut the whole plants down
to pot-rim level, back to just stumps, then give it a good feed.
I love the look of the two pots when they're in their pomp.

I still have a few herbs in the ground, including this chervil,
which I didn't plant here. It turns out that chervil is so happy
here it's behaving like a weed and self-seeding all over the
place. It has a lovely, light aniseedy flavour.

Also in the ground and "on the way out" is this patch of
coriander, which is starting to go to seed as the weather
warms up. The patch has been here for a few months now,
as coriander loves our mild winters the best. That's the
time to grow it here in Sydney. If you grow it in summer,
you'll have to sow, grow and harvest three or four crops
each summer season, as it goes from leafy to seedy in
no time at all during steadily hot summer weather.

That's enough for my own personal update on the herb patch. It's time to show you Don's new book, priced at $29.95 in hardcover, which goes on sale on October 1. It's published by New Holland Publishers, is 304 pages long and has entries on virtually every useful herb and spice you can think of, plus lots that you might not have heard of. Here's the cover.

With only a few exceptions, each herb is covered in what's called a 'double-page-spread' of two open, facing pages. Pam did some of the illustrations used in the book, and my wide-ranging contribution to Don's text goes under the heading of "editorial consultant". Don loves to get down to the practical nitty-gritty of gardening, so he offers tips on how to grow each herb, best varieties, how to harvest and dry or prepare it, then how best to use it in the kitchen. He also quite frankly tells you whether it's worthwhile trying to grow each herb or spice in the garden (as some are hopelessly impractical to grow in backyards while others are dead-easy). 

And Don loves a good debunking of myths, too. This is a no-mumbo-jumbo book! Instead of mindlessly repeating all the ancient myths about herbs and spices being good for curing ague, plague or whatever, he's gone straight to modern scientific research to find out whether each herb really is beneficial or not. (The good news is that many are very useful.) However, this is also where Don's book is full of new, fresh info that might contradict some of the very unscientific mumbo-jumbo that has been long attributed to the healing powers of various herbs and spices. Some traditional 'medicinal' herbs are actually unsafe for human consumption, and several are simply useless. While researching this subject area I was struck by how many herb experts writing their books had unquestioningly just repeated the traditional folk myths about the medicinal benefits of herbs and spices. So I say good on you Don for turning to science for your evidence in this area. I learned a lot at this stage of the project.

And did I tell you it's full of delicious recipes and gorgeous colour photos? And if you like to brew interesting cups of tea we've got the tea brewing recipes for you too.

OK, so I am a bit biased, but it's a new kind of herb and spice book, a deliciously practical one. A few enjoyable months of my working life went into helping Don research and prepare the text for this book, and I am very pleased with how it has turned out. Go check it out if you can. 

I've noticed that while it doesn't 'officially' go on sale until October 1, it's already up and available for pre-order on websites such as Amazon, the ABC Shop site here in Australia, and numerous other book sellers' websites. Just search for 'Herbs & Spices' by Don Burke and you'll find it.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

We're having lunch with some friends today and Pam had a lovely idea for a little gift for our hostess, the charming and beautiful Zora: a posy of poppies, plus a bunch of fresh herbs from the garden – parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And as two of these classic herbs are in bloom now, and the other two just powering along as usual, it's time I celebrated these worthy runners-up in this year's Herb of the Year awards.

The sage is in full bloom now and looking better than ever (click on the photo to make it look bigger). And I mean 'better than ever'. It seems to me that each year this herb is liking its sunny home more and more. In previous years after it finishes flowering it has always looked exhausted, and so I cut it back, and it bounces back. But the year it's just looking great in leaf and the flower show seems better than ever. I can take no credit for this improvement, either. I never feed it and never water it. Whatever falls from the sky waters it, and whatever fertiliser run-off which flows down from nearby plants is all the food it gets.

While I was griping recently about holes in my parsley borders, other sections of the border are belting along in the spring warmth. This looks a bit scrappy just because I keep on cutting off handfuls to use in the kitchen. And it looks a bit dense and lush because I keep on cutting off handfuls to use in the kitchen (get my drift?).

Stately rosemary rises high and has just finished flowering, but apart from that it's looking and smelling wonderful.

I was just lucky, I guess, but the plant I bought at the nursery about 10 years ago is an oily one. You can feel the oil in your hands as you harvest some more, and the scent given off by this rich rosemary oil is heaven. The only trick is never to use too much of it in cooking – it's powerful stuff!

The thyme is in full bloom this morning as well. Fortunately there are some little sections here and there where I can harvest just the leaves for Pam's posy, but most of it is in bloom, and as I've mentioned a few times before here, most of the plant is sitting on top of the pavers, not on top of soil. I guess my pavers are a pretty good substitute for the rocky boulders on sunny Mediterranean hillsides where thyme likes to grow in the wild.

I have virtually given up trying to photograph thyme flowers. They are so tiny that they always look like clouds, rather than flowers. I guess that isn't so bad, as they do look like clouds of colour when you're standing next to them. They have a pinky tinge, but I'm not sure if they have a scent, as the scent of the thyme leaves is what intoxicates you as soon as you come close.

So we're looking forward to this lunch with Zora and her partner Sean. They don't live far away, and so we're catching the bus to see them. If you're on the 423 from Marrickville into Newtown this afternoon and see two passengers cradling bunches of poppies and fragrant herbs, don't worry, it's just a mad old gardener and his gorgeous wife on their way to a lovely barbecue in the spring sunshine.

Herbal tonics

A few weeks ago I decided that some of my herbs were looking a bit tatty in one way or another, and so I took to them with my favourite herbal tonic: my trusty secateurs. With February's rain and warmth, all of them have bounced back very nicely, and so I thought it's time for a little herbal show and tell.

The big surprise is how happy my sage plant is. This Mediterranean herb ought to cark it during a month of torrential rain and humidity, but after I cut off all the daggy, saggy, wilty bits in late January it has thrived. This is one herb I never water, never feed. All I do is cut it back occasionally. It gets a savage cut-back at the beginning of spring each year, and then I simply cut off anything crappy looking whenever I notice it at other times of year.

Mint is the opposite to sage, in that I'm always watering and feeding the thing. But I do also cut it all back down to the pot-rim level every few months, when it gets leggy and scrappy. This morning, it's really getting going again.

The French tarragon was in dire trouble, as the clump had grown so dense that it formed a tight ball in the pot. There was moss forming on the soil surface, so bad was the drainage. And so I unpotted it, cut off the bottom half of the rootball with my pruning saw, then pulled the remaining clump apart to make several plants (tarragon forms runners, so each 'plant' is actually a set of runners). Then, into fresh potting mix, I created two new pots of bare stems and roots. Later on, I fed them with a high-nitrogen liquid food as soon as the first green shoots appeared (which didn't take long at all, just a week or so).

Here's the other pot, doing equally well. I love the slightly aniseedy flavour of tarragon, which goes especially well with either egg dishes or chicken. It's nice to have a good, healthy supply once more. These plants will die down slightly over winter, but they'll bounce back once spring arrives. I'm not sure how old my tarragon plants are, but they've been here for a long time and with this rejuvenation they'll last for many years more.

The only tonic my thyme plant needs is an occasional trim with hedge shears. Just cutting off an inch or two all over creates a new flush of growth. Like the sage, the thyme never gets watered or fed. Our plentiful natural rainfall is all it needs.

I know I often bang on about herbs here in this blog, and that's because I'm a keen cook. And when I cook, I use herbs almost every time, most of the time my own home-grown herbs. And in my small garden herbs are one of the best ways to use precious space. By comparison, vegies are just a bit of fun on the side. I could never hope to grow all the vegies I need, but I do come quite close to growing all the herbs I need.

Thyme for tiny flowers

Much better, Lord: 38mm of rain overnight, the first decent fall in ages. While my poppies have temporarily shut up shop and are sensibly refusing to open to the inevitable, soggy pummelling they'd get in the next downpour, my thyme is welcoming the rains with wide-open blooms. This little herb is thriving in the spring rain and has gone into full flower this wet weekend.

Pink and tiny, thyme flowers cover the plant at the moment. If the flowers have any scent, you can't notice it, as the leaves dominate your nostrils with their savoury aroma.

I plucked one flower off the bush and measured it. 5mm from wingtip to wingtip, and 6mm from head to tail. In the old money, that's about 3/16th of an inch either way. Tiny.

Here's the motherlode plant this morning, in the rain. This is such a healthy thing, and the reason for this is that I never feed it and never water it, but I do pick the leaves often for cooking, and occasionally give it a haircut whenever it looks a bit shaggy anywhere, just to keep the growth dense. Though it's planted on the path edge, in the garden bed, most of the plant actually grows atop the paving. Planting it there has proved to be a very successful accident indeed. Give thyme a 'rock' to cover, as it probably does on those rocky Mediterranean hillsides where it thrives in the wild, and half your thyme-growing problems are over.

A while ago I blogged about striking cuttings of thyme, and these are the two little pots of thyme that I grew from cuttings earlier this year, also in bloom at the moment.

To finish off this little homage to thyme, I thought it might be useful to share one little tip about harvesting this herb for use in the kitchen, something I do every week of the year...

Pictured above are two stems of thyme. The top one is some new growth, with its distinctively light green stems. The lower one is some old growth, with darker stems and relatively more leaves. When I picking thyme I always go for the darker, older growth.

Here's why. The easiest way to get thyme leaves off the plant is to 'zip' them off by running the stems between your pinched fingers. I find that the dark old stems are nice and strong and never break while I'm pinching off the leaves. The light green new stems are much more delicate and almost always break, even under the gentle pressure of pinching fingers. Harvesting leaves from them can be a frustrating chore, and you end up resorting to just picking off the leaves, one by one. Boring!

Right now it's hard to find a good supply of dark stems, as the plants are just covered in new growth, as well as blooms. But after the flower show ends, and for most of the year, there's a mixture of dark, older stems and lighter, new growth available for picking. That's when I choose the older stems. I can't find any difference in flavour between older and younger leaves. They're both wonderful, easily one of my favourite herbs for use in all sorts of dishes.