Starting My Herb Container Garden! 🪴 Growing Herbs in Pots

I have my first round of herbs for my container garden! I am trying to many new varieties this year but also have my tried and true herbs.

How I Refresh Potting Soil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyVAc5n82c
Fruit Mint Varieties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4r6jLP3Iw

For daily updates, follow me on Instagram @chicagogardener

hey everyone I went to the Garden Center so now I have my first round of herbs for my container garden now I have a few other herbs that I’ve picked up randomly but this was the first time I went to the Garden Center almost all of the plants were outside and it just really feels like Garden season is now all of the work is starting so I picked up 1 2 3 4 5 six herbs from Farmers Market Chicago’s Garden Center it was my first time there and I don’t know how it’s taken me so long to get there because it’s huge they have really cool house plant stuff as well and also they apparently have five cats now I don’t know if my love of cats comes out on YouTube as much as it is in real life but I love cats they weren’t out when I was there but that just means I have to go back so I’m going to go through the herbs that I’m going to grow I’ll probably do like another round of shopping for herbs at a garden center in a few weeks for any of holes that I’m missing and then I do have I made a whole video about it but I do have a fruit mint order coming I think it said miday is the estimated delivery date so I’ll do a refresher on the fruit mints that I’ve ordered so let me go through what I got we’ll plant some of these up and even though it’s nice outside so I think the ones I plant up will sit in the Sun for a little bit they’re going to come back inside overnight and that’s probably I think we have about four to five more days until I’m comfortable able leaving them outside now some of these they will die back in the winter but some are perennials that are Hardy and come back like mint but for me when I’m growing them in containers some of these the temperatures when they get down below 45 can really slow the growth and again in containers there’s even less protection for the plants root balls so to be safe I don’t leave my herbs outside until it’s at least 50° at night I wait even longer for my basil because this is a heat loving herb so this I’ll move out once I move my tomatoes out which is usually when the nighttime temps are like above 60 sometimes I’ll push it to 55 but I’m extra careful with my basil which smells fantastic so first I’ll just show this off really quick these are not getting potted up today these I started in February they got to go on TV on me TV I’ve forgotten the type because I think I threw away the seed packet but they’re more like bushy varieties like kind of looked like boxwoods was that maybe in the name I’m not really sure but I have two of these they’re staying in these size pots until they go outside and these I don’t even think are going in the section where I have all of my herbs I think I’m going to companion plant these with my tomatoes some marold some nerum so I just wanted to point out that I do have two basil plants I’ll probably pick up some other varieties as well but here is what I just got from the garden center so I just kind of have the herbs that I use all the time and this is something I’ve kind of paired back with over the years because it’s very easy to fill up the space that I have available so for example Sage I really love the look of tricolor Sage but I find that I don’t use Sage as much in cooking so I’m not doing any Sage this year and I still have dried Sage from last year’s Garden in fact I need to start working through a lot of the dried herbs that I have from last year I had this terrible habit of saving them like using things we got from the grocery store and saving the good quality ones for something special and then they just don’t get used so I do need to start working through those more but I first got parsley this is the triple curled parsley I don’t have any longing or ties to a certain type of parsley same thing with the oregano most of these herbs it’s just kind of like whatever variety is there I’ll get but there are some where I do like certain varieties so I have parsley I have a Greek oregano also smells delicious my favorite part of the herbs well I guess favorite part is eating them but I also love sniffing them anytime I’m gardening with them my fingers just smell fantastic by the end of it so oregano Greek oregano specifically then I got kind of a must have in my garden because I love making tea this is one that I go through really fast this is lemon balm oh now I’m just getting lemon plus oregano plus basil which is interesting I think I did make a lemon balm and basil either sun tea or ice water and that was really good but I love this in in fact I might even get a second one if I do see it at the Garden Center kind of at my next round of herb pickups but this is definitely a must have every year in my garden then I got one leak I might get another one or I think there’s one coming back in one of my 30- gallon grow bags so we’ll see but I might get another one of this cuz we use that fairly often and then I got a new to me garlic chives I’ve never had specifically the garli chives before I don’t notice a smell difference necessarily but I love garlic and I love chives so I’m excited for these so put those over here and then the last one is probably my favorite herb in the garden and that is chocolate mint this I use in tea I like warm tea the best but I also have made IC tea with it uh you can make ice cream with it which is really good but I love this I’m not a huge fan of like straight up mint like mint or peppermint but I love all the flavored mints and I do have one of these coming in the order of fruit mint but I got one just in case I’m the worst at having a backup just in case and then never needing a backup so then I just have double of everything so that’s what I got six of these herbs that I’m going to plant up today and funny story so I was at the Garden Center obviously it wasn’t super crowded and there was one orange mint plant left which I’ve never actually seen orange mint in a garden center before although it’s not like I’ve ever looked that hard for one and I was looking at the chocolate mint some of the herbs and I could feel someone standing behind me and I could tell that because I was up there first I could tell that they were waiting to grab that orange mint I don’t know why I knew I just knew from the way that they were kind of like lurking in a polite way but I could feel that intensity when like you see there’s only one plant of the one you want left and someone else is in line ahead of you um so I grabbed what I needed I left and then the orange mint was gone in like 2 seconds but the reason I didn’t get it is because it’s in my fruit mint order so let me pull up the order because I don’t remember all of the flavors off of the top of my head so here is what I got I got banana mint which this says back ordered next to it so I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to come with the original shipment that I’ll get in miday I have chocolate mint coming I have lemon bergamont mint which I love lemon flavored or scented herbs I’m excited for that oh reminds me I have to get Thyme and lemon thyme because I like both of those I have orange mint I have apple mint and I have pineapple mint so I am so excited and let me double check it says the estimated delivery date is May 13th so I’m hoping I get those soon now I’m growing the most mint I’ve ever grown before so I don’t know if I’m actually going to have fewer plants than last year but maybe just more plants that I know I’ll use more frequently um so what I’m going to do well let me show you what I pot these in then we’ll take them outside get them potted up watered they’ll sit outside for the rest of the day and then come in with me tonight and just sit under a grow light and I’ll show you where that setup’s going to be so these are the pots that I use for my herb garden they’re 8 in terracotta pots I use them mostly because of I like how it looks aesthetically I do think the majority of the herbs I grow are happy in them the mint could probably go up a pot size or two because when I empty them out at the end of the season the mint is always the one that’s the most root bound now don’t plant mint with other plants put them in their own separate container because they spread like crazy even if so there’s a drainage hole here if I set this on the ground the mint can find its way out and into the ground and then still spread that way so it’s very aggressive for the most part though again just for Aesthetics I will plant one herb per pot again basil o companion plant I might throw some other ones if I just run out of space but I just really like the look of a little herb garden full of terra cotta pots all with their own individual Herb in each these do get set up to drip because they dry out faster if I was going to use plastic pots they would dry out a little bit slower but these are porous so they usually get watered once a day and then during the super hot heat of Summer sometimes I’ll come out and have to water them again so if you want to avoid that you can go up in pot size but for me 8 in is kind of the minimum I’d go the first time I started my herbs I think the pots were 5 in and that was way too small so 8 in is kind of the happy medium for me that’s what I’m going to go with so let’s go ahead and move these outside I’m going to reuse the potting soil that I just refreshed in a video and then I’ll have my herb garden started and I’ll show you the rack and everything where it’s going to go it’s the same as it’s been for the last couple years but I really love it it makes me happy when I come out and see my little herb garden this is where my herbs are going to spend their evenings for the next few nights it’s underneath my soultech grow light I emptied off this table I just have some house plants here basically my house plants get pushed aside and all of my garden plants kind of take up space under the grow lights my seedlings and then once I kick everything out then I’ll move my house plants back into place but this has worked really well the soultech light works great for house plants and then plants for the garden that I’ve already started they don’t work really well for seed starting which I don’t think they’ve ever claimed to but I did try that a few years ago with just not powerful enough or I don’t know if it’s like too concentrated that the seeds did get leggy but it works great for things like when I have my herbs or my dollia start to sprout they’ll go under here as well this is the box of the potting soil that I emptied out from from my pots last year so some of this is actually the potting soil used in last year’s herb garden and then I just refreshed it and I link the video down below showing the process but I just refreshed it with compost and perlite and then if there was anything that was diseased I don’t keep that soil I throw that away so this is all from pots where the plants grew fine and they were healthy so I’m just going to mix this around a little bit and then dunk my pots in and get them filled actually you know what I going to grab my herbs and maybe I’ll plant them up kind of as I dunk and then that’ll keep the dirt in the container because I am trying to be tidier about not getting too much dirt like falling underneath the crevices in the deck all right well I realized I planted three of the herbs rambled on about a lot of stuff and hadn’t hit the record button so I’m pretty sure I fit the record button now I’m going to plant up the final three so so far I got the the garlic chives the leaks and the Greek oregano and part of what I was saying is that I’m actually really liking just planting straight in here because usually I plant most things out on the front deck at the table that’s just off camera view there and I get things everywhere so this makes it just much more contained I mean there’s not going to be any Garden cleanup because all of the dirt’s falling back in into the dirt box so that is really nice so for some of these the roots are pretty root bound I’m just losing them up not doing anything special plantwise other than just planting them at the depth that they were planted in in their Nursery containers and really that’s it and then I always want to leave about an inch at the top because if you fill the soil all the way up to the rim of the plant then it’s going to be much more difficult to water that because the water is going to spill over the sides you’re going to have to wait for it to absorb into the soil and then just pack it down to make sure there’s no air pockets but that’s my parsley I am keeping these labels on for now the labels that they came with but I do have like just cute little wooden labels that I will use instead once I get all of my herbs set up and in place so that’ll probably be I don’t know the next couple weeks or so cuz like I said I know there’s some I still to buy like my time and I’m sure there’s just other ones that I’ll see and be interested in and then all of the ones that I’m getting from Mountain Valley Growers all right our last one of this round which is the lemon balm oh another thing so I typically buy my herbs versus starting them from seed even though obviously starting from seeds going to be cheaper now I did start the basil because I was doing that for the TV segment but when I’m only growing one of something in the garden it makes sense for me to get just one plant start versus a whole pack of seeds and then taking the time to start those and then having like a pack left and I’m only going through a few seeds a year so for me anything where I’m just growing a couple plants I will get those from the garden center anything where I’m growing multiples or if it’s a variety I can’t find at a garden center then those I will go ahead and start from seed but that’s just kind of my general rule of thumb and we’ll cover this back up push you back under there and now let’s go ahead and water these in now I got the flexible hose Zer G branded flexible hose on Amazon this is my first year using it so last year I got a flexible hose but basically the cheapest one I could find because I wanted to see if I liked the concept of a flexible hose before investing money into one and I did like it the one I had last year but it was very poor quality which I think is an issue with flexible hoses and started to leak maybe after a couple months of use so I asked on Instagram what everyone’s brand recommendation was for flexible hoses and zero g was the one that was recommended the most so I just started using it I just set it up a couple weeks ago this is the 25 foot one I got a 50ft one that’s too long so I’m either going to try it somewhere else or give it away to somebody but the 25 foot one seems to be working great for me so far so I’m mostly worried about like durability I want to see how long it lasts I’m sitting out in the sun but flexible hoses for me because I have such a small space and I have to maneuver around a lot those seem to work the best so my herbs are just going to sit there now for the rest of the day it is just about 3:00 I’ll move them in when the Sun goes down and then this is the rack that they sit on now this was from Gardener Supply but I’m pretty sure it’s out of stock now I’ll double check again if it’s available I’ll link it down below but I like it because it just has this like stair step effect and then I do have drip set up because again these need watered more than probably any other plant because they’re smaller pot size in terracotta so I definitely like having the drip set up on those now I’ll probably go more into like herb maintenance when I get my whole rack set up and have all of my herbs but basically the majority of the herbs want full sun both of my decks except for very small spots on them are full sun um I do Harvest them fairly regularly and some of them you can Harvest like mint I think you can cut back to like a third and it’ll still flush back so the more you harvest the better they’ll do you want to avoid a lot of them flowering because not all of them but some herbs once they flour the actual Taste of the herb itself decreases so some things just to keep an eye and I do fertilize even if plants or herbs say it does well in Poe soil they’re growing in very small containers so I do apply liquid fertilizers I’m trying to think if there’s anything else off the top of my head I think that’s it I I’m so excited I just feel like all of a sudden there’s a switch in the weather Garden season is here it’s almost like I can’t work fast enough and I love that time of getting everything set up and going so if you have any questions let me know down below and I will show you of course when I get all of the rest of my herbs get everything set up and labeled and have my herb garden all put back together so I’ll see you in the next video bye