Container Garden
Nothing will brighten up your windowsill or your meals more than fresh herbs grown by you!
Selecting Plants
- Start with healthy plants like Viva! Herbs, available exclusively at The Home Depot.
- Let the kids select the herbs they want to grow. Suggest a theme, such as culinary, aromatic, health and beauty, pet or tea herbs.
- It's okay to plant several herbs in one container, but try to match their water needs. Softer, herbaceous annuals like Parsley, Basil, Dill prefer soil kept evenly moist, while the woody perennials like Lavender, Rosemary, Echinacea are drought tolerant. You can let their soil dry out a bit between waterings.
- To promote more growth you can tansplant from the 4" pot your herbs came in to something that provides from 6" to 12" of soil depth. Be sure to save the care tags.
- Any kind of container is fine as long as it has adequate drainage holes in the bottom. Look around the house for clever container ideas like an old work boot, a cookie jar, or a metal pail. Use a rotary tool or a hammer and nail to punch drainage holes.
- Cover the holes with a scrap of window screen or a broken piece of pottery to keep dirt from falling out.
- Put in a layer of Styrofoam peanuts to promote good drainage.
- Using a good quality potting mix, fill your container to within a few inches of the top.
- Remove your herbs from their 4" containers by turning them upside down and tapping gently on the bottom to avoid breaking off tender stems.
- With your hand dig a hole in the potting mix and holding your herbs by the root ball, gently arrange them (tallest plants toward the back or in the middle) in your container. Back-fill with potting mix and gently tap the soil down with your fingers. You'll want to leave about an inch of space from the top of your container to allow for easy watering.
- Water so that the soil is evenly moist but not soggy.
- Now place your container in a sunny spot. Most herbs need at least 6 hours of full sun a day. To avoid leaf-burn, be careful not to let the leaves of any plant touch a window pane.
- Most annual (herbaceous) types won't require fertilizer. Woody perennials may need a light feeding every six months or so.
- Prolong the life of annuals by pinching back flower spikes as soon as they appear.
