Windowsill Gardening for Rookies
Growing plants has been scientifically proven to be great for your physical and mental health, improving indoor air quality, and home-grown fruit and veg has a greater nutritional value!
Don’t even get us started on the supermarket plastic you could be saving too.
Feel like the only one not growing a salad in your back garden because you don’t actually have one?
No Garden? No Problem!
There are loads of plants that thrive on a window ledge, especially fresh herbs that are extremely handy to have to hand in the kitchen.
Here are 7 easy windowsill plants to get growing:
Aloe Vera
A kitchen essential for anyone who fancies themselves a bit of a chef. Its healing properties loan itself to being great for burns and even spots in a home-made facemask when mixed with bicarb of soda. Aloe Vera plants are sold widely in supermarkets and even Ikea.
Mint
Great with coconut yogurt to make a mint raita go on a curry or falafels or even in a gin or to make tea – mint is a really easy growing herb. You can get mint seeds at DIY stores and online.
Make sure you keep it indoors as it can easily take over a whole flowerbed or vegetable patch!
Basil
Basil is a staple in Italian cooking and you can buy basil in pots from most supermarkets – however, the seeds are usually overpacked and will die in a few days so would need repotting and spreading out with ⅓ of the plant removing (or immediately make pasta sauce as soon as you get home with your new plant).
Coriander
The marmite of the herb world, adding zest to plain rice and curries since its discovery.
Like basil, it’s widely available in supermarkets but would need seperating to survive for more than a week.
Chillies
Chillies can be extremely fruitful over summer! You can expect more than a few chillies every month, they go dormant from around September – March however, so don’t chuck them out if they look dead.
Another plus is that chillies look great on the kitchen shelf.
Cress
Did anybody else have this growing consistently in the classrooms of their childhood? Cress is extremely fast growing and a tasty addition to a sandwich or salad, their seeds are widely available at hardware and gardening stores.
Rocket
The salad leaf with bite, rocket starts to sprout within a week of planting and takes under a couple of months to go from pot to plate!
You’ll be ready to be that person who says ‘oh let me just pick the salad’ right before serving dinner to guests in no time.
If you have a garden and want to expand your vegetable growing further then check out our blog on easy growing outdoor veg here.
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