One of my favorite things in our home is our little window herb planter. Currently, our window planter is growing some cilantro, basil, parsley, green onions, thyme, and a bunch of other ones I’ve forgotten the names of. The important thing to note here is that they’re growing. Yay!
Sadly, our kitchen doesn’t get much sunlight and one of the goals Russ and I had when buying our home was to have an indoor herb garden. Not one to be discouraged, Russ was able to install an indoor herb garden in our guest room. I’ve written about our guest room here, and it’s basically the room where we cram all our artistic and creative pursuits in. So why not throw in some plants?
Making this was super easy. One way we made this project quick and easy was buying wooden boxes instead of making our own. We bought four lightweight boxes from Daiso – if you don’t have a Daiso in your neighborhood, try a dollar store or Target’s dollar spot to see if they have any wooden boxes. Any size will do as long as it’ll fit within the depth of your windowsill. Lucky for us, our guest room has a semi-seating windowsill which we take full advantage of. Hence, a homemade hanging herb garden. Here’s what we did:
- As I’ve said previously, we bought our wooden boxes. You can make your own but we took the easy route.
- Line the bottom of your boxes. We try to avoid as much plastic as we can in the Henry Home, but sometimes we cave in. Here we used some old plastic bags, tore them up, then used them as lining for the bottom of the boxes. This will help the wood last longer and prevent it from rotting since we didn’t seal the wood beforehand.
- Either before or after lining your wooden boxes, screw the boxes into the wall. We lined our boxes and secured the lining by screwing through both the lining and the box when installing them to the wall.
- Next, drill holes at the bottom of your box. How big your planters are will determine how many holes you drill. Since our planter boxes can fit about two styrofoam cups each, we drilled two holes underneath each cup.
These holes will help drain any excess water. Since we bought four boxes, we lined them up directly overhead each other – creating a makeshift drip system. At the bottom of the last planter, we placed a large potted plant to catch the last bits of draining water. - Fill your planters with either dirt (if you’re ready for it) or styrofoam cups. We planted our seeds in foam cups and placed them in the planter. We already had cilantro growing in our patio so we transferred that herb directly into the planter. Once our other herbs grew, we took them out of their cups and repotted them directly into the planter.
One cool observation we noticed was that all our herbs leaned towards our window to catch that sunlight. So cute.
And you’re done! Windowsill gardens are perfect for our herbs and we’re loving this addition to the guest room. I really like having my own herbs growing in my home since I never need too much of one herb and dislike buying herbs from the grocery store. This is a lovely way to use your own garden as decoration while falling in love with plants/future food. Enjoy!
