How to plant an herb container garden for patio or kitchen
Well it’s blazing hot here in Napa. It hit 100F today so it feels more like mid July or August. One thing about hot weather though - it puts me in the mood for growing herbs because they generally like a lot of sun and heat.
More importantly, it also makes me think of herb container gardens because hot weather is outdoor grilling, BBQ, and cocktail weather, and what can be better than planting pots that support our culinary and cocktail habits? After all, any self-respecting back yard chef and mixologist would recommend using fresh herbs as key ingredients, right?
Besides being fun and beautiful, growing your own herbs makes economic sense. Even if they don’t grow as well inside for example, small herbs in a 3” pot usually cost roughly the same as buying the herb from the grocery store, but the cut herbs will last a week tops and need to be tossed.
So let’s get to it. I thought it would be fun to go through some planter ideas as well as a step by step process for putting together a winning herb pot combo that’s both delicious and ornamental.
If you’re new to container gardening, rest assured with a little effort (not much!) you’ll get great results. Container gardening is fun! You’ll enjoy watching your plants grow, and it’s so satisfying having fresh picked herbs any time to add to your favorite dishes and drinks.
Sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary and garlic with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. All can be easily grown in pots on your patio or in the kitchen. Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
Planters
First on the list is to select a suitable container. Whether you plan on planting a single herb in a pot or several, proportion is important both visually and for water retention purposes.
Choose a pot that’s large enough to hold a number of small herbs (or a single plant) but isn’t so big it looks disproportionately large for the height of the tallest plant.
It helps to try and visualize how large they will become - usually the tag provides their mature size.
One thing to keep in mind about containers when choosing is that they dry out quickly, especially when exposed to a lot of direct sun, and sun makes herbs happy. Most prefer at least 4 hours direct sun per day. So understand that a tall narrow container will dry out faster than a short wide one of the same volume. (Read here for more on container sizes and water retention.) Your pots will likely need to be watered close to every day in a hot dry climate, less if you have summer rain.
Since they dry out quickly, it may seem logical to use a pot with no drainage holes. Don’t try this though - herbs (like almost all most plants) do much better with drainage.
Soil
Choose a general all-purpose, bagged planting medium. It’s unlikely you’ll need to add extra perlite, sand, or other amendment to it to lighten it up. If it’s a good container planting mix, it should be light enough already. Pots dry out quickly as it is, and most herbs need a regular supply of available water, especially when grown in a planter rather than in the ground.
Do not add gravel or rocks to the bottom to “promote drainage.” This is a myth still misunderstood by many so-called experts (I saw it stated in two different articles/posts in one day last week without looking for it.) I’ll have a post explaining exactly why it hurts rather than helps drainage coming soon.
You can place a piece of mesh over the drainage hole or a curved piece of a broken pot over the drainage hole to help keep it from getting clogged by soil and roots if you want.
Keep a few curved pieces of broken pots for covering drain holes to help prevent roots from blocking them. Do not add gravel or rocks to the bottom for drainage, just use the same potting soil throughout.
Light - outside and in
Most herbs like at least 4 hours of sun per day; 5 to 6 hours is ideal. They will be happiest outside for this reason, but don’t let that deter you from trying herbs indoors as well. I grow them in my kitchen next to a bright window. Rotate the container periodically to promote even growth on all sides.
Experiment with different kinds of herbs and see which ones do well inside for you.
The woodier types like rosemary and lavender will want the most sunlight and the least water. They will likely protest about being inside after a while unless it’s in a really bright, hot spot.
Leafier types like basil and mint will do better indoors. My kitchen is never without a trusty Trader Joe’s basil in a pot and I keep parsley, mint, and others inside too from time to time.
Even if you don’t have a sunny window for them, I say go for it anyway and just understand they will get kind of leggy eventually and need to be replaced more frequently. It’s still less expensive than buying cut herbs from the grocery store and much more convenient to have them at your fingertips rather than needing to pick them up at the market.
Water
My method for judging when to water potted plants is almost always by lifting the container (or at least one side of it) and assessing its weight. To me, this is much more accurate than touching the soil. Maybe it’s just my digits, but I can’t tell very well how dry the soil is by feeling it. If you can’t lift your container easily though, then this is probably the next best way.
When you become really attuned to your plants, some leafy types will show what I think of as “pre-wilt” which is when their soil is really dry but the plant hasn’t actually started wilting yet. The foliage and stems look just slightly lowered is the best way I can describe it (droopy is too strong a word) without being actually wilted. If you start keeping a basil in the kitchen, you might observe this if you forgot to water, and then you know it’s time to swoop in with the watering can.
Fertilizer
I don’t give non-woody herbs fertilizer. If your soil comes with fertilizer in it, then great. If not, I wouldn’t sweat it.
The life cycle for many herbs is short - basically a season whether indoors or out. Basil, parsley, and cilantro are types that bloom, set seed, and then die. Their life cycles are completed quickly and range from about 45 days to 4 months depending on species and conditions.
Woody or semi-woody types like rosemary, sage, and lavender will live for years, so you can fertilize them if you want to keep them long term and encourage growth and flowering.
Others like mint, thyme, and oregano grow by runners and keep spreading indefinitely. Again, minimal fertilizer is needed.
I think mint would give cockroaches a run for their money in surviving a nuclear holocaust. Mint can be very aggressive and unless you don’t mind it running rampant, (or you make a whole lotta mojitos) it’s advisable to keep it contained in a separate pot so it doesn’t out-compete the rest of the plants.
General herb plant care
Chances are your herbs won’t get too leggy because you’ll be consistently pinching or snipping them to harvest for your cocktail or dish du jour. Trim off dead leaves and pinch/prune lightly as needed though.
If they’re outside, give them a shower to cool foliage on hot days and to help blast pests and dust off in addition to watering the soil.
If inside, you can do the same under the sink (or even in the shower - been there, done that many a time).
Designing your potted herb garden
Now that we have our container know-how taken care of, it’s time for the fun part - putting together your herb planter.
As I mentioned briefly above, you can go about this a couple ways.
You can opt to have a single plant in a pot. This generally works best with the woodier types like rosemary or lavender. They’re bigger than many other herbs, work well as “stand alones” and can last indefinitely. Rosemary can be pruned into a topiary too.
You can mix herbs together for a varied and lively look.
If doing multiple pots for a container garden, combining both of these types creates a pretty vignette.
Tip: stick to odd numbers unless you’re going for symmetry and flanking a doorway for instance.
Herb container planting - thriller, filler, spiller
When using multiple plants, I often go with the “Thriller, Filler, Spiller” method for designing containers.
Thriller plants are the biggest/tallest plant - they have an upright habit and are the focal point of the pot. This could be a sage, lavender, or rosemary, or heck, get wild and crazy and plant a tomato as a Thriller.
Filler plants surround the thriller plant.
Spiller plants have a trailing habit and cascade attractively down the sides of the container.
Step by step for thriller, filler, spiller container planting:
First group your plants together and decide how you want to arrange them in the pot. You may want to place the Thriller in the middle surrounded by the Fillers. The Spillers go on the outside angled a bit outward.
Fill the bottom of the container with enough soil so you can place your Thriller even with the top of the pot (the soil will settle when watered).
Be sure to rough up the roots when you remove a plant from its store container. This encourages the plant to “branch out” in the pot and not keep growing roots in the same shape as the container it came in.
Add more soil until you have the soil at the level you need to place your Filler plants (assuming they’re in a smaller, shorter container than the Thriller) and finally place the Spiller plants angled outward toward the edge of the pot.
Don’t forget to rough up the roots!
Press the plants firmly into the soil so they’re secure. Don’t worry about squishing them up against each other either. This isn’t a “forever” pot - they will grow just fine.
Add a little more soil to the container so no roots are exposed
Water the pot thoroughly until it’s running out of the bottom. Watering-in will reveal any spots missing soil, so add any needed extra potting mix and re-water.
Roughly plan which plants will go where in the pot.
Put enough soil in the pot until your largest plant is even with the top. Add more soil until the smaller plants are at the same level.
Press the plants firmly into the soil so they’re secure. Don’t mind if they’re right up next to each other.
Herb container all potted up and watered in from left - tricolor sage, lemon balm, jalapeno pepper (tallest plant), purple basil (hidden in back right) and nasturtium. It may look underwhelming at first, but once your plants get over transplant shock, they will fill in quickly, smell and taste great.
Groupings and display
You can mix a few different pots together - again I recommend odd numbers - 3 generally looks better than 4 together.
Caveat - if you’re going for symmetry then that’s different - two large containers flanking a doorway for example.
If mixing a few pots for an herb vignette, 1 or 2 of the pots could have multiple herbs planted together and 1 or more could also have a larger “stand alone” plant like a rosemary.
Herb recommendations
Some perennial favorites:
Basil, mint, thyme, rosemary, sage, parsley, cilantro, chives, oregano, lavender
Some that may be new to try:
Dill, lemongrass (trying it this year for the first time!) purple or Thai basil, Greek oregano
Some that aren’t strictly herbs (what exactly is the definition of an herb anyway? :)
Nasturtiums - beautiful flowers and disk-shaped foliage and both are edible (if you’re a Pilea peperomioides houseplant fan, you’ll love Nasturtium). They come in both bushy types (Fillers) and trailing/climbing types that make beautiful Spillers.
Jalapeno, serrano or other small peppers - great in salsas, spicy cocktails, pickled or grilled.
Trailing nasturtiums make beautiful “Thriller” plants in containers. Image by Ismet Sahin from Pixabay
Delicious looking grilled bread with burrata cheese, watercress, and edible nasturtium flower. Image by silviarita from Pixabay
Selecting herb varieties for flavor
Rosemary adds great flavor to meat and even to some cocktails, although a little goes a long way. For my recent re-landscaping project, I choose two types:
Blue Spires grows upright and large enough to be a small hedge eventually, and is also great for seasoning.
I also needed a smaller, semi-upright type with good flavor, so I tried a newer variety, ‘Chef’s Choice’ (it’s also sold as ‘Roman Beauty’ - Rosmarinus officinalus ‘Roman Beauty’). According to Sunset, it was selected for it’s higher oil content and spicy flavor. My youngest son loves using this one on meat dishes!
I’m far from a of rosemary connoisseur though, and especially if I’m just throwing a few sprigs onto the beef or chicken before it’s grilled, I wonder if I could tell the difference?
One herb where you do need to pay attention to what you’re buying though is thyme. Certain varieties of thyme have that distinctive thyme-y scent and flavor but most out there have very little, so pinch off an end at the nursery and smell it to make sure.
Three of the most common that are great for culinary flavor are Thymus vulgaris (common thyme), Thymus citriodorus (citrus thyme), and Thymus serpillum (wild thyme).
A handful of thyme varieties are useful for cooking, but most are not. Pinch off an end and smell it to be sure. Image by photosforyou from Pixabay
Mint - The two types you hear most about are peppermint and spearmint, although there are actually many more. So what’s the difference and which should you use?
Peppermint has the stronger flavor of the two due to having much more menthol. It’s a hybrid of spearmint and water mint, and the water mint contributes the high menthol. Both spearmint and peppermint contain menthol but peppermint contains 40% versus .05% in spearmint.
It’s most often used in desserts because it pairs well with chocolate and sweets, and also in tea.
It’s a cooling agent and can actually change the temperature of the mouth and skin and is used for medicinal purposes also.
Peppermint tea. Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
Spearmint has a relatively mild flavor that comes from the phytochemical carvone, which provides a sweeter flavor, and from having less menthol. In savory dishes calling for mint, spearmint is usually the preferred type. According to Martha Stewart, it’s the mint of choice in lamb and mojitos. Martha had me at lamb and mojitos - I’m planting spearmint!
So now you’re all ready to make a beautiful, aromatic, and flavorful herb container garden. Have fun with it and don’t be afraid to mix it up and try new combinations. You can hardly go wrong, and it’s not a long term commitment.
Your beautiful planters will have you set for warm weather entertaining with all the herbs you need to make your favorite stand-out recipes for grilling, cooking, and cocktails.
What are your favorite herbs to grow and use in recipes? I’d love to hear about them. And as always, if you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
Happy growing, grilling, and mixing!
Other posts you’ll love:
How to choose the right pot for your plant [Why pot shape & size matters. A lot.]
DIY Vine Trellis for Climbing Indoor Plants
How to design a room (a home decorating step by step guide)
Best pomegranate varieties to grow in your garden & pots (Plus how to prune, water and fertilize)
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