In today's Q&A, I'm going to attempt to answer a question that Judy posed in the Beginners Garden Shortcut Facebook group.

I was asking what questions that those members had about herb gardening and containers in preparation for an upcoming podcast episode.

And she asked one that I thought would be a good one to address here on a Q&A episode.

And that is she had heard that in her zone 8A climate that it was too hot to grow cilantro.

And she was trying to figure out how she could grow cilantro.

Well, I'm in zone 7B and I can give my experience on that and it might be something that

may surprise you and that is plant it now.

I have been absolutely amazed at how cilantro in my area grows the best through the winter.

I have volunteer cilantro that is sprouting all over my garden,

and that is because of the cilantro that I allowed go to flour in the spring. If you haven't noticed,

if you've tried to plant cilantro in the spring, you may have noticed that it went to flour

really quickly, and if you didn't know that was what was happening, you may have

made a dish with cilantro and realized that it tasted so bitter. You couldn't eat it. We've all been there.

But usually it takes that experience for us to realize, oh, cilantro does not like the heat.

And so I found, like I said, that my cilantro will volunteer in my garden because I will let it go to flour in the spring.

The pollinators love it.

So if you're wanting to attract beneficial insects, this is like an extra tip today.

Let your herbs like cilantro, dill, others go to flour in the spring.

Lettuce, they attract all sorts of great beneficial insects.

But after the cilantro will flower, it sets seed. And of course, that seed, if you didn't know,

is coriander. So you can have a spice there, coriander. But if you don't harvest it for coriander,

it will drop into the soil. And in my case, it was dropping into the soil in May,

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