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.

Eating Organically on a College Budget

It's not easy trying to live as impact free on the environment as possible when you're a college student....one of the reasons why I'm glad I'm attending a college where they've done their best to make sure that the food served in the cafeteria is not only cooked well, but as organic and locally sourced as possible. There's just one problem.

Although I may only weigh approximately 100 pounds, and stand 5'2", I have been told by the cafeteria staff that I eat about as much as a linebacker does. While all my friends say that they would love to have my metabolism, it's really not as great as it seems. It means that although I have a great resource with the meal plan I'm paying big bucks for, I often have a schedule that means I can't use to to its greatest effectiveness. My college has what they call 'meal replacements' that I regularly make use of instead of going to the cafeteria. This makes my schedule easier to handle, particularly when I'm running late and can't get to the cafeteria for breakfast as often as I would like.

When I can't get a meal replacement, or go to the cafeteria, I generally have to find alternatives that are both as healthy as possible, and within my budget. If I didn't have the ability to eat mostly organic at the cafeteria, I'd probably be relegated to the traditional college student foods. Yuck!

Hello After a Long Hiatus

It's been such a long time since I've posted to this blog; clearly, everyday life and a few dozen other things have gotten in the way.  But I believe in the ideas behind it, and I'm still just as passionate about trying to live in a way that benefits this planet and the beings living on it.

That means getting healthier, wiser, and more connected.  It means leaving light footsteps on the surface of the earth, not razing its resources to the ground.  It means realizing that living and eating "green" is a step in a much healthier direction.

Because life can be busy and being green is a job for more than one person, I've added another writer to this blog.  My older daughter is currently at college, and she may have many insights not only about the values with which she grew up, but also about just how it might be possible for even a busy college student to make a difference and live as "greenly" as possible in the midst of busy schedules and other important life events.

Welcome, Ayuh! (Our affectionate nickname for her.  Her baby sister called her that when they were younger and it stuck.)

Seedlings

The tomato and pepper seedlings are up--or at least, many of them are up.  Unfortunately, all but two of the Roma Paste tomatoes did not sprout, and one of the two that did is small and seems a bit sickly.  I fear the rest were non-viable, and that's a pity, because there should have been ten Roma Paste in total and I've ended up with only two.  There's not really enough time to replant successfully and have them get large enough fast enough to be effective this year, so I will have to purchase the eight I need from a greenhouse.

Fortunately, the Principe Borghese heirloom came up strong and beautiful, as did three of the Marglobes, and they will fit the four topsy-turvies that I plan to hang from the patio.  So it's only most of the ones that go in the garden that I will have to buy from someone else.

The huz is happy because all but two of the super-hot peppers I planted for him have sprouted; he warmed up the seed pots under a blanket and a light for a day, and the seeds he had saved from peppers we grew last year sprouted.  He has over a dozen of these pepper plants now, and he is the only one who really wants to eat such hot peppers.  But that doesn't matter.  He's happy, and he'll have his peppers, and that's a good thing.

Kicking Off A Year of Flat-Broke Eating

It doesn't seem like several months have gone by since the last post. Where does the time go? The economy being what it is, even food has to be on a strict budget. That got me to thinking that it might be good to share any tips or experiences I come across for the backyard gardener and people who want a greener lifestyle even on a shoestring budget.

It's mid-February, and time to start our seedlings to go into our small backyard vegetable garden this year. I'll start with that.

It isn't that seeds are horribly expensive, but it's better if you can save seed from heirloom plants--that way you aren't laying out even $1.50 for a packet of maybe 20 seeds. This year, I can't really afford that much, so I'm using seeds that I have either saved from last year's garden, that I already had on hand from previous years' purchases, or that were given to me a couple of years ago by the wonderful people at Wintersown.  Without them, I would not now have seed for the tomato plants I will need to help feed my family this year.  It's my goal to grow as much of our food as possible in the limited space we have. It's going to take luck and planning.

I'll post more soon as we go through the process of planning our garden, choosing which foods will give us the most bang for our buck, and taking the seeds through the indoor sprouting process so that they will be ready to go into the garden when the weather warms up.

Savory

Why is it that no one seems to know what the herb called Savory is? It's not important or anything--it's just one of the main herbs that help flavor the best-tasting tomato-based pasta sauce. It also adds the perfect flavor to cream of tomato soup. Tonight it was one of just three herbs (savory, parsley, and thyme) that I used to flavor the ham and broccoli crustless quiche we had for dinner. These are just the first few uses for savory that occurred to me. There are many more; hence my earlier sarcasm. I know I've heard many TV chefs mention it. So why is it that the big-box grocery store in our area does not even stock it with the culinary spices? And why do only a very few of our garden centers even stock the seeds, much less sell it as an annual along with the rest of the spice herbs? I've lost count of the people who've looked at me strangely and repeated, "Savory?"

Yes, savory. There are two varieties: summer savory and winter savory. The first is an annual and must be started anew every year, while the other is a perennial. If we were in Italy, I'd be willing to bet that this blog post would never have been written. I'm sure the Italians know what savory is. I'll bet that even if they didn't speak English and I asked for it by name, they'd still know what I was talking about. I, yi-yi!

Strawberries at Home

Here are the strawberries, all tucked into their new bed. There were more like three dozen plants, not two, and there are more where they came from. We're thinking about building another planter box in a different location so we can get the rest of the strawberries--maybe something that can hang on the fence and keep the plants away from the slugs.