It’s perfectly true that you should harvest herbs at this time of year. The various phytochemicals that give them flavor, nutritional value, and maybe (who knows?) healing powers are most concentrated just before they flower, according to the extension office.

I am now imagining an old English farmer (Gaffer Gamgee, perhaps) overhearing the monks giving credit to John the Baptist for stuff that everyone knows if they’ve been paying attention. The scene is exactly the sort of thing that monks don’t write in their manuscripts for us to consult a thousand years later.