Herbs

Mints

How to Start

To sow the seeds indoors, place them on top of the Bio Sponge in your Bio Dome, or on top of the medium in your seed flat. Do not cover the seeds; they need light to germinate. They should sprout within 10 to 15 days at room temperature or slightly warmer (68 to 75°F). Transplant into the garden or container when they have at least 2 sets of true leaves.

To sow the seeds outdoors, place them on top of well-worked soil, then sprinkle a fine layer of vermiculite on top of them. If you are sowing directly into the garden, consider placing a row cover over the seeds until they sprout.

From seeding to maturity, mint takes about 90 days. This means that it will achieve its full height, generally of 1 to 2 feet, and it will be ready to harvest. At this point you can cut mint down to 1 inch above the soil, and it will regrow to harvest height again in a month and a half or so.

 

Basil

 

Just sow basil plant seeds evenly by covering them with about ¼-inch of soil. Keep the soil moist and make sure you remove any weeds. The growing basil seeds should germinate within a week. The seedling can be recognized by D-shaped seed leaves that will have the flat sides facing toward each other.

Spearmint Peppermint varieties growing white containers pots foodie gardener

Grow Mint Indoors: Spearmint and Peppermint

Cilantro

 

How to grow cilantro

Cilantro needs a frost free period to grow but it doesn’t like extreme heat. So in milder climates you grow cilantro during summer, in tropical climates you grow it during the cooler dry season.

To grow cilantro you need reasonable soil and you need to keep the plants well watered.

Flowering Cilantro PlantPhoto by Chrysaora

Always grow cilantro from seed, directly where you want it. Cilantro HATES being transplanted. The stress will likely cause it to go straight to seed and then it dies. And you never get any leaves at all!

Also, cilantro grows a big taproot, and those little seedling pots are not deep enough to accommodate it. Growing cilantro in a pot isn’t doing it any good.

Don’t bother buying cilantro from a nursery in a pot. Just get the seed.

Growing cilantro from seed

The standard directions are to sow cilantro about 1 cm deep, but there is no need to get scientific about it. Just cover the seeds and keep them moist.

You can plant cilantro in rows for easy harvesting or you can spread the seed over a wider area and rake it in. It depends how much seed you have available. (If you have lots of seed there is another way to grow cilantro and I’ll tell you about it below.)

Don’t go overboard with the amount of seed. Healthy cilantro plants grow fairly big, about 50 cm or 2 feet tall.

You want about 5 cm between plants if you grow cilantro for the leaf. They need more space if you grow them for seed, but you can always eat the extre plants and just leave a few to go to seed.

Cilantro seeds take about two to three weeks to germinate. If they come up too thickly, just pull up and eat the extras…