Sanguisorba minor organic seeds - Salad burnett

Organic Salad Burnet seeds, Sanguisorba minor in Latin, will introduce a characterful aromatic and culinary perennial to the garden, as lovely as it is tasty. It offers light, finely cut foliage and quite an original flowering. The young leaves, with a slight cucumber flavour, delicately perfume salads, herb sauces or refreshing drinks. Very hardy, drought-resistant and undemanding, this little plant finds a place in the vegetable patch, naturalistic borders and dry gardens. Sow it in March and April. Harvest from June to August.

Salad Burnet is refreshing and has a recognised medicinal use. Used externally for cuts; internally it is anti-diarrhoeal and aids digestion. Its active principles are flavonoids, vitamin C, ursolic acid and the tannins in the root. Its flowers are also edible. Its use should be supervised by a professional and is not recommended for pregnant women.

Harvesting: harvest as needed. For fresh use, choose young leaves. This cutting stimulates the plant and encourages new shoots. Cut off the inflorescences to extend the leaf harvesting period.

Storage: You can dry the leaves, but the flavour fades during storage. When they become crumbly, transfer to an airtight container. You can also preserve them in vinegar or freeze them.

The gardener's little tip: To have very tender leaves, water the burnet well.

Salad burnet belongs to the Rosaceae family. It is a herbaceous perennial, semi-evergreen in winter, which develops a deep taproot. At maturity, each plant forms a clump 30 to 40cm wide. Fine upright stems 40 to 60cm tall bearing ovoid flower heads emerge from the centre from May to August. The leaves are made up of numerous rounded and toothed leaflets, medium green on top, more glaucous on the underside. The inflorescences group together female flowers with red stigmas, and at the base, pendulous male flowers with yellow stamens. The fruits are small tetragonal achenes, contained in a hardened calyx which aids natural dispersal.
Sanguisorba minor is native to a large part of Europe, North Africa and western Asia as far as the Himalayas, where it grows in dry meadows, calcareous grassland, roadsides and sunny rockeries, often on poor, stony, very well-drained soils. Naturalised in many temperate regions, it remains non-invasive in the garden, content to self-seed here and there.
This traditional plant was cultivated from the Middle Ages for its culinary and medicinal uses and was said to feature in the King's vegetable garden at Versailles. In Germanic countries, its leaves are still used in the famous Frankfurt green sauce or certain soups.

Organic seeds or 'BIO' seeds come from plants grown using organic farming methods (without the use of phytosanitary products). They undergo no treatment after harvest. These seeds are intended for use in organic market gardening.