For want of Cilantro....

Now that I have moved into my own apartment, I've started up a new project. It's a large one, and really very exciting. I've started to garden right inside my apartment. It's not the biggest undertaking in the world, but it's still pretty expansive and it all started with a desire for cilantro and tomatoes.

In my apartment, I have two west facing windows that are a combined 8 feet in length. While there is another apartment building right in front of mine, It's set at an angle, so I still get lots of good sunshine during clear days in the afternoon, and lots of bright indirect light. Perfect, I'm thinking, for growing plants!

Right away I asked my dad for help, and between the two of us we came up with a design for it. The bottom half of the shelf is built out of scrap wood he had in his garage, and we painted it with the remnants of a light grey house paint that was left over from the last house we lived in. The legs are fully detachable, making it easy to disassemble and move if I ever need to. The picture below features what it looks like, along with my windows. On the table is a potted geranium I've had for a long time, and some seedlings I started in some used yogurt cups.

After my dad and I had completed the plant shelf, I decided to get going on creating my indoor garden. One weekend, I shanghaied the other parent, and mom and I went to a greenhouse to pick up what we could. We were unable to find everything that I wanted to, as it was late fall by this point and many of the softer herbs were already unavailable.

I was able to pick up several plants though. In total, I was able to get a rosemary, purple sage, lavender, silver edged thyme, and several packets of seeds for various other plants like basil and mesclun salad mix.

In addition, some tiny tomato seedlings were starting to sprout at this point in the yogurt cups. When I was organizing my pots of plants, I paid attention to what other plants they did and did not like, and I created a pattern for optimum placement of the plants on the shelf. This allowed me to more easily fit the different sizes of pots onto the shelf, as I had 6 inch pots and 8 inch pots on a table that was 18 inches in depth and just under 8 feet in length.

For supplemental lighting, I bought two 2 foot long, 4 bulb T5 grow light boxes that I suspended from the ceiling over the plant shelf from Amazon. Though expensive, I bought these partially because they are more maneuverable than the longer version, which is a 4 foot long section. The other reason is because they are 'cool bulbs', which means that the plants can touch the bulbs directly and not burn. With ratcheting support hooks, I am able to move these up and down depending on what that section of plants need, allowing for greater control over the environment.