How to Grow Herbs

Updated August 2026 · Garden Advice Guide

Split every herb you own into two groups and treat them differently. Mediterranean herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, lavender) want lean soil, sharp drainage, and to dry out completely between waterings. Leafy herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley, mint, dill) want richer soil and steady moisture. Never plant the two groups together, in a bed or in a pot, because no watering schedule satisfies both.

That's the whole framework, and it explains most dead herbs. The rosemary didn't die because you're bad at this. It died because it was sharing a pot with basil and got watered on basil's schedule.

Not sure when to sow or set out? Get your dates with our free When-to-Plant Lookup before you buy plants.

The Two Groups, and Why Mixing Them Fails

Mediterranean herbs evolved on rocky, poor, fast-draining hillsides with hot dry summers. Their roots are adapted to going bone dry for stretches, and they have almost no defense against sitting in wet soil. Root rot kills a rosemary in about a week.

Leafy herbs mostly come from richer, moister ground. Let a basil dry out once and it wilts, sheds leaves, and often bolts as a stress response.

Put a rosemary and a basil in the same pot and you have made a decision you can't undo. Water on the basil's schedule and the rosemary rots. Water on the rosemary's schedule and the basil is dead in a week.

Rich soil actually makes Mediterranean herbs worse. The essential oils that give thyme and oregano their flavor concentrate under mild stress. A thyme grown in compost-rich, well-watered soil grows fast, floppy, and comparatively bland. That's the one place in the garden where the standard "add more compost" advice is wrong.

For Mediterranean herbs in the ground, the fix is usually drainage rather than fertility. If you garden on clay, plant them on a raised mound 6 to 8 inches high, or amend the planting area with coarse sand and fine gravel until water drains through in seconds rather than minutes.

How to Grow Herbs in the Ground vs in Pots

Both work. The choice depends more on the herb than on your garden.

Grow in the ground when the herb is a hardy perennial you want to get big: rosemary in zone 8, sage, thyme, oregano, lavender. In-ground plants have more root run, need less water, and survive winter one to two zones colder than the same plant in a pot, because a pot's root ball freezes solid from all sides. Which of those herbs actually returns where you live is a zone question, and perennial herbs by zone gives the hardiness range for rosemary, bay, lemongrass and the rest.

Grow in pots when the herb is tender, when you want it near the kitchen door, or when it needs different soil than the rest of the bed. Basil, rosemary in zone 6, and anything you plan to bring indoors belongs in a pot.

Grow in a pot regardless of anything else if the herb is mint.

Our growing herbs in pots for beginners guide has the full container chart, with pot size, mix recipes, and a three-pot kitchen setup you can copy exactly.

Mint gets its own container. Always.

Mint spreads by underground runners called stolons, and it does not stop. A single 4-inch plant put in a bed will occupy several square feet by the end of its second season and will be in your lawn by the third. Digging it out rarely works, because every fragment of root left behind grows a new plant.

Rules that actually contain it:

• Its own pot, standing on a hard surface, never sunk into a bed.
• If you must plant it in the ground, sink a bottomless 5-gallon bucket with the rim 2 inches proud of the soil, and plant into that. The rim matters, because stolons will run over a flush edge.
• Repot every 1 to 2 years. Mint strangles itself in a pot and the center dies out. Split it, keep an outer piece, compost the rest.
• Different mints cross and blur. Keep spearmint and peppermint in separate pots if you care about the flavors.
• Lemon balm, catmint, and oregano share the running habit to a lesser degree. Treat lemon balm as a mint.

When to Plant Herbs by Zone

Herbs split by cold tolerance rather than by watering group here, which is why this table doesn't match the one above.

Treat those zone and frost figures as regional averages, not promises. Hardiness zones and frost tables are built on 30-year averages recorded at weather stations that may sit miles from your garden and hundreds of feet higher or lower. Elevation, a nearby lake, a frost pocket at the bottom of a slope, or a south-facing brick wall that stores heat all move your real dates and your real hardiness by 1 to 2 weeks and often a full half zone. A rosemary against a warm south wall in zone 7 survives winters that kill the same plant 40 feet away in the open. Two gardens in the same county at different elevations are not on the same schedule. Your county extension office publishes local frost data and knows those pockets. Cross-check your numbers in our frost dates tool and confirm your zone with the growing zones lookup.

Our seed starting guide covers the indoor sowing side, and the planting calendar puts these dates on your actual calendar.

Buy plants, not seed, for these four: rosemary (germinates at about 30 percent and takes 3 weeks), lavender (slow and needs cold stratification), French tarragon (produces no viable seed at all, so anything sold as tarragon seed is the inferior Russian type), and mint (seed-grown mint is wildly variable in flavor).

Spacing and Sun

Herbs get planted far too close together, usually because a 4-inch nursery pot gives no clue what a mature sage looks like.

Our plant spacing calculator works out how many plants a given bed or pot actually holds.

Worked example: a 4x8 herb bed, split down the middle. That's 32 square feet. Run the split along the 8-foot length so each half is 2 feet by 8 feet.

• North half, leafy group, amended with 2 to 3 inches of compost. Four basil at 15 inches, six parsley at 9 inches, and a 12-inch band of cilantro sown thickly for cutting. That's about 16 square feet.
• South half, Mediterranean group, mounded 6 inches with a mix of native soil, coarse sand, and gravel, no compost. One rosemary at the end (allow 30 inches), one sage at 20 inches, two thyme and two oregano at 15 inches. Also about 16 square feet.
• Mint stays in a 3-gallon pot on the path beside the bed.

Water need splits cleanly. The leafy half wants about 1 inch a week, which over 16 square feet is 16 x 0.623 = 10 gallons. The Mediterranean half wants a deep soak only when the top 3 inches are dry, which in most summers is every 10 to 14 days, roughly 5 gallons per soak. Two zones, two schedules, one bed, and nothing rots. Our watering guide converts those gallons into minutes on a hose or drip line.

Harvesting Technique Decides Everything

This is the part that separates an herb plant producing into October from one that goes woody and quits in July. How you cut matters more than how much.

Three rules that apply to every herb

1. Never take more than a third of the plant at once. A plant stripped harder than that has to rebuild from stored reserves and stalls for weeks.
2. Pinch off flower buds the moment you see them, on anything you're growing for leaves. Flowering diverts energy into seed and makes existing leaves smaller, tougher, and more bitter.
3. Harvest in the morning, after dew dries and before the day heats up. Essential oil content peaks then, which is why the same thyme tastes stronger at 8 a.m. than at 3 p.m.

Cut basil above a leaf pair

This is the single highest-return technique in the whole article.

A basil stem has pairs of leaves at each node, and at the base of each pair sit two dormant side shoots. Cut the stem just above a leaf pair and both of those shoots wake up, so one stem becomes two. Do it again on each of those and you have four. A basil pruned this way for two months becomes a dense bush.

Do the opposite (pluck individual leaves off the stem, or snap the stem off at random) and the plant grows a single tall stalk, flowers, and stops.

How to do it:

1. Wait until the plant has at least 3 sets of true leaves, roughly 6 inches tall.
2. Cut the main stem just above the second or third leaf pair from the bottom, taking the top off.
3. Two new shoots appear from that node within a week.
4. Repeat on each new shoot once it has 3 leaf pairs of its own.
5. Never strip individual leaves off a stem you plan to keep.

The same branching logic works for mint, oregano, and marjoram, all of which have paired leaves.

Technique by herb

The bare-wood rule is the one that ruins expensive plants. Rosemary, lavender, and sage carry very few dormant buds in old leafless wood. Cut a rosemary back to bare brown stems and that section is simply gone. Prune those three lightly and often, always leaving green leafy growth below every cut.

Cilantro Bolts in Heat, So Grow It in Fall

Cilantro is the herb people most often assume they're failing at. They aren't. Cilantro is a cool-season annual with a short life, and heat makes it shorter.

Above about 75F, cilantro shifts into flowering, sends up a lacy stalk, and turns the leaves narrow and bitter within days. Nothing stops it once it starts. A spring sowing in zone 7 typically gives you 3 to 4 weeks of usable leaf before June ends it.

The fix is timing, not technique:

• Sow in fall. In zones 7 through 10, a late August through September sowing is the best cilantro of the year, because the plants mature into cooling weather instead of heat, and they crop for 2 to 3 months instead of 3 weeks. In zones 8 through 10 fall cilantro often overwinters and gives you leaf until March.
• Sow every 2 to 3 weeks in spring rather than once, so a fresh patch is always coming on.
• Sow thickly and cut like a salad green, shearing the whole patch at 2 inches. Two cuts per sowing is realistic.
• Give it afternoon shade in summer. It buys you a week or two, not a month.
• Use slow-bolt varieties like 'Calypso', 'Santo', or 'Cruiser'. They add 2 to 3 weeks, which is genuinely useful, but no variety is heat-proof.
• Direct sow only. Cilantro has a taproot and transplants badly, which is another reason store-bought pots collapse a week after you get them home.
• Let one plant bolt on purpose. The seed is coriander, and cilantro self-seeds happily, so a patch left alone often comes back on its own next spring.

Late August is exactly the right week to sow a fall cilantro patch across most of the country. What to plant in September covers what else goes in alongside it.

Overwintering Herbs Indoors: The Honest Version

Bringing herbs indoors for winter is one of the most repeated pieces of garden advice and one of the most disappointing in practice. The reason is light, and it's worth being blunt about.

A south-facing window is usually not enough. Outdoors in summer, an herb receives somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 foot-candles of light. A bright south window in December, at a northern latitude with short days and low sun angle, delivers perhaps 300 to 800 foot-candles for 3 or 4 hours. That's a fraction of what the plant is built for, and the plant responds by stretching, going pale, dropping lower leaves, and producing thin flavorless growth.

What actually works:

• A shop light or LED grow light on a timer, 12 to 14 hours a day, positioned 6 to 12 inches above the plants. A basic two-tube LED shop fixture costs about the same as replacing your herbs every spring, and it is the difference between herbs that survive and herbs that produce.
• Cool room, 60 to 65F. Warm rooms push weak growth that the available light can't support.
• Water much less than in summer. Indoor plants in low light use a fraction of the water, and winter overwatering kills more herbs than cold ever does.
• Stop feeding from November to February.
• Expect leaf drop in the first 2 to 3 weeks after coming in. That's acclimation, not death.
• Check for hitchhikers before they come inside. Aphids and spider mites explode indoors with no predators. Hose the plant down, inspect leaf undersides, and quarantine it away from houseplants for two weeks, because an infested aglaonema or pothos will pass mites to everything on the same shelf. Our aphid guide covers what to do if they got in anyway.

Which herbs are actually worth bringing in:

The most common rosemary failure indoors is powdery mildew and root rot at the same time, from a warm still room and a heavy watering hand. Cool, bright, airy, and dry between drinks is what it wants.

The realistic alternative for zone 6 and colder: treat basil and marjoram as annuals, let them go, and sow fresh seed in February under lights. It's less work and it produces better plants.

Common Herb Problems

When and How to Store Your Harvest

Fresh storage first:

• Basil never goes in the refrigerator. Below about 50F it blackens. Stand the stems in a glass of water on the counter, loosely tented with a bag, and it keeps a week.
• Other leafy herbs (parsley, cilantro, dill, mint) keep 1 to 2 weeks wrapped in a barely damp paper towel inside a bag in the crisper.
• Woody herbs (thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano) keep 2 to 3 weeks in a bag in the fridge and honestly don't need it, since you can pick them fresh from the plant most of the year.

Preserving, and this splits along the same two groups:

• Mediterranean herbs dry well. Their leaves are low in moisture and the oils survive. Bundle 8 to 10 stems, hang upside down in a dark, dry, airy spot for 1 to 2 weeks, then strip the leaves and store whole in a sealed jar out of the light. A dehydrator at 95 to 115F does it in 2 to 4 hours. Whole dried leaves keep flavor 6 to 12 months; crush them only as you use them.
• Leafy herbs dry badly. Basil, cilantro, parsley, and dill lose most of their character when dried, which is why dried basil tastes nothing like the plant. Freeze them instead. Chop, pack into an ice cube tray, top with olive oil or water, freeze, then bag the cubes. They keep 6 months and go straight into a hot pan.
• Pesto freezes better than anything, and it's the honest answer to a basil glut.
• Chives are the exception among leafy herbs: they freeze well chopped and dry into something usable, though frozen is better.
• Cut and dry Mediterranean herbs just before flowering, when oil content peaks.

Our when to harvest tool covers timing for herbs alongside every other crop in the garden.

FAQ

What are the easiest herbs to grow for a beginner?

Chives, mint, oregano, thyme, and basil, roughly in that order. Chives and mint are close to unkillable, oregano and thyme forgive neglect as long as drainage is good, and basil grows fast enough to be satisfying if you keep it watered and pinch it above a leaf pair. Start with four or five herbs you actually cook with rather than a full rack of them.

Can you plant all your herbs together in one pot or bed?

Only within the same water group. Mediterranean herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, and lavender want lean soil and to dry out between waterings, while basil, cilantro, parsley, mint, and dill want steady moisture. Mixed together, one group always dies, and no watering schedule fixes it. Group them in separate pots or in separate zones of a bed instead.

How do you keep mint from taking over the garden?

Grow it in its own container, standing on a hard surface rather than sunk into soil. Mint spreads by underground runners, and any fragment of root left in a bed regrows. If you have to plant it in the ground, sink a bottomless 5-gallon bucket with the rim standing 2 inches above the soil, because runners will simply cross a flush edge.

How do you harvest basil so it keeps growing?

Cut the whole stem tip just above a pair of leaves, and two new shoots grow from that node. Never pluck individual leaves off a stem you want to keep. Start once the plant has 3 sets of true leaves, take no more than a third of the plant at a time, and pinch off any flower buds the moment you see them, because flowering makes the remaining leaves smaller and more bitter.

Why does my cilantro bolt so fast?

Because it's a cool-season annual and anything above roughly 75F pushes it into flowering. That's the plant working normally, not a mistake you made. Sow it in late summer or fall for a crop that runs 2 to 3 months instead of 3 weeks, sow every 2 to 3 weeks in spring, and use a slow-bolt variety like 'Calypso' or 'Santo' to buy an extra 2 to 3 weeks.

Which herbs come back every year?

Chives, mint, oregano, thyme, sage, tarragon, and lavender are perennials in most of the country, with chives and mint hardy to zone 3 and thyme and oregano to zone 5. Rosemary is perennial only in zone 8 and warmer, or zone 7 with 'Arp' or 'Hill Hardy'. Basil, dill, and cilantro are annuals everywhere, and parsley is a biennial usually grown as an annual.

Can you really grow herbs indoors over winter?

You can, but a south-facing window is usually not enough light on its own. Winter window light runs a small fraction of summer outdoor levels, which gives you pale stretched growth with weak flavor. Add a shop light or LED on a timer 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 to 12 inches above the plants, keep the room cool at 60 to 65F, and water far less than in summer. Chives, mint, parsley, and bay do best; basil rarely thrives.

How much sun do herbs need?

Mediterranean herbs want 6 to 8 hours of direct sun, and rosemary and lavender want the full 8. Basil and dill want 6 or more. Parsley, chives, mint, and cilantro produce fine on 4 to 6 hours, and cilantro actually prefers afternoon shade once the weather warms. Less light than that gives you leggy plants with noticeably weaker flavor, since sun is what drives essential oil production.

Updated August 2026