The Biggest Mistakes To Avoid When Growing A Kitchen Herb Garden

A kitchen herb garden is one of the most rewarding gardens to grow. A lot of herbs are small and relatively non-finicky, making them great options for beginners. When grown indoors, healthy herb plants reward their cultivators with fresh seasonings and garnishes for cooking without any need to leave the house. However, even though they're relatively easy to grow, there are still a lot of potential mistakes a beginner gardener can make.

Planting an indoor garden is slightly more complicated than many other hobbies. You're growing live plants, and there is no exact protocol to follow that keeps them alive and healthy. Your home environment is completely unique, even from your next-door neighbors'. Indoor conditions affect how much water, pruning, and overall care your plants need. The key is to pay attention and understand the basic needs of the different herb species. Knowing what plants need to stay satisfied and healthy ensures they provide tasty leaves for you to use and store throughout the year. So, learn more about the biggest mistakes people make when growing herbs so you can avoid them and have a thriving kitchen garden.

Anyone can grow a home herb garden as long as they provide plants with the right conditions. Many attempt to grow these plants on countertops and open shelves without considering if there's truly enough light to sustain plant life. Even if the sun shines in brightly early during the morning or late in the afternoon, your plants may not get the amount of light they require most of the day. Without enough sunlight, some herbs don't have as much flavor. Herbs can also grow lanky, leggy, and lose lustre in their leaves. 

Fortunately, this mistake is easy to fix. Start by ensuring your plants get at least five hours of sunlight a day. A lot of herbs do best when given six hours of direct sun. To achieve this, place your pots in an unobstructed south-facing window, as these get more sunlight due to the Earth's tilt and rotation. If you don't have a lot of space or windows to work with, something like Amazon's Hywyimlait LED Grow Light Strips can provide subtle but powerful light to sun-deprived plants. You could also try growing a shade garden and stick to herbs that tolerate dimmer conditions, such as chives, coriander, parsley, and mint.

One of the biggest mistakes indoor gardeners make is watering their plants too much or too little, and overwatering and underwatering can be equally harmful. Overwatering drowns plants and makes them vulnerable to fungi, insect infestations, and diseases. In contrast, underwatering can stunt plant growth and deprive them of essential nutrients.

It may take some trial and error to figure out how much water your plants need, but as you learn, there are ways to mitigate watering issues. You can use something like Amazon's Apine Soil Moisture Meter to keep an eye on the levels so you know exactly when you need to give your herbs a drink. It's also essential to use pots with holes at the bottom, which drain excess water into a dish or draining tray so that you don't oversaturate the soil and slowly drown plant roots.

Choosing functionality over aesthetics is a hard decision to make, especially when growing herbs indoors. A planter or container garden set might complement your interior design, but more importantly, it should provide a healthy and spacious environment for plants. Not all pots are created equal, and you need to find containers with the right size, drainage capabilities, and material to house your herbs.

Plant pots and planters can be ceramic, fiberglass, metal, plastic, wood, or terracotta. Most of these materials can safely house plants as long as they have drainage holes and saucers to catch and collect extra water. Terracotta is ideal for woodier herbs that dislike continuously wet soil and like to dry out between waterings, since it's porous enough for moisture and air to escape from all sides. It's also a common practice to tuck plants growing in plain terracotta or plastic grower pots into larger and flashier planter designs.  In addition to being the right material, the pot must be large enough to comfortably house the herb plant at its mature size.

Luckily for aspiring herb growers, a lot of the herbs that do well on a windowsill (such as dill, chives, cilantro, and basil) will be happy in a smaller container. However, these containers should still be at least 4 inches wide. Some herbs do prefer more space, such as mint, oregano, and rosemary, so you should do your research on individual plants beforehand.

Starting a herb garden from seeds is the cheapest way to begin, but it also takes weeks to months before you can harvest the results. Amateur gardeners may struggle to make plants sprout, as various things can go wrong during the seedling stage. There are even more factors to consider when you start from scratch; the temperature, soil moisture levels, planting depth, air circulation, light conditions, and fertilizer can stop seeds from ever germinating. It can be tricky to deduce what went wrong since seeds don't have as many physical characteristics as a young or mature plant.

Get faster and easier results by using starter herbs or cuttings from healthy plants. Starter herbs are usually immediately harvestable, but cuttings still need time to grow. Since starters are already grown and mature, they are already hardier and more resilient. Plus, it's easier to problem-solve other issues that arise and keep them alive.

Windowsills often get the most sunlight, making them ideal locations for plants. However, areas near vents, unsealed doors, and drafty windows are terrible spots for indoor gardens. These locations can undergo temperature extremes, be it the natural climate or artificial air being pumped through your home. When the temperature dramatically swings between hot and cold, plant leaves can yellow and brown, droop, and drop.

The resulting plan of action depends on the culprit behind the swaying temperatures. If the AC or radiator vent is blowing your plants, you need to relocate them beyond the line of fire. If your doors and windows are drafty, add insulation using products like XFasten Transparent Window Weather Sealing Tape or Trisiki Weather Stripping Door Seal Strip. You should also move plants away from entryway doors that open and close often and keep them off windowsills that have very narrow ledges that force plants against the glass, or where they'll be trapped behind curtains during the hottest or coldest times of the day (essentially roasting in the hot sunshine coming through the window and freezing during cold nights). Many plants are intolerant of extreme midday and midnight temperatures, especially during summer and winter, and these locations are especially susceptible to weather changes.

Sometimes, kitchen herb gardens stand forgotten when you aren't cooking in the kitchen every day. During busier weeks or months, you may neglect to harvest herbs on a regular basis. Without routine pruning and harvesting, herbs can quickly grow out of control. Left unchecked; faster-growing plants can overcrowd neighboring companion plants or outgrow their containers. This is one of the biggest mistakes people make with container gardening and traditional gardening alike.

Remember to prune plants even when you don't need their leaves, seeds, and stems for culinary recipes. This keeps them producing fresh foliage, discourages diseases and pests, and maintains their aesthetic appearance. Basil, dill, and mint need regular pruning to encourage new growth, making it especially important if you cultivate these three popular species.

While routine pruning is necessary to keep plants under control, garden growers also need to be careful not to overdo it. Trimming off too much can put a plant into shock. Losing too much healthy growth is harmful, as it won't have enough of the leaves it needs to produce chlorophyll and support itself.

Avoid over-pruning by only harvesting up to one-third of most herb plants. Keep in mind that some herbs have different rules when it comes to trimming in harvesting. For example, the one-third rule doesn't apply to lavender. You can prune up to two-thirds of the plant after its last summer bloom. You can also cut chives and parsley down to a half-inch above the soil. These aren't the only kitchen herbs with such requirements, so a little research ensures you'll get the most out of your garden.

When growing plants for aesthetic reasons, the end goal is usually to end up with lush and bright flower blooms. However, things are a little different for culinary gardeners as most herbs are grown for their taste rather than appearance. Kitchen herbs are harvested for their leaves and stems, and only sometimes are their flowers also useful. When herbs like dill and basil are allowed to flower, their energy is sapped away from the parts you cook with, as they put more work into growing the blooms.

Pinching buds off as they start to form delays flowering and encourages more leaf growth instead. Trimming flowers at their earliest stages keeps herbs like basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, and mint producing large and healthy green foliage. Obviously, you'll want to avoid this practice for herbs where flowers are harvested as edible ingredients, such as borage, calendula, chives, and German chamomile.

Before you start chopping the flowers off all your herbs, you should educate yourself on just how much of each plant is actually edible. While many herbs are harvested for their leaves, amateur gardeners may not realize that their stems, seeds, flowers, and even roots may also be viable ingredients. Neglecting to harvest them won't necessarily affect your garden's health, but you could miss out on valuable and unique ingredients for home recipes.

Planning on growing cilantro? With a little research, you'll find that many parts of cilantro are usable for cooking ventures. The leaves, seeds, and stems are all common ingredients; and you may recognize the seeds by the term "coriander". You can also harvest seeds from species like anise, dill, and fennel. Ginger and turmeric are even more unique in that these species are harvested for their roots. 

The general consensus among gardeners is that you should use tools rather than bare hands for most tasks. When snagging a few herbs from a kitchen garden, it may seem more convenient to just rip off what you need with your fingertips. However, tearing off the plant parts you need without any sense of decorum can be damaging to perennials with woody stems. Twisting and yanking on healthy foliage can damage the otherwise robust stems, weakening the plant. 

Instead of using your fingertips (which is a safe method for harvesting sprigs from non-woody species), cut them with a clean pair of scissors or herb snips. Sharp and clean tools leave smoother cuts, which are easier for the plant to heal and recover from than tearing. You can find something like the Beaditive Culinary Herb Scissors or Fiskars Micro-Tip Pruning Snips on Amazon. Either of these tools works well for harvesting and trimming small herb plants.

Growing multiple species close together is referred to as "companion planting" in the gardening world. Although there are some benefits to companion planting in a home garden, putting plants in shared containers is often a risky practice. Plants must actively compete for water, space, and sunlight. Fast growers, such as mint plants, can quickly overcome slower-growing species, taking over the container and turning it into a single herb planter rather than a mini garden. 

The best way to avoid having a shared container garden go wrong is to strategically place herbs based on how they grow. Some annual species can be planted together in a large pot, but many perennials need their own isolated space. Parsley and thyme, basil and oregano, and sage and chives can potentially be grown together. However, the safest route is to simply plant herbs in their own containers, using a setup like D'vine Dev's Herb Garden Planter Set with individual containers to house each herb.