6 reasons to stop buying supermarket herbs (and grow your own instead)

Nobody decides to spend a fortune on herbs. It just happens a pound at a time: a packet of basil for one recipe, coriander for another, parsley you'll mostly throw away. None of it feels like much, and that's exactly why it slips past you week after week.

Growing your own flips the maths. A handful of herb plants, or a packet of seeds, costs about the same as a couple of weeks of supermarket packets, and then they just keep producing. I won't put a fake number on your savings, but anyone who's made the switch will tell you the herb aisle stops being a line on the shop.

You know the fridge drawer. The half-bag of dill gone slimy, the basil that turned black overnight. Cut herbs are already dying when you buy them, so you're racing the clock from the till, and most of us lose.

A growing plant doesn't have that problem. You snip what you need and the plant carries on, cut-and-come-again, fresh every single time. Nothing wilts in the drawer because nothing's been cut until you want it.

It's a small thing, but it's every single time: the plastic sleeve, the little tray, straight in the bin within the week. If you buy herbs most weeks, that's a quiet pile of single-use plastic you never chose to create.

Grow your own and it just stops. You pick into your hand, not out of a packet. No sleeve, no tray, nothing to throw away.

There's a reason chefs grow their own. A herb picked a minute ago and one that's spent a week in transit and a chiller are not the same ingredient. The oils that carry the flavour fade fast once it's cut, so by the time a packet reaches your kitchen, a lot of what you're paying for has already gone.

Pick it yourself and you get the full thing: basil that actually smells of basil, mint that bites, parsley with some life in it. It's the cheapest upgrade your cooking will ever get.

Half the reason herbs get bought in packets is panic: the recipe says fresh, you've got none, so it goes on the list. Then you over-buy to be safe, and the cycle starts again.

A planter by the back door ends that. Thyme, rosemary, mint, chives, parsley, all a snip away when you're cooking, year-round for the hardy ones. You stop planning around herbs and just use them.

Here's the part that surprises people: herbs are genuinely hard to kill. Most want sun and the odd drink and they get on with it. The thing that trips people up isn't the herbs, it's the container, drainage, rot, wondering whether the wood's safe to grow food in.

That's the bit the Sussex takes off your hands. It's the right depth for herbs and salads, comes lined and drained so the roots don't drown, and it's treated with Timbac, our own non-toxic, water-and-wax treatment, safe around anything you'll eat. It arrives fully assembled and raised off the wet, so you lift it out of the box, fill it, and plant a row of herbs. That's the whole job.