Herb Basket Garden

by Tracey · Published September 2, 2016 · Updated February 9, 2019

I’ve had this wood picnic basket laying around for 3 or 4 years. The other night I got tired of tripping over it and made the statement -“I’m doing something with this TONIGHT or I’m throwing it away.”

I’ve been doing a lot of container gardening lately. Thank you Carmen Johnson for sparking my interest again. Plants can be planted in just about anything. I’ve been wanting to create a backdoor herb garden and this picnic basket would be perfect!

To protect the basket I sealed the entire inside with Thompson’s WaterSeal Clear.

I wanted to add a little color to the exterior of the basket so I stained it with Minwax Premoistened Wood Finishing Cloths (Maple). These cloths let you wipe on stain and finish in one easy step.

Because of the weave of the wood, it took 4 cloths to stain the basket. USE gloves when you use this product. Cool thing is that the basket was dry in an hour.

Although I treated the inside of the basket with Thompson’s WaterSeal, for further protection I put a thick plastic garbage bag as a liner in my basket. I also put a few slits in the plastic on the bottom of the basket so a bit of water could drain and hopefully prevent root rot for my herbs.

The soil went in next.

Once the basket was filled with soil, I trimmed the plastic liner a bit more so that it was even with the top of the basket. I then planted rosemary, purple basil and parsley.