When I lived in Little Village years ago, I had these huge sunny kitchen windows with deep sashes, and plants thrived there. My Christmas cacti bloomed! My tiny jade plant became a tree. I had to repot the aloe three times in less than two years. The spider plants had so many spider babies.
Then I moved to a place with very little light. We were very close to neighboring houses on either side, and there just wasn’t enough light and everything drooped. I gave away what could be salvaged.
Several things we had were poisonous to cats, so I gave those away too. I tried to grow herbs a few times but couldn’t keep them going. More of an attention problem than anything else.
Then I moved here in 2021, and my friend Heather gave me a window box full of seedlings as a housewarming gift. @jeremydnichols.bsky.social was away in TX caring for his mom, and I started documenting the little green shoots for him.
This is her now. Some paperwhite bulbs I got in November. had a fungus gnat issue that spread everywhere, and we’ve finally got the infestation under control, hopefully without damaging her roots.
We got an Aerogarden on super sale last fall and what I’ve learned so far is that there’s a reason dill is a weed. This is from before The Problem where the dill and mint took over completely and I eventually scrapped everything & started over.
I know you have to harvest frequently to make it work and yeah…attention problems.
I’ve had good luck starting tomato and jalapeño pepper seedlings after the reset and am gonna attempt to grow them in containers. Here are the peppers getting acclimated to their big boy pots before moving outside.
If I manage to come out of this summer with edible crops, next year I’m growing a container of strawberries on the balcony like my grandma used to do. But I have to keep my pepper and tomato children alive first.
I'd never tried strawberries before two years ago and they kind of intimidated me - I have totally grown tomatoes and peppers.
Strawberries are so much easier. I commend the order in which you're going because it'll be like jogging with ankle weights. :D
You may have to put bird netting on the strawberries once they start to fruit.
I’ve planted dozens over the past 30 years and never got more than a small handful without various critters biting into -or- stealing them the minute a berry started to blush.
I love nasturtiums and so do the hummingbirds! They (the nasturtiums, not the hummingbirds) taste delicious in salads in addition to looking pretty. I started three different types last week.
I am very strongly considering growing cherry tomatoes in a bucket on our back porch, but don't know how to even get started. So we'll see what I decide by the end of May. It would just be convenient given how many cherry tomatoes my gremlins eat on the regular.
Tomatoes are pretty tricky in containers. They can drink a lot of water in hot weather. I had mine in a large plastic bin each, with a 10 litre water compartment on the bottom. Middle of the summer I had to fill those up all the way, every day.
Strawberries are probably easier.
I have done tomatoes in pots in my kitchen window with decent success! Not this year though, as one of the cats has decided that salad is her favorite treat(???) and all plants need to be tasted
I experimented with setting up a simple DIY hydroponics system and out of all the seeds I tried, it was the basil that went fa-WHOOM. I was seriously begging people to take basil off me the way you usually have to do with zucchini.
My spouse has one of those and his nemesis is basil. He loves basil, harvests it constantly, and still ends up with a small basil bush. However, he can't get mint to grow correctly at all.
Probably because the basil takes all the light.
Arugula and mustard greens do fantastic in my AeroGardens. And don’t take over as badly as dill. (Oh lordt, the dill tree I got rid of a couple months ago…)
