Growing things

Inspired by a couple friends and blogs I read, I wanted to try my hand at growing our own food. The catch: we live in an apartment on the third floor. No yard. I'm doing a fun experiment by growing vegetables and herbs in pots on my balcony in hopes I'll get some garden-fresh vegetables to try. Currently, the broccoli, cauliflower, peas, chives, and parsley have sprouted, and the basil, thyme, and marjoram are just starting to peek up. No tomatoes yet, and I haven't planted the carrots or green beans.

With my few pots, I don't expect to have tons of vegetables to be able to feed us through the winter or anything. Someday, I would like to try my hand at freezing or canning what we grow and having our garden food last longer. As it is now, I just wanted to give growing a first-try.


This week, the weather went from short-sleeves-and-capris weather to heavy-coat weather. I guess an advantage to having no yard is that all my plants are portable. Due to the below-freezing temperatures at night, they all came into my dining room, and will remain there until spring decides to return to central Indiana.


This is the super-cute herb pot I bought at Aldi. It came with FIVE kinds of seeds, but I decided against putting then ALL in this little pot. As it is, chives are around the sides and parsley is in the middle.


These are my baby broccoli plants. I planted enough seeds to make sure some came up, but I think I'll have to pull some of these up to make room for the grown-up plants- they're supposed to be planted feet apart, and I don't have that kind of room, but to give them some reasonable amount of room, it'd be good to have 2-3 adult plants in this pot, I think.


These are my pea plants. I'm excited about these. I like peas. I like green beans even more, and, once the peas are harvested, I'll plant beans in these planters.

So, give me a few weeks, and these plants will be in my dining room for a different reason- to be eaten rather than just kept warm!