Grow herbs indoors year-round! Discover easy tips for creating a thriving indoor herb garden, bringing fresh flavors and fragrance into your home.
Plant one plump supermarket ginger root in February and you can dig up fresh, juicy rhizomes by October, with thin skins you never need to peel. Learning how to grow ginger at home comes down to three things: warmth, a…
Start a stem cutting of grass jelly plant (Cyclea barbata, cincau hijau) in a large pot with a tall trellis. That is how to grow grass jelly plant outside the tropics: a herbaceous vine that climbs about 5 m in…
Take a 15 to 20 cm semi-hardwood stem cutting, strip the lower leaves, and push it into moist potting mix. That is how to grow katuk sweet leaf in a temperate garden: fast shoots, a deep pot, bright shade, and…
Sow stonebreaker seeds indoors 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost, at 25 to 30 degrees Celsius, and seedlings emerge within 1 to 2 weeks in a warm, bright spot. That is how to grow stonebreaker from Indonesia in…
A witch garden is a working garden with a point of view. The beds grow herbs for the kitchen and the teapot, the paths curve on purpose, and the whole planting glows after dark. Gardeners have built versions of it…
Planting takes one autumn afternoon. At 10 cm spacing, 60 corms need about 6 square feet of bed. Harvest comes the next October. Difficulty is moderate: the planting is easy, the patience and the drainage discipline are not. Kashmir saffron…
Start tulsi indoors 6 to 12 weeks before your last frost, move it out only when nights stay above 50°F, and you can cut your first handful of leaves at the four-month mark after sowing. In USDA zones 10 and…
Give one Lonicera japonica vine a 2-meter trellis in full sun and prune it hard twice a year. That is how to grow honeysuckle for tea without the plant eating your fence line. The rest of this page is 12…
4 to 5 years. That is how to grow white peony root from a bare-root division to a bai shao harvest: plant in autumn, give the plant four full seasons to build thick roots, then dig, peel, boil, and sun-dry…
Start with a 20-gallon (76-liter) pot, full sun, and a plan to bring the tree indoors before hard frost. That is how to grow bilimbi outside the tropics: the tree stays small enough to wheel inside, and seeds grow into…
Start roselle seeds indoors 6 weeks before your last frost. Learning how to grow roselle in a temperate climate comes down to three moves after that: full sun, a large container, and picking the fleshy red calyces 100 to 110…
Tejpat is a tree. Say it plainly, because most first-time growers picture an herb. Indian bay leaf (Cinnamomum tamala) is an evergreen tree from the Himalayan foothills that reaches 12 meters or more in the wild, and even a pampered…
If you want to learn how to grow Rehmannia glutinosa, start with the seed packet, not the soil. The plant sold as “Chinese foxglove” seed is usually a different species entirely, while the true Di Huang of traditional Chinese herb…
You can grow perilla from seed in a single season and start picking leaves about five to six weeks after sowing. Perilla (Perilla frutescens) is a warm-season annual in the mint family, and the whole project, from seed packet to…
Gotu kola (pegagan) grows in 90 days from a rooted runner and belongs in a pot, not the open garden. This creeping tropical perennial sends out stolons that root at every node, so a wide shallow container holds it in…
Press lemon basil seed into damp mix 4 to 6 weeks before your last frost, and the first sprouts break the surface in 10 to 14 days at 70 to 85°F. That is how to grow lemon basil from seed:…
Growing Indonesian bay leaf starts with one non-negotiable fact: the seed must come from fresh, ripe fruit and go into soil within 4 to 6 weeks of harvest, because after that window it hardly germinates at all. Sow it on…
Sow nigella after your last frost, harvest the seed in about 100 days, and never transplant it. Nigella sativa, the kalonji of Indian kitchens, is a cool-season annual with a taproot that sulks at every move, so the whole game…
Ajwain is the thyme-smelling seed spice of Indian kitchens, and you can grow a full harvest in one summer: seed to ripe spice takes about 4 months. The catch is identity: three different plants share the name “ajwain,” and buying…
Chinese mugwort is a plant that will reward you for years, but it will also punish you for years if you plant it wrong. Artemisia argyi grows from seed to a harvestable 100 cm perennial in a single 4 to…
