Seattlest Pix 09Nov21
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The start of our own indoor herb garden
However, we love our apartment, and though we may not be able to afford "a room with a garden" just yet, there are options, and luckily we live in a city that thrives on community gardens and P-Patches.
Seattle boasts 68 P-Patch gardens throughout the city, with four more coming up this year. The P-Patch Program began in the early '70s, beginning with Picardo Farm (the "P" in P-Patch stands for Picardo). And since beginning some odd thirty years ago, thousands of gardeners and volunteers have put in countless hours to keep up what is now the 68 P-Patches, over 1,900 plots, and twelve acres of land.
Though some of the waitlists can be long to get a plot, some are also as short as six months, with only up to four people already on the list. And besides allowing us to plant our veggies and roses, the P-Patch program is also valuable in the fact that each year they donate at least seven to ten tons of produce to local food banks.
If P-Patches aren't your bag, there are a couple more tips we can offer for an indoor garden. Yeah, we know that you might not be able to get away with a full garden popping up in your living room, but how about a small herb garden on your kitchen window sill? Because this has become such a popular trend for urban dwellers, there are many new herb growing kits popping up everywhere, there's even a Chia herb garden for god's sake.
We have been planting our own herbs from scratch in our kitchen for a couple years now, and we've definitely learned from trial and error that a) basil is the easiest indoor herb to grow, and b) thyme is the hardest. We hear it can happen, but in our own experience it hasn't yet (though we're trying again this year). One other thing to keep in mind--if you have any southern sunlight exposure, that is the best place for them to start and survive.
And one last thing we've found that we love in our indoor gardening experiences is the indoor tomato plant we bought last summer at the Ballard Farmer's Market for only $12! This amazing plant blooms every three months throughout the year, and as long as it has a little sunshine, it grows like a weed and just keeps going and going...seriously, we've had cherry tomatoes since February.
We promise that your friends will come over and stare in disbelief, when you have the perfect cherry tomatoes to eat mid-winter. We're hoping the same vendors (we believe their name is Sequim Prairie Star Enterprises) will be back this summer, because they also sell an indoor pepper plant that we cannot wait to try out. Fingers crossed.
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I've got a big cedar garden box that I built on my west-facing balcony. It's covered with plastic, and is growing salad, radishes, peas, and kale like crazy.
I used to plant things in bunches of pots, but it was so messy I couldn't actually sit on my balcony.
Photos? Sure, why not...