Pots, soil and feeding aren't the glamorous side of indoor herb gardening.
Nobody invites friends over to admire the excellent drainage hole underneath the parsley pot.
But what happens below the leaves determines an enormous amount of what happens above them.
Give an herb a suitable container, a potting mix that holds enough moisture without staying waterlogged, room for its roots and sensible nutrition, and you've removed several of the most common ways to make indoor growing unnecessarily difficult.
In a garden bed, roots can explore a large volume of soil.
In your kitchen, you've given them a pot.
That little container has to provide:
That's why pots, soil and feeding are really one connected subject.
A watering problem can actually be a drainage problem.
A plant that appears to need feeding may have unhappy roots.
And a perfectly good potting mix can become difficult to manage if the container itself is wrong.
For indoor culinary herbs, drainage is one of the first things to check.
Excess water needs a route out of the growing medium.
A beautiful decorative pot with nowhere for water to escape may look excellent on the windowsill while creating a much less attractive situation around the roots.
One practical solution is to grow the herb in a draining inner pot placed inside a decorative outer container, then make sure excess water isn't left collecting around it.
And don't rely on a layer of stones or gravel at the bottom as a substitute for proper drainage.
If you've found an inexpensive container you love but the drainage arrangement is less convincing, our future guide to drainage hacks for cheap pots will look at the practical options.
Good potting mix needs to hold enough moisture for the roots to use while still allowing excess water to drain and air to remain available in the root zone.
Too fast, and you're constantly chasing a dry pot.
Too slow, and the roots can spend far too much time sitting in wet conditions.
Ordinary soil dug from outdoors isn't the obvious solution for indoor containers. Container mixes are formulated differently to provide a more suitable balance of moisture retention, drainage and aeration.
If you're staring at bags in a garden center wondering what any of them actually mean, best potting soil for herbs will be the dedicated guide.
Watering an herb and seeing the mix remain wet for a while is normal.
A pot that stays persistently saturated is different.
Before automatically watering again because “it's watering day,” check what is actually happening in the container.
Persistent wetness can involve several factors:
If you're currently looking at a herb whose potting mix seems determined never to dry, fixing soggy potting mix fast will tackle that situation directly.
Then there's the moment when you look at the pot and discover something fuzzy growing on top of the soil that definitely isn't basil.
Don't immediately assume the entire herb has to go.
Surface growth can be associated with persistently moist organic material and the conditions around the pot, so the useful question isn't only:
“How do I remove this?”
It's also:
“Why are the conditions allowing it to keep appearing?”
Our dedicated guide to removing mold from pot soil will walk through that problem without turning every white speck into a botanical emergency.
Bigger pot equals happier plant, right?
Not automatically.
The container needs to make sense for the root system and the plant you're growing.
A pot that's too small can restrict a growing herb and dry very quickly.
But moving a small root system into an unnecessarily huge volume of potting mix can also make moisture management harder.
Pot depth matters too. Different herbs develop different root systems, so one container shape isn't ideal for every plant.
Choosing pot size for herbs deserves its own page because “buy the biggest pot that fits the windowsill” is not much of a strategy.
An herb doesn't need repotting simply because you've owned it for a particular number of months.
Look at what the plant and roots are doing.
Signs that deserve investigation can include roots growing through drainage holes, a root mass tightly circling inside the container or a pot that has begun drying unusually quickly.
That's when it may be time to inspect what's happening below the surface.
Repotting rootbound herb plants will cover how to recognize that situation and move the plant on without treating repotting as an annual ceremonial event.
You Can Mix Your Own Potting Medium — But You Don't Have To
Eventually, indoor gardeners encounter recipes involving ingredients such as coir, peat-based material, perlite, vermiculite, compost and various other things that make the kitchen briefly resemble a very earthy chemistry laboratory.
Making your own mix can be useful when you want more control over how the medium behaves.
But beginners don't need to manufacture potting mix simply to qualify as proper herb gardeners.
A suitable commercial container mix can be a perfectly sensible starting point.
For anyone who does want to experiment, DIY soil mix for herbs will explain what the different components are actually trying to achieve rather than just presenting a mysterious ingredient list.
Fertilizer is useful.
More fertilizer is not automatically more useful.
Container herbs have a limited amount of growing medium, and repeated watering can gradually remove available nutrients. That means feeding can become part of long-term container care.
But fertilizer should be applied according to the product directions and the needs of the plant rather than used as an emergency response whenever an herb looks unhappy.
Too much can damage rather than help.
Fertilizing herbs without burning will cover the cautious approach in detail.
The other tempting approach is to ignore fertilizer completely until the plant looks miserable and then provide a heroic dose.
Indoor herbs generally respond better to sensible, restrained care than dramatic rescue operations.
How often feeding makes sense depends on factors including the plant, its growth, the potting medium, the fertilizer being used and the product instructions.
That makes a simple routine more useful than pretending one feeding calendar works for every herb in every apartment.
Our light feeding schedule for herbs page will turn that idea into a practical routine.
This is the part worth remembering when something goes wrong.
Imagine a herb sitting in an oversized pot filled with dense, persistently wet mix in weak light.
Adding fertilizer probably isn't the first problem to solve.
Or imagine a vigorous herb that's filled its container with roots and now dries remarkably quickly.
Simply watering it twice as often may treat the symptom without addressing why the pot suddenly behaves differently.
Look at the whole root environment.
Indoor herb care becomes much easier when you stop treating every symptom as an isolated problem.
When an indoor herb isn't thriving, work through these questions:
1. Can excess water escape from the pot?
Check real drainage, not decorative gravel.
2. Is the potting mix suitable for container growing?
It should balance moisture retention with drainage and aeration.
3. Is the mix staying wet for an unusually long time?
Look at watering, drainage, pot size and growing conditions.
4. Does the pot make sense for the plant?
Neither cramped nor unnecessarily enormous.
5. Are the roots becoming crowded?
Inspect when the plant gives you a reason to.
6. Does the plant actually need feeding?
Don't automatically diagnose every unhappy leaf as hunger.
7. Are you following the fertilizer instructions?
More isn't better.
Those seven questions can explain an impressive number of mysterious-looking herb problems.
When basil struggles, it's tempting to conclude:
“Apparently I'm bad at basil.”
Maybe.
But first look at where its roots are living.
Is the pot draining?
Is the mix permanently wet?
Has the plant outgrown the container?
Is the pot far larger than the root system?
Have you been enthusiastically feeding a plant that's actually struggling for another reason?
Sometimes the herb isn't difficult.
It's simply been given rather challenging accommodation.
Good pots, soil and feeding don't need to be complicated.
Start with a suitable container.
Give excess water somewhere to go.
Use a potting mix designed to work in containers.
Match the pot reasonably to the plant.
Repot when the roots actually need it.
Feed gently and deliberately rather than enthusiastically and randomly.
Get those basics right and the invisible half of your herb garden is doing a lot of the work for you.
The leaves may get all the attention.
The roots know who's really running the operation.