Gardens?

[Georges]

One word for all the apartment dwellers: Sprouts.

Your salads and grocery budgets will thank you.

For the people will limited space, I always recommend Eliot Coleman's books. He's a Maine farmer (~45th parallel, not too far south from Edinburgh) with decades of experience, who has incorporated (and sometimes improved upon) ideas and techniques from all over.

Also, if you can, find local seed swaps. If you only have room for a few plants, there's no point in buying thousands of seeds. (Although some seeds stay viable for many years, not all do.) Seed swaps are also a nice way to increase your chances of finding a plant strain that will do well in your area.

If you want to save seeds, the key words you want are "open-pollinated." Heirloom seeds are open-pollinated, but not everything that's open-pollinated will be marked heirloom. (The opposite of open-pollinated is hybrid seeds. They don't breed true, and sometimes are entirely sterile.)

Growing things. It's what I want to do for a living.

[chasely]

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Here's my garden. My transplants are finally starting to take root and get new sets of leaves. I was getting pretty pessimistic the last week though since it was so hot and dry here.

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[LessJos]

We have five acres (soooo blessed, I know!) with the following fruit trees: pomegranate, peach, plum, pear, apple, cherry, blueberries, blackberries, and figs.

Out back we have a 20x30 garden plot with tomatoes (lots and lots of tomatoes!), watermelon, canteloupes, squash, okra, pumpkins and peppers, plus some more blackberries vines, and plans to add kiwi, asparagus and strawberries next year.

Totally jealous not because of the space but because of the climate!!

I'm looking to get started with gardening with my partner

As we are both vegetarians, it would be fantastic to grow our own. This thread has definitely inspired me to get it started.

Tomorrow is time to clear out the weeds, and dig in!

Make sure you don't overdo it. If you grow too much in the beginning it will get overwhelming and neglected. Start with a few easy to maintain plants and see how it goes and add on next year and the year after. Square foot gardening is great! Can highly recommend it.

One other thing I've been thinking about... my workplace has a nice sunny patio and backyard, way more space than I have, and no one ever uses it... I'm considering sticking a young blueberry bush in a big pot out there and seeing if anyone complains!

I used to have cherry tomatoes and basil plants on my desk :-) That was awesome for snacks and lunch! Now I have an office with tinted windows facing north. :-((

Small yard? Install gutters.

http://lifehacker.com/5229896/gutter-gardens-grow-produce-without-taking-up-space

Been wanting to do this for awhile. Thinking about installing a hanging gutter garden outside my apartment building.

We did that. They are on the garage wall facing east. A little tricky since there is not much soil in the gutters and they need constant watering. So far we planted strawberries and lettuce in them successfully. Not sure if I will use them this year though because it is quite labour intense.

One word for all the apartment dwellers: Sprouts.

Your salads and grocery budgets will thank you.

Also, lettuce, cherry or grape tomatoes and most herbs will grow just fine on a kitchen window year round. If you have a balcony, you can easily add more plants. There are dwarf cucumber, beans, peas, peppers, etc. Perfect for small space and in pots.

I love to garden. We are on a ranch and have tons of space. However, in Canada the growing season is ridiculously short. Some years we had the last snow on the first June weekend and it's back on the last September weekend. That's not even three months.

I have a little green house where I grow my tomatoes and some herbs. This years I got 6 different kind of tomato plants: yellow grape, red cherry, roma, yellow pear, tumbler and one that's called health kick. I have a 16 square square foot garden with lettuce, radishes, carrots, spinach, herbs and lavendar. lavendar and herbs (basil, thyme, rosmary, parsley, sage, chives, ...) are all over the place because they keep the bugs down on other plants and we eat tons of herbs.

We also have a whole hedge of saskatoon bushes which is amazing since the berries are yummy but super expensive and tough to get in supermarkets. And we have red currant and goose berries and a lot of rhubarb. Some potato plants and 6 zucchini plants and for the first time this year 6 spaghetti squash plants. Phew, I didn't think we had that much but I guess we do.

I would love to garden more but the climate here is not exactly great and it takes a lot of time to tend to a garden.

One thing I would like to try next year is to grow a herbal tea garden (camomile, peppermint, bee balm, bergamot, sage etc.). I saw that somewhere online and love the idea. There are lots of plants that are hardy and even perennial, so it would be a nice project. Also, in fall you just cut the plants and hang them upside down to dry.

[Shoshie]

I have oregano, mint, chives, lemon thyme, golden cherry tomatoes, ground cherries (delicious mini tomatillos), butter lettuce, mesculin lettuce, baby carrots, brussels sprouts, sprouting broccoli, kale, rhubarb, garlic, snap peas, fava beans, snow peas, strawberries (just coming up now!), two artichoke plants, and teeny tiny pepper, eggplant, basil, leek, and chard starts. I'm a little worried that it's too late for the peppers and eggplants, but we'll see. It was my first year planting nightshades from seed, so I've been sort of making it up as I go along. My tomatoes and ground cherries grew marvelously and are chilling outside full time these days. I left my basil and pepper starts out a bit too late and they all got chilled, though. I also have some bush bean, cucumber, and zucchini seeds, but it's still to cold for them, up here in the Pacific Northwest. Next month, hopefully. I also just planted some pot-sized dahlia and sunflower seeds and bought a fuscia plant. And I have two orchids. I love plants! I just started gardening last season, and I totally fell in love.

[ZenGwen]

One word for all the apartment dwellers: Sprouts.

Your salads and grocery budgets will thank you.

As in bean sprouts, or brussel sprouts? (Here in the UK, when someone says "sprouts" they mean brussel sprouts.)

[Ocelot]

I'm guessing the kind of sprouts where you soak beans or seeds overnight then rinse them once a day while leaving them in the sun and they grow tiny little shoots, which you then eat! It's a super healthy and magical food in terms of nutrients and cheapness... but I never really found any I liked the taste of :/ If its brussel sprouts I'd be surprised, they're pretty huge plants for an apartment x)

All this garden talk is making my heart itch as I adore adore adore gardening but I don't even have a windowsill at the moment. My plants are down to:

1 parrot plant (I adore this thing, it grows flowers that look JUST like parrots. I don't know its proper name, lol). It's pretty miserable at being stuck in a shady attic room all day but it's grown so much this spring that it's almost a parrot tree now.

1 unnamed house plant. I don't know WHAT this thing is. It's like a strange ramson that sends out long creepers. It so far has no flowers or any distinguishing feature whatsoever. Someone gave it to me and I'm waiting for it to assert its personality.

1 aloe vera. It's in a kilner jar and really needs repotting. But I have no idea how to get it out.

A peppermint. Essential for tea.

A rather straggly thyme.

And a wild strawberry that I love, my baby sister gave it to me a couple of years ago and it grows the most delicious fruit I have ever tasted. Tiny, aromatic, vanilla-lavender-peachblossom strawberries with an aftertaste that lasts for hours.

Yeah... I really really need some ground to re-build my plant family back up. I can't go much longer without a fennel for a great stomach-soothing tea, and chamomile for my headaches, and salad to save a ton of money... yay gardens.

[Georges]

Definitely what ocelot said. Bean sprouts that we have here in the USA are sprouted from mung beans. Other things to sprout are alfalfa, radish, broccoli, mustard, fenugreek, buckwheat, wheat (I don't know if the sprouts are considered grain from a paleo viewpoint), kale, onion, and probably more that I don't know about.

Key Thing: make sure you're using seeds that haven't been treated with anything gross. This rules out a lot of the cheaper seeds, but a packet of high quality seeds --> a lot more sprouts than you'd get at the grocery for the same money.

Do stores sell UV grow lights in the UK? They don't cost much to run. They're not the best substitute for a sunny window or an outdoor spot, but I've seen some nice little setups that could probably be copied at a low cost.

[ZenGwen]

Cool! I think I may need to try this.

You say "seeds"... so, should I be looking for packets of seeds at a garden centre, rather than packets of beans at a grocery store? Maybe I should take a trip out to a garden centre and see what advice they can give me.

They do sell grow lights here, but I'll try it without first. I do have a nice sunny window for them, at least.

[Georges]

Yep, most sprouts are from seeds, like alfalfa. I think the only beans I've seen sprouted are the mung beans, which are the bean sprouts in Chinese (or at least Chinese-American) food.

Here's a link to an info sheet on growing sprouts: http://www.johnnyseeds.com/Assets/Information/sprouts.pdf

It's pretty simple, so the info sheet is pretty repetitive.

Aside from the sprouter that they sell and the method using a canning jar, I've seen (but haven't tried) cloth sprout sacks that can hang over a sink (or bowl).

One of the nice things with sprouts is that they only need sunlight for a couple hours right before they go into the refrigerator (or into the salad), so you can still use your window space for plants.

[LessJos]

I just had to replace my spaghetti squash plants. Late frost! Damn that Canadian spring!!!

[Georges]

>.<

We try to throw a row cover over the sensitive stuff when the weather calls for frosts, but we're in a valley, so we have to kind of guess what our low temp will be based on the NOAA forecast for the area. And I don't know about Alberta, but we stopped checking for frost warnings about a week ago!