If you enjoy cooking as much as the next guy, then you probably also love the idea of having fresh herbs to cook with all year round. But how does one do it? The best answer to this plight is an indoor herb garden. Here’s how you can keep it during winter.
Find the Best Indoor Location
The first thing you need to do is find the best location indoors to place your pots. If you want them to grow big and healthy, you must put them somewhere very sunny. Seeing as most herbs need at least four hours of direct sunlight every day, the best place would be right next to a window.
Check on Drainage
Next, you will have to make sure the spot you’ve chosen has good drainage. You might want to put them on a table top or a windowsill, but these pieces of furniture can get damaged really quickly. Herbs will let out a lot of the water you pour into them which will then spill all over your nice furniture.
Don’t adjust the indoor temperatures too much. Most herbs are typically very happy with a standard inside temperature. Think about it this way. If you’re satisfied with the degrees in your house, so will the herbs. However, make sure they don’t actually touch any of the windows. In this way, you will protect them from extra moisture and frost.
Tip – all these rules apply to most herbs, with the exception of basil. Apart from spilling sunlight in your indoor herb garden, basil also needs a lot of warmth. Therefore, during the winter, it will not be happy with the cold generated by the window itself.
Give the Herbs Space
The last thing you need to do is give them as much space as you can. If you’re planting them in ceramic pots, keep the ratio as follows: one herb per plant. You must also plant only a few seeds
in each pot. Remember that the roots need rooms to stretch at will within the soil inside the pot and that the branches need to spread out. This idea brings us to the following tip about harvesting.
Tip – when it’s time to harvest the aromatic plants in your indoor herb garden, clip a maximum of one-third of all the leaves and branches. If you cut them at the adjoining spot between two branches, they will grow back faster.
An indoor herb garden will utterly transform your cooking, so it is a good idea to give it a try. Even if the plants themselves will be a bit spindlier than usual because you are growing them inside, they will still be chock full of taste and flavor.
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