Growing Coriander (Cilantro) at Home!

Coriander, also known as Cilantro, is used for flavouring many a dish and it gives them an appealing taste and odour. Cilantro leaves are also often used for garnishing food in plates at hotels. I have tried to grow coriander both in garden pots and on ground soil. In rainy season, coriander grown on ground can get spoiled because of mud particles sticking on to the leaves. So I prefer growing cilantro in garden pots.

Soaking coriander seeds overnight can improve the germination rate and leads to quicker germination. The seeds shown here were bought from a local shop. You can see as pinkish coating, which is routinely seen on coriander bought for cultivation. Coriander bought for cooking will not have this coating and usually do not germinate if sown, possibly because they have been processed in a different way. These seeds with pinkish coating should not eaten either.

If the thick husk is gently broken, that will also increase the chance of germination. I use this little plastic toy from kids’ kitchen set to break the husk without damaging the seeds inside. Usually there will be two seeds inside each coriander. Seeds might germinate even if not soaked or broken, but it will take a long time like a month for germination sometimes and many of the seeds might not germinate as well.

The seeds prepared thus are planted in garden pots. Small grooves are made in the potting mixture and seeds are placed in them. Seeds are then covered with soil from the sides of the grooves. If you look carefully, you can see the pinkish seeds in the grooves made on the soil in garden pots. The tiny plants seen are not coriander plants, but some other plants which have not grown well. Potting mix usually contains coco peat, dry cow dung powder and soil. I buy them from local nurseries along with garden pots.

This pot shows tiny coriander plants in their very early stage of growth. It is difficult to differentiate them from other vegetable plants at this stage. Sometimes you may be able to see the husk of coriander on the tips of saplings. If you look carefully, one of the saplings in this garden pot has a coriander husk at its tip and no leaves are visible yet.

Slightly older set of coriander plants are seen here. At this stage it is easy to recognize that they are coriander saplings. The leaves have serration typical of coriander leaves, though they are still small in these tiny plants.

Here the coriander plants have grown well and some of the leaves are having a yellowish tinge, probably due to exposure to very bright sunlight in summer and a bit scarcity of water. Coriander leaves can be plucked and used for flavouring various food preparations. At home I do not pull out the plants as whole, but rather pluck the leaves as and when needed.

Those selling coriander leaves usually pull out the plants with roots and sell them after clearing the soil from the roots.

This was the first ever coriander plant I had grown. It was the only one which I got after sowing several seeds. At that time I was not aware of the importance of soaking the seeds overnight and gently breaking the husk prior to sowing.

These coriander plants in garden pots have grown well over one foot in height and there are plenty of leaves. As I had more plants than what I needed for use at home, some have grown further and started developing flower buds.

Now the flower buds have opened and you can see plenty of white coriander flowers. It was nice to see them as I had never seen coriander flowers in my life. It was only because there were more plants than we needed that we could keep some for flowering, mostly out of curiosity to study the full growth of coriander plants. When you grow coriander for leaves, they are used up before they reach this stage.

Next stage was with plenty of green coriander seeds along with the flowers in between them. We usually do not see such coriander seeds as what we get from the market are the seeds which have matured and dried. Most often what we get are processed seeds which do not germinate on sowing. In my childhood I remember seeing coriander plants at waste dumps at home, sometimes sprouting from coriander which had spilled. May be in those days the coriander seeds were not processed, or else they would not have sprouted.

In due course the coriander seeds of plants grown in garden plants matured and became just like the coriander seeds which we buy from local shops for cooking. I took a lot of them, soaked them and planted them in garden pots. Though many of them did germinate, all of the seedlings withered away after some time and I did not get good second generation coriander plants. Not sure whether the plants were damaged because of heavy rains at that time as the seedlings were in large garden pots which could not be easily moved from rain to shaded areas. Anyway, it was gratifying to see the full life history of coriander plants at home.