How To Grow Thyme Indoors And Keep It Thriving All Year Long

Cultivating your own herbs always seems like it'll be an easy on-ramp to living more beautifully. Your home will be more fragrant, more verdant, and you'll be able to snap off a fresh sprig on a whim like a regular Barefoot Contessa. But once you actually get that window box going, it can start to seem like everyone is able to propagate those aromatics in perpetuity except you. With a few easy tips, you can turn those blue thumbs garden green. Thyme is a great place to begin because it factors into so many recipes, not to mention it produces pretty little flowers.

Should you want to grow thyme from seeds, know that they'll take a month to sprout. If you have that kind of time, you'll want to pack your soil into a pot with good drainage, sprinkle the seeds over the top, and place it in a spot that gets plenty of sun. Spritz it with enough water to keep the soil moist, but never muddy. Within a few months, you should be able to pluck a few leaves to use in recipes, but it'll be years before you can yield a bountiful harvest even if everything works perfectly. You can get to that point with patience and fairly little effort as long as you make sure never to soak the plant and to keep it in a bright area. Given how long the process takes, you may prefer a thyme growing (and time-saving) shortcut.

You can buy fully grown thyme in little plastic pots from plenty of vendors, likely including your local supermarket or grocery store. Its care should remain more or less the same, and it might even be more likely to thrive, being that it's already made it out of those dicier early days. And you'll still have a little patch of wild right there on your own counter. Should you truly need to satisfy the desire to grow it on your own like Dr. Frankenstein himself, you can try starting with a cutting.

Find your most herbaceous friend and ask them for a snip or two of their thyme. They'll lop off the top few inches right under a leaf node. You'll strip any lower leaves and pop it in a glass of water, which you should swap every couple of days. Keep it in a sunny locale for a few weeks until roots emerge. Plant it in that well-draining pot, maintain your misting to prevent the soil from getting too wet or too dry, and enjoy the little bit of lead time you've achieved versus starting from seeds alone.