Growing Herbs in Pots for Kitchen and Pollinators

A Windowsill and a Step: Where Herbs Do Best

You do not need a vegetable bed, a greenhouse or even a garden to keep yourself in fresh herbs from April to October. A sunny windowsill, a doorstep and a few decent-sized pots will do it. Herbs are, on the whole, forgiving plants: they evolved on dry, stony hillsides and cope with the cramped, quick-draining conditions of a container far better than most vegetables ever will. Better still, a pot of herbs earns its keep twice over. You snip what you need for the kitchen, and — if you resist the urge to keep everything neat and clipped — the flowers feed bees, hoverflies and butterflies right through the summer.

Pots, Compost and Drainage

Get the container right and half the battle is won. Aim for pots around 25–30cm across for thyme, mint and chives; basil is happy in something a little smaller if you are keeping it on a kitchen windowsill. Terracotta is traditional and dries out quickly, which suits thyme and basil but means more watering, while glazed or plastic pots hold moisture for longer and are lighter to move about. Whatever you choose, make sure there is a drainage hole, cover it with broken crocks or a handful of gravel, and never leave a pot standing in a full saucer of water.

Use a peat-free multipurpose compost for most herbs, and mix in a good handful of horticultural grit for thyme and any other Mediterranean herb going into a pot. Mint is the exception to the tidy-up: it spreads by underground runners, so give it its own pot and repot it each spring rather than letting it muscle in with everything else.

Four Herbs Worth Starting With

Basil, thyme, mint and chives cover almost every kitchen use, and all four will crop happily in containers.

• Basil — tender and warmth-loving. Sow under cover from March, keep it at around 20°C, and do not move it outside until nights are reliably above 10°C. Pinch out the growing tips every couple of weeks to keep plants bushy, and water in the morning so the foliage dries before evening.
• Thyme — hardy, drought-tolerant and happiest in full sun with gritty, free-draining compost. Let it dry out between waterings, feed it only lightly, and harvest sprigs little and often. A pot by the back door will crop for years.
• Mint — vigorous to the point of thuggish. Partial shade suits it, it drinks more than the others, and cutting it hard through summer keeps the new leaves sweet. Watch for rust on the undersides of the leaves and remove affected growth promptly.
• Chives — the easiest of the lot. Cut the leaves with scissors about 2cm above the compost rather than pulling them, and divide congested clumps every second spring.

Planting Out, Position and the British Weather

In most of the country the last frost falls somewhere between mid-April and mid-May, later in the north and in frost pockets, so harden off anything raised indoors over a fortnight before planting it out. Move pots gradually into the open, bringing them in at night at first. A sheltered, south-facing wall is ideal, but stand pots 30cm or so away from the wall itself — close enough for warmth, far enough for airflow and rain.

On a windowsill, turn the pots a quarter-turn each week so plants grow evenly towards the light rather than leaning into the glass. Indoors, basil in particular needs air moving around it; a stuffy kitchen windowsill with wet compost is the quickest route to downy mildew.

Watering, Feeding and the July Slump

From June onwards, check pots daily — twice on hot days. Water in the morning, aiming at the compost rather than the leaves, and use rainwater where you can. Feed with a liquid seaweed or general-purpose feed every ten to fourteen days; basil and chives are hungrier than thyme, which resents rich compost. If everything looks tired and pale in late July, it usually means the compost has been exhausted, so give a liquid feed and top-dress with a little fresh compost. Group pots together in the shade if you go away, and stand them in a shallow tray of water rather than leaving them parched.

Let Some of Them Flower

This is the part most gardeners miss. If you deadhead every herb the moment a bud appears, you keep the neatest possible pot and starve the garden of nectar. Chives produce rounded pink pom-poms in late spring that bumblebees adore, and the flowers are edible — scatter the petals over a salad. Thyme flowers in early summer, a haze of tiny blooms that hoverflies and solitary bees work over for weeks; hoverflies are doubly welcome, since their larvae eat aphids. Mint throws out small lilac flower spikes in late summer.

Basil is the one to plan carefully, because leaf quality drops once it runs to flower. Keep two or three plants for cutting and pinch those back hard, then let one plant flower in late August — its small white blooms are a late-season lifeline for honeybees when much else has gone over. A pot of thyme, a pot of chives and one flowering basil on a patio will do more for pollinators than most people imagine, and you still get the herbs for your supper.