Plants for a kitchen

A kitchen asks something different of a plant. Most plants are kept to be looked at, and a kitchen plant is kept to be cut, so it is judged on what it gives as much as how it looks. That is why this page is mostly herbs. They want sun and steady water in a way that a foliage plant does not, and they pay for it with leaves that you pick every week.

The light decides which herbs. Basil needs at least six hours of sun and, on a shaded sill, grows pale, leggy and thin flavoured, so it takes the brightest window in the room. In the northern hemisphere that is the south-facing window, and south of the equator it is the north-facing one. Chives are happy in more shade than most herbs, and mint and coriander both do well in part shade, which makes them the plants for the dimmer window over the sink. An aloe wants the brightest sill you have, with several hours of direct sun.

The mistake that kills them

Taking the supermarket pot home and leaving it as it is. A pot of basil from a shop holds many seedlings crammed together, and twenty of them exhaust the compost, compete for light and collapse within a fortnight. Split the clump into three or four pots, or thin it to three or four plants in a pot fifteen centimetres across, and the plants that remain will last for months.

The second mistake is letting the pot dry out even once. Coriander reads a dry spell as the end of its season and runs to flower within days. Basil takes the same drought as a signal that its season is ending, and mint sheds its lower leaves at once. All three want the compost evenly moist. The aloe on the same sill wants the opposite, a soak and then no water until the pot is dry all the way through, which you can feel by the weight. The entries give each plant’s interval, and on one sill those can differ several times over. The guide to telling whether a plant needs water shows how to check by finger and by weight.

Picking is part of the care. Pinch basil from the tips, just above a pair of leaves, rather than stripping the lower leaves, and the plant branches from every cut. Take mint in whole stems, not single leaves. The guide to picking and storing the harvest covers how to keep what you cut.

How the list was chosen

An entry is listed here when it is filed under the kitchen, and once it has been reviewed. The list is sorted with the easiest first, then by name. Several of these herbs are annuals that run to seed in a season, so the entries give sowing months for both hemispheres, and a short row sown every few weeks keeps the supply going.

Choose by the light in your own kitchen before you choose by the flavour, and match the pot to the plant: a deep one for coriander, a heavy terracotta one for the aloe, and for mint a pot you can divide every spring, because it exhausts itself within a year if it never is. The finder can narrow the same selection by light, by pet safety and by how thirsty a plant is.