Savage Garden: Week 0

We may have just had a foot of snow, but it’s garden-starting time! Sadly, I have no garden, but I am fortunate enough to have the roof-access door in my apartment, and the stairs going up there have a (currently snow-encrusted) skylight and a ledge all the way around (see below). I also have a completely unfounded optimism about my ability to grow vegetables indoors.

Even though I don’t have a real garden, I’ve gotten myself pretty psyched up to try growing vegetables in a fake one. There’s tons of information out there on how to grow edibles in container gardens (Instructables in particular has some really useful stuff), but I thought I’d try to give a play-by-play of a forgetful newbie attempting to grow vegetables in a city.

I bought some seeds: spinach, eggplant, tomato, chives, sage, parsley, cilantro, green onions, basil and California poppy. Obviously, this is a whole lot of seeds; I was so enthusiastic when I was picking out what I wanted that I didn’t register that the packet of eggplant, for example, says it makes 25 eggplant… plants, each of which, if they’re treated right, produce 10-12 eggplants. I have little enough faith in my abilities that I fully expect to screw up about 80% of the seeds I plant one way or another, so I’m not super worried about being overrun with vegetables.

Firstly, I know that I am forgetful when it comes to watering plants, and so I’ve decided to construct various self-watering pots that work by physics. I’ll get to the larger versions later as I make them, but to germinate the seeds I’m trying a modified Instructables self-watering pot that uses cotton string to wick water up from a container to the soil, thus making sure it’s not under- or over-watered due to someone like me, who is death to plants.

I poked a few holes in the bottom of a Dixie cup, then shoved a couple of wet strings through one hole, leaving half the string to hang down through to another cup of water below. Then I filled the cup with Miracle Gro, stopping to wind each string around at different levels. I planted the seeds and covered them, then got the soil really wet. For a comparison, I’m also planting some peat pots that I have to remember to water. We’ll see how this goes.

And there’s a slightly bigger version using old Indian takeout containers. We’ll see how this goes. When/if the seedlings start coming up, I’ll let you know which germination method worked better.