Growing Herbs in Containers

Herbs are the easiest thing to grow in pots, and a few near the kitchen door earn their keep all summer. The only real trick is a simple one: group herbs by how much they like to drink, and keep the bully — mint — in its own container. Get that right and you can grow most of the herbs a UK kitchen needs on a patio, a balcony or a windowsill.

Why herbs love pots

Most culinary herbs are small, shallow-rooted and undemanding, which makes them perfect for containers. A pot also lets you give each herb exactly what it wants — sharp drainage for the Mediterranean ones, richer moisture-holding compost for the leafy ones — without redesigning a whole bed.

Pots are portable too. You can move tender basil to the warmest, sunniest spot, shuffle pots out of a cold June wind, or stand the whole lot by the back door so you actually use them. And if a herb sulks, you just deal with one pot rather than a patch.

Group by watering needs

This is the single most useful idea in this guide. Herbs split neatly into two camps, and they don't make good flatmates.

Thirsty, leafy herbs want moisture-retentive compost and regular watering:

• Basil
• Parsley
• Coriander
• Chives
• Mint (in its own pot — see below)

Drought-loving Mediterranean herbs want gritty, free-draining compost and prefer to dry out between waterings:

• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage
• Oregano

Plant a thirsty herb and a Mediterranean herb in the same pot and one of them is always unhappy: keep the soil damp for the parsley and the rosemary rots; let it dry for the thyme and the coriander bolts. Put each camp in its own container — or at least pot up all the dry-lovers together and all the thirsty ones together — and watering becomes a single simple decision per pot. This is just good container growing practice generally.

Keep mint contained

Mint is wonderful and almost impossible to kill — which is exactly the problem. Its roots run sideways and will swamp anything sharing a pot or, given an open bed, take over the border within a season or two.

So never plant mint loose with other herbs. Give it a pot of its own, water it freely (it's firmly in the thirsty camp), and stand that pot on a hard surface rather than on soil so it can't escape through the drainage holes. One 20–25cm pot keeps a household in mint all summer, and you can split it every spring when it gets congested.

A kitchen window box

If you've no garden at all, a single window box by the kitchen is a proper little herb garden. A 60cm box on a bright, ideally south- or west-facing sill will hold three or four everyday herbs — and there's more on a windowsill setup if that's your only spot.

A reliable, hard-working combination for cooking:

• Basil — sown or bought as a plant in late spring, the classic partner for tomatoes and pasta. It's the most tender of the lot, so keep it indoors until the nights warm up.
• Parsley — slow but generous, crops for months.
• Chives — neat, perennial, snip-and-come-again.

Keep mint and the dry-loving herbs out of this leafy box — give them separate pots. Because window boxes are shallow, they dry out fast in summer, so check yours daily in warm weather and pick little and often to keep growth coming.

Compost, drainage and feeding

Every herb pot needs drainage holes — without them roots sit in water and rot, which is the commonest way to kill a potted herb. Stand pots on feet or a couple of stones so water runs away freely.

For the thirsty, leafy herbs, use a good peat-free multipurpose compost; it holds moisture well. For the Mediterranean herbs, lighten that compost with a generous handful of horticultural grit or perlite per pot — they hate sitting wet far more than they mind being dry.

Herbs aren't greedy, so go gentle on feeding. A liquid feed every couple of weeks through summer keeps the leafy herbs cropping, while the Mediterranean ones are happy on very little — overfeed them and you get soft, flavourless growth. Pinch out flowering shoots on basil and the like to keep the leaves coming, and harvest regularly: with herbs, picking is the best maintenance there is.

Once you've got the watering groups sorted, herbs are about the lowest-effort crop you can grow. For the wider principles — pot sizes, compost and watering across all your crops — head back to the container growing guide.