I am a huge cilantro fan. I mean huge! I love cilantro on almost anything which is evident in several of the recipes I’ve posted on this blog.
Apparently I did not do much research prior to planting my cilantro and placed it in the top container of my double-decker container garden. If you want to read more about the container got check out my first Container Garden post here. I realized as the first few weeks passed my cilantro was not looking so hot. It seems that I was so disappointed about how sad the cilantro was looking that I did not snap a picture, but this is what it looked like about 3 days after I planted it:
You can see some of the leaves looked a little more yellow than green, but quite a few of them turned brown. That’s when I decided to see what was going on and how I could make my cilantro get healthy. As it turns out, cilantro does not do well in heat and hot temperatures…um, that could be a problem here in Texas!
Then I started thinking, one of my strawberry plants in the bottom container doesn’t seem to be getting enough sun. So, I decided to pull a switcheroo. I moved the cilantro to the bottom container and the strawberry plant when in its place up top. My hope was the new somewhat shaded location for my cilantro plant would make it thrive. After 28 hours in the new location the cilantro plant looked like this:
You’ll notice I have two new stalks that shot straight up to the right and one to the left. You can’t really see it in this picture but they were already starting to flower at the top. Upon noticing this change I immediately googled “Why is my cilantro flowering?”
Apparently when this happens your cilantro is stressed and this is called “going to seed.” Did you know that coriander seed is the product of cilantro, or rather cilantro grows from a coriander seed? The recommended remedy for this that works best for me is to trim off the flowers.
It has now been a few days since I moved the cilantro plant and I haven’t seem much change in the plant but the small stalks haven’t continued to grow so maybe I’m headed in the right direction.
[…] was and the cilantro went on bottom. Remember I talked about it last week? You can read it here. The strawberry plant is slowly perking up, the cilantro however I think is dying a slow death, […]