You buy healthy-looking herbs in pots at the garden centre - and probably never enough. You determine to move the new purchases from the turfy potting soil into a bed or a bigger pot with good soil. You forget, and the next morning there is a trail of the snail and not so much of the herb. You learn. Now you may need, or anyway desire, a huge variety, though some prefer to stick to half-a-dozen favourites, but how to get enough of the one you use the most often and how to guarantee a continuous supply through the winter? Many herbs do very well on this basis - chives for example, winter savory in the open - but one friend takes special care for his family's favourite which is chervil, and gets pleasing results.
For example, he has just a few weeks ago cut the last of his chervil sowing of the April or May 1999 - leaving it late. For his new crop should have been put in two months ago. Anyway, his plan is this. He uses a wooden frame about three feet by three feet, with, of course, a slanting glass top (which is well out of shade and faces westward). Now the remarkable thing about this was that he gathered his crop of chervil every fortnight throughout the winter and a full crop it was. A lot is in the preparation. First, the old soil is dug out and then a thick layer of newspaper is laid down. The newspaper is a precaution, chiefly, against convolvulus or bindweed, which is all around. It should be said here that chervil in the open may well survive in the winter, but not in the richness and abundance it reaches in the frame.
To have the crop coming on all the time, you cut the plants down to base and, if you are to keep using the herb until the next cutting in a fortnight, may well hold some of it in the freezer. This year's harvest was the richest yet. The quality of the soil matters most of course, so into the frame on top of the thick layer of newspaper or newspapers, go two bags of John Innes number 3. A bit excessive? Well, a big bagful of the most flavoursome chervil you've ever had makes it worthwhile. What do you do with chervil? Well, a salad of it alone is wonderful, but most people mix it with other greens. And all the time you have your other wintering herbs.
Mrs Beeton has an odd little note in small print in her famous book: "Chervil (Fr. Cerfeuil). Although the roots of this plant are poisonous, its leaves are tender and are used in salads. In antiquity it made a relishing dish, when prepared with oil, wine and gravy. It is native of various parts of Europe, and the species cultivated in the gardens of Paris has beautiful frizzled leaves."