Dapper DIY: How to Plant an Indoor Herb Garden

Captain Dapper wants you to grow your own.

Growing plants may seem totally daunting but, actually, there's nothing to fear. If you have a window sill, you can probably keep some herbs alive. You'll have some tasty greens to spice up your food and you'll bring a little bit of the outdoors in. You can even slap on some overalls and pretend you're on a farm.

First, gather all your materials. You'll need some herb starter plants, which you can pick up from most grocery stores and garden centers, larger containers for replanting the starters and soil. I have a mix of herbs for my little window garden. One basil plant came with my CSA and then I picked up another at my favorite little Chicago garden store, Gethsemane. I also picked up flat leaf parsley and lavender lady (that name!) and another lavender that can be used as an air freshener. I want the focus to be on the plants here so I picked up five identical gray containers from Target. They're cheap and plastic but at $2 each, it felt like a minimal investment to create a cohesive look. Once the herbs get a little bigger, the dark gray color of the containers should recede a bit.

OK, so let's transplant the herbs into the new containers. I bought a ginormous bag of soil that I opened on my back porch. Rather than take the chance of spilling soil all over Captain Dapper HQ, I filled a small bucket to bring into the apartment.

First I poured a base layer of soil into the container - about a quarter of the way. The containers I'm using have drainage holes in the bottom but if you're using pots without holes, you'll want to place some rocks in the bottom to help with drainage.

I like to place the plant (still in its pot) into the larger container and wiggle it around a bit. This will create a little crater where the plant can rest when I take it out of its container. It also helps measure to make sure there's not too much of a base layer of soil. You want the top of the plant to sit an inch or two below the top rim of the large container.

Here, I've carefully removed the plant from its pot and gently loosened the roots a bit.

I set the plant into the crater in the soil in the larger container. I continued to loosen the soil around the plant a little bit and then mixed some of the base layer soil with it.

And then I added additional soil to the container.

I gently patted the soil down a bit to and then added a little more as it settled.

And then I repeated and repeated until I had five pots of plants. I like to top my potted plants with small rocks (courtesy of the beach at the end of my street). Rocks look a little more upbeat versus staring at plain ol' brown dirt at the base of the plant, especially while they're so small.

Will the herbs live? Perhaps. This is a West facing window so they'll get a lot of line during these early days of summer. And if they don't, I spent about $25 on this entire project and most of that was on the containers, which I can use again, and the soil, of which I have a ton. For now, I have a lovely living garden in my living room window!

Images: Jason Loper