Cultivating Herbs in the Great Indoors

Fresh herbs make food taste great, but they can be inconvenient to use, coated with pesticides, expensive, and less than fresh when bought at the grocery store. However, there’s no need to compromise the taste of your food. You can easily grow herbs on your windowsill year-round that will be fresher than anything commercially available and they’ll save you time and money too. All you need is a bit of space near a window and some potting mix and you’re on your way to a thriving indoor herb garden.

Getting Started

Before you start planting decide what types of herbs you want grow. Basil, chives, parsley, mint, cilantro, sage, lavender, and thyme all grow well indoors, take up very little space, and require little care. Herbs grow best when they’re harvested regularly so stick with herbs you’ll use.

Once you’ve settled on a selection of your favorite herbs, head over to your local nursery and pick up the plants you need. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous and patient, you can buy and plant seeds instead. The process is the same, but it will be a few months before you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

A gardening or hardware store is your best bet for the rest of your supplies. Pick up containers for your plants, potting mix, and fertilizer. Single plant containers will need to be at least six inches deep and six inches wide, and they need to have drainage holes. The myriad of choices in potting mix can be overwhelming, but your best option is a soil-less potting mix—it eliminates soil-borne plant diseases and is less messy to work with indoors. You will need some sort of fertilizer as well (plants need to eat too!), but there are quite a few organic, not so smelly, options on the market, such as Terracycle’s Plant Growth Food.

Planting Your Herb Garden

Setting Up

1. Choose a south or southeast facing window that will give the plants five or more hours of sunlight a day.
2. Pick a planter (remember, six inches deep and six inches wide, with drainage holes).