My arugula has seeded itself a couple times over, and gives me more than I can use. Same deal with oregano - the seeds must blow in the wind because not only does it come back in the same place every year, but every year, I find it coming up through the cracks of all areas of my backyard brickwork, where only the tiniest amount of soil resides. I never much cared for the flavor of oregano, of which I had only ever had in its dried form, until I finally gave in and ate some fresh stuff from the yard. Now, when it's in season, I chop it up and eat it with whatever I possibly can.

If your wanting to use it as a flavoring, this method will obviously not work, unless you give it another year to expand its plants. Here, dill and cilantro have always dropped seeds and even though I use a germination deterrent (corn gluten) to reduce weeds, these seeds seem to survive well. Even for that, once the gluten breaks down it give a lot of nitrogen to the plants. This year, I had a huge harvest of dill so far, and none of the plants were actually planted by me, as seeds. Next to them was portulaca (moss rose), that also drops 'salt grain' sized seeds, and some survived to sprout the following year.

Not me hinesh I want Cilantro! I've tried to plant Cilantro 3 or 4 times and every time it goes to seed almost immediately. There has to be something that I'm doing wrong because the stuff that u buy in the supermarkets looks great and I don't even come close to having that kind of foliage. In fact I usually don't get any Cilantro leaves at all it seems to go right into some seedy type of plant with foliage that looks more like dill than Cilantro. Can anyone give me an idea of what I'm doing wrong? Most of the time I've use fairly good soil, potting soil when it's in pots and very nice stuff when it's in the ground. Am I using too good of a soil or do I just need to cut it back before it get over 4" tall? Any help would be much appreciated because this is the one herb that I use a ton of but I just can't seem to grow it at all.

Seeds will only germinate and become plants if they were mature to start with. Seeds will only mature on a living plant. It's doubtful if a plant grown indoors will have reached maturity before it died, or lived long enough for any seeds to have reached maturity - but there's no harm in trying, is there? Curly parsley, like other parsleys, is a biennial. That means that it lives out its entire life cycle over 2 years. In its second year, it will produce flowers, then seeds, and those seeds take quite some time to reach maturity. No amount of watering will bring a dead plant back to life. Certain deciduous plants can LOOK dead during winter, but there is still life in the roots, and usually in the stems (branches) as well - it shuts down and goes to sleep, and will bounce back in spring - but parsley is not one of these. If parsley looks dead, it is dead. Thoroughly dead. You can grow coriander (cilantro) at any time of the year, provided the conditions provided for it are right. Because it is a very short-lived plant (about 2 weeks in my subtropical part of the world), you'll need to do successive plantings, about every 2-3 weeks. Best to allow it to self-seed (ie drop ripe seeds and go from there without any intervention on your part). Hence - best outside. To again quote a long-departed old gardener friend of mine: "God didn't make houses, and he didn't make pots, either". Which means that most plants do better planted outside in the garden. What a lot of people forget is that (a) plants usually get much bigger and healthier when planted outside; (b) indoor plants are inhibited by the amount of dirt and grease which covers their leaves (c) all plants will be stunted to some degree when planted in pots (and usually the pots will be several sizes too small!); (d)the light coming through glass windows is FILTERED light - filtering out certain rays of the sun which plants need. I suggest you use the search facility here to browse through the many posts on the herbs you mention. eg: Here is a link that might be useful: search results for 'parsley'