How does your garden grow?

Now that the Passover posts are behind us, I am excited to talk about something very new to me. We are growing an herb and vegetable garden!

A few years ago, we grew herbs inside our house with an AeroGarden. We really loved having herbs readily available, and we didn’t buy them at the store nearly as often. We stopped that when we got our dog because she took over the area where the herbs were.

Now we are excited to start over with an outdoor garden but still easy for urban living.

First, let me tell you that I know nothing about growing a garden. We don’t even have a yard to plant things. We don’t even own a shovel. A company called Burpee Home Gardens contacted me a few months ago and asked if I would like to try their herb and vegetable plants and blog my experiences on their site. I received the plants a few days ago, but not the rest of the growing supplies. It’s up to me to grow them where I have room and maintain them. I will be writing about our garden for their site and on my site as well. I hope you’ll be interested in simple and affordable ways to grow a home garden. I promise this will be an honest look at beginner gardening. If you have questions or tips, I am open ears.

Burpee sent me 12 herb/vegetable plants, including different kinds of basil, tomatoes and bell peppers. They came in little compostable four inch planting containers. I think the plants are about $5 each, and are sold online or in gardening stores.

We went to Home Depot to buy some gardening supplies and figure out how to make these things grow. Our hope was to hang these from our balcony, but we think we bought the wrong type for our balcony. So they’ll be sitting on the balcony.

We came home with:

• two 32 inch expandable box holder ($15 each)
• two liners ($7.50 each)
• a pair of gardening gloves ($3.55)
• a watering can ($3.68)
• hand trowel (a shovel) ($4)
• and two bags of seeding soil ($4 each)

Total: ~$60

Our garden should last through the summer and grow to be very tall. We may have to replant in larger containers if the roots get wild and crazy. That’s part of the experiment, so we’ll see how it grows.

Here are the steps of initial planting:

We  left the herbs/plants in the compostable containers (we aren’t sure if this was correct or not).

We lined each container with the liner and placed six cups in each container evenly spaced.

We poured potting soil on top of the planter box until the cups were covered.

We watered them with our watering can.

That was it! Now we’re waiting for them to grow. They have been outside for one day, and I watered them again. I think I’ll water them daily especially because it’s already so hot.

Do you have any gardening questions or pointers? Have you ever grown an outdoor garden not in the ground?

Also, here is my latest CultureMap story about green cleaning products. There’s been a lot of green talk for Earth Day and these are some products I researched to keep your house green.

Putting green cleaning products to the test