Eave-side porch garden

      It’s been awhile since I’ve done a post just on apartment gardening. I’ve done a lot of it in the last couple of years. Lots of things grew nicely. Lots more things died because I didn’t have the right conditions.

      I was reading over the last and first only post of my apartment gardening posts. Oh the mistakes in it! It’s appalling. Letters missing, grammar sadly lacking, it’s embarrassing. In my defense, I have a horrible time seeing my own mistakes. My super-fast-awesome-reading-skills skim right over them. That’s right , my super-power ability is actually a weakness.

      Anyway, I’m doing a ton of apartment gardening, inside and out. At the moment I have an aloe plant in my kitchen window. There is a garlic experiment right outside the front door. And my porch garden is growing wonderfully, both in quantity of plants and well, the plants actually growing.

      This time around I feel like I have a better hold on apartment gardening. I’m remembering to think long term a little more, considering the elements I have to deal with, and how large said plants will get.

      I’m lucky enough to have a porch that gets close to full sun after about 11 am. It has a divider and a wall of trees that keeps the wind down on stormy days. There is plenty of space out in the open for plants that love or don’t mind rain. It also has a decent amount of room under the eaves for those plants that don’t like their leaves to get wet, such as tomatoes. At my front door I have some room for those plants that don’t need mostly full sun, but just a little morning direct sun and indirect sun the rest of the time. My windows provide much of the same, though, since Milo loves his window sills, I’m trying to figure out what to do to keep those plants that need to be inside in the winter, close enough to light, but safe enough from being knocked over because of kitty frustration. I still have yet to get a grow light. I think that it has become a need, for the plants and for me, because it provide UV light, unless I’m mistaken. And we all need that during the grey winter, sometimes fall,spring and summer months.

My goals for my apartment gardening/porch gardening

      Of course I have to have goals for this fun adventure. Without some planning everything will die and I’ll be left feeling wasteful and selfish.

• Use of organic soils so that which I grow to eat is safest and best to eat
• Grow edible things more than plants just for show, i.e. herbs and tomatoes
• Grow things that will last a few months, even years and produce things I’ll actually use
• Have lots of fun and learn a lot
• Share my extras, I can always use work on sharing
• Practice gardening so I can be better prepared when I have an actual backyard and garden
• Create something of which to take pictures
• Dry or preserve things grown to be used in winter time so I don’t have to spend so much money on herbs for cooking(also a reason I have an herb garden at my parents house)
• Give in to the urge to pretend to be Laura Ingals of Little House on the Prairie more often, I can never be too old for that
• With luck(sunny weather) and practice, take pictures of my apartment porch garden that won’t look washed out.

      We’ll see how many of them I’ll actually achieve. So far I’m doing fairly well on keeping things edible and practical. And yes, I will consider my recent eucalyptus purchases practical. They discourage insects. They just happen to be pretty. Yup, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself. It is partially true.

The Modern Hippy