Cilantro is searched for as "how long does it take to grow" in about five different phrasings, and the reason you will find wildly different answers is that the question does not quite fit the plant. There is no single number, because the variable is the weather rather than the crop.
Leaves are pickable within a few weeks. But cilantro flowers as soon as the weather says summer, and once it does the leaves are finished. The useful question is not how long it takes, but how long the window lasts — and what you can do to lengthen it.
The conditions that matter, in order
Cilantro is the odd one out among the herbs on this site. Thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary and lavender are woody Mediterranean plants that want sun, poor soil and dryness. Cilantro wants almost the reverse, and treating it like its neighbours is how people lose it.
1. Cool weather. This is the one that decides everything else. Cilantro is a cool-season annual, and heat is what triggers flowering. Grown in spring and autumn it gives weeks of leaf; sown into early summer it can flower almost immediately.
2. Steady moisture. A dry check — one hot afternoon with dry soil — brings bolting forward. This is the opposite of the woody herbs, which are at more risk from watering than from drought.
3. Light, but not necessarily full sun. See below; this is where most advice is too blunt.
4. Soil depth. Cilantro has a taproot. It wants reasonable depth more than it wants richness, and that taproot is also why it will not transplant.
5. Ordinary fertility. Not rich, not deliberately poor. It is not a starve-it-for-flavour herb.
Does cilantro need full sun?
Less than you would expect, and this is the single most useful adjustment you can make.
In spring and autumn, when heat is not the limiting factor, full sun is fine and gives sturdy plants. In summer, full sun works against you: the hotter the plant gets, the sooner it flowers. Morning sun with afternoon shade noticeably lengthens the leaf harvest in warm weather.
So cilantro grows in part shade, and often does better there than in full sun once the weather warms. Deep shade is a different matter and gives thin, drawn, weak plants. The way to hold it in your head: cilantro wants light but not heat.
That is why the quick facts table above shows a lower sun figure for cilantro than for the woody herbs. It is the threshold this plant needs, not a measurement, and the note under the table explains where the thresholds come from.
How long the harvest actually lasts
Since the quick facts table shows no days-to-maturity for cilantro — and says why in that row — here is the honest shape of it.
Leaves come quickly. A few weeks from sowing you can start taking outer leaves from a young plant.
Then the window. How long you keep picking depends almost entirely on temperature. In cool weather it can be several weeks of useful harvest. In a hot spell it can be a matter of days before a flower stem rises, the leaf shape changes to thin and feathery, and the flavour goes with it.
Then it is a different crop. Once flowering, the plant has stopped being cilantro and started being coriander. That is not a failure — see below.
This is why no single number honestly answers "how long does cilantro take to grow", and why you will find wildly different figures quoted. The variable is the weather, not the plant.
What actually lengthens the window:
- Sow in the cool parts of the year and skip the hottest weeks entirely.
- Afternoon shade once the weather warms.
- Never let it dry out. A check is a trigger.
- Pick often. Taking leaves regularly keeps the plant vegetative a little longer.
- Slow-bolt varieties buy a couple of weeks. They are worth using and they are not a solution.
And the technique that beats all of them: sow again.
Sowing, and why succession is the whole method
Direct sow. Cilantro has a taproot that bolts when disturbed, so it is sown where it will grow — which is why the quick facts table shows no indoor sowing or transplanting dates, with the reason in each row. Pot-grown plants from a supermarket rarely settle into a bed for the same reason.
Sow two weeks before your last frost date for the first batch; the planting date calculator works that out from your own frost date. Then sow a short row every two or three weeks through the cool parts of the season, and pick up again in late summer for an autumn crop. UGA puts cilantro in as a spring and late-summer planting, which is the same pattern from the other direction.
A single large sowing gives you a glut and then nothing. Several short rows give you a continuous supply from the same total amount of seed and space — the succession planting schedule covers the pattern across crops.
Spacing is 4 to 6 inches, and that range is a real disagreement rather than vagueness: UW-Madison gives 6 inches and UGA 4, so the table spans both rather than picking one. The plant spacing calculator turns it into plant counts for a bed. Sow thinly, cover lightly, and keep the surface damp until the seedlings appear.
For cut-and-come-again leaf rather than individual plants, sowing more thickly and cutting the whole patch a couple of inches above the soil works well, and often gives one further flush.
In a pot, give it depth for the taproot — depth matters more than width — and sow directly into the final container. A pot has the advantage that you can move it into shade as the weather warms, which is the single most effective thing you can do for a summer sowing.
Cilantro and coriander: the same plant
Worth one clear paragraph, because the naming confuses people in both directions.
The leaves are cilantro. The dried seed is coriander. Both come from Coriandrum sativum. In Britain, Australia and much of the rest of the world the leaves are called coriander as well, and the seed is coriander seed — which is why a recipe and a seed packet can seem to disagree.
So you cannot "plant coriander leaves". You sow the seed, and which crop you get depends on when you harvest: pick early and often for leaf, or let the plant flower and go to seed for coriander. A bolted plant has not been wasted, it has switched crops — leave it, let the seed heads go tan and dry, and collect them the way you would dill seed.
The flowers are worth leaving for another reason too, which brings us to the companions.
Cilantro companion plants
Cilantro's genuine contribution to a garden happens after it bolts, which is unusual enough to be worth planning for.
The mechanism is the flowers. Cilantro's flower head is a small open umbel, the shape that tiny beneficial insects can feed from — hoverflies, parasitic wasps, lacewings — whose larvae eat aphids and caterpillars. Attracting beneficial insects is the best-supported of the companion planting mechanisms, and cilantro is one of the plants most often named for it, alongside dill.
So the advice that follows is the opposite of tidy gardening: let some of your bolted cilantro flower instead of pulling it. A plant that has stopped being useful in the kitchen is at its most useful in the garden. It also self-seeds from those flowers, and volunteer seedlings often come up earlier and stronger than anything you sow deliberately.
Easy neighbours are tomatoes, peppers and spinach — the first two because cilantro is low and tolerates being shaded by them, which in summer is a benefit rather than a compromise. Growing it in the shade of a taller crop is a genuinely good trick. Our tomato and spinach guides cover those.
Fennel is the traditional avoid, and it is on the usual avoid-list for almost everything, on fairly thin evidence. Does companion planting actually work goes through which of these claims stand up.
The plants to keep it away from are the ones with opposite needs: the woody Mediterranean herbs. Thyme, oregano, sage and lavender want dry, poor, sharply drained ground, and the watering cilantro needs is exactly what damages them. Grow cilantro with the vegetables, not with the herbs.
The note under the companion table on this page is worth reading: these pairings are traditional garden practice rather than settled science, and sowing again every few weeks will do far more for your cilantro supply than any neighbour.
Soil and water
Moist, free-draining, ordinary fertility, with some depth. That is the whole specification. Cilantro does not want the deliberate poverty that suits oregano, and it does not want a heavy feed either — rich nitrogen gives soft growth and no more time before bolting.
Keep it watered. Steady moisture is a bolting-control measure as much as a growth one, and the seedbed in particular must not dry out while the seed is germinating. No publication behind this page gives a weekly figure, so the quick facts table says so rather than printing one.
No publication behind this page gives a pH range for cilantro specifically. UGA puts most herbs at about 6 to 7.5 and Minnesota at 6.0 to 7.5, and the table reports it that way rather than as a figure for this crop.
Common problems
It bolted almost immediately. Heat, a dry check, or root disturbance from transplanting. Sow again, direct, in a cooler spot, and keep it watered.
Leaves turned thin and feathery and the flavour changed. That is the flowering leaf shape. The plant has switched to making seed; let it, and sow a fresh row.
Nothing came up. The surface dried out, or the seed was old. Cilantro seed is not especially long-lived.
It came up and stayed tiny. Too little light, or competition in an unthinned patch.
Aphids on the stems. Common on soft growth, and the insects cilantro's own flowers attract are among the things that eat them — worth tolerating a modest infestation rather than spraying.
A pot-grown plant from the shop collapsed when planted out. The taproot. Sow your own; it is faster than you think.
Our other herb guides are basil, parsley, dill, thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary and lavender. The full set is on the crop guides index.