How to Grow Herbs Indoors & Outdoors
Video transcription
Hi, I'm the aspiring gardener, and today we're going to talk about growing herbs indoors and outdoors and the thing you have to first decide is which ones do best in which conditions. Indoor herbs are very tricky because they need a lot of sunlight and some homes are perfectly suited and some are not so what you need to do is find a windowsill that get good sun, possibly on the South side of your house and see if you get at least six hours a day of sunlight. If you don't then you'll need to have a florescent light or some type of a grow light. If you do you'll still find that some of your woody herbs and Mediterranean herbs still don't necessarily like to be inside year round so what most people do is they take things like sage, oregano, rosemary, lavender and they'll grow them outdoors during the Summer or maybe start cuttings and then bring them in after they've had a really good lush growth season and then let them go through the Winter, bring them back outside for the Summer. Otherwise they tend to dwindle and kind of decline over time so what most of us end up doing is having a few extra months of herbs. We don't expect them to necessarily live inside year round. Now that's the perennial herbs. The ones that you can grow all the time are the annual herbs such as cilantro, basil, here I've got some chives. Those are perennial but they tend to be something you can also continue to recede and what you want to do with things like that, dill is another one, is that you'll be able to start them, harvest them, plant more seed. So you're planting them throughout the year. You're not getting the same plant to stay throughout the Winter. So annual herbs are definitely the easiest ones to grow in your windowsill and what most people do is just grow a pot of herbs, add seed like on a weekly basis, cilantro bolts up, you eat it, plant more seed, wait for it to grow, eat it. Don't expect it to last. The other thing to remember is that herbs need impeccable drainage. So you want to use a really good loose soil mix and one thing you might want to do is add a little bit of sand to that. That always increases the drainage. So what I'm doing here with this pot of nice fine soil. You don't want big heavy pieces of bark because a lot of times it's seeds we're starting so we want what would be suitable for starting seed but maybe we're going to add a little bit of sand. I've gotten away with just regular potting soil as well but this is always helpful. Okay, now what you want to do is you either want to start with a small pot like this for your cilantro, basil and just complete, get another pot, start it or you can start out with a larger pot like this and just continue to add seed throughout the Winter but just remember the main thing is if you don't have enough light you're not going to be able to grow herbs and you do want to have your home temperature fairly even. You can't have really cold nights and really warm days so even temperature, good light, ample moisture but good drainage. Give them a low dose of fertilizer monthly and see what you can grow.