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Supermarket living herb pots are designed to be eaten, not kept: each pot is 15-30 seedlings crammed together to look lush on the shelf, which is why they die on your windowsill in a fortnight (they starve each other). The trick: split one pot into 3-4 clumps, repot each with space, and a GBP 1.40 basil becomes months of basil. Hard herbs (rosemary, thyme, bay, sage) are perennial: one GBP 3 garden-centre plant replaces every packet you'd ever buy.
What The Herb Pot Calculator Works Out
- Your cut-herb habit: packets a month x price x 12. The four-packets-a-month cook spends GBP 40 or so a year on soft herbs, a good share of which wilts in the fridge drawer's famous graveyard.
- The split-and-repot trick: a supermarket living pot is 15-30 seedlings sown dense to look lush at the shelf, which is why it starves itself in a fortnight. Teased into three or four clumps and repotted with root space, one GBP 1.40 pot plus GBP 2 of compost supplies the soft-herb habit for 3-4 months. Water from the base, use the brightest sill, pick basil from the top.
- Grow-from-seed endgame: a GBP 1.50 seed packet holds 200 plus basil plants; a pinch sown every three weeks from March to September keeps the sill continuous, and coriander's bolting is managed by exactly that rhythm. Perennials (rosemary, thyme, sage, bay, mint in its own pot) end their purchases permanently.
- Share that wilts unused (advanced): prices the packets you throw away. A third is typical for soft herbs in a small household; a growing plant only gets picked when you need it.
- Compost, splits and months (advanced): edit the trick's assumptions: what a bag of compost and pots costs, how many clumps you make and how long a split pot keeps producing, giving the split-pot route's cost per year.
- Perennials pay back in (advanced): four garden-centre perennials at your price against the share of your packets that are hard herbs. One GBP 3 rosemary out-supplies every packet for years on Mediterranean neglect.
- Seed route per year (advanced): two seed packets and compost for a season of succession sowings. The working sill routinely out-produces the household's actual usage from May, the courgette lesson at herb scale.
- Best-case annual saving (advanced): what the habit costs now minus seed-grown soft herbs and perennials spread over five years. Freeze any glut in oil in an ice-cube tray for winter cooking.