The Backstory
It all started with a few herb plants I received as a Christmas gift. Rosemary, thyme, and a couple others. I kept them on the windowsill and watered them when I remembered. They were doing alright until I left for a ski trip and came back to find most of them dried out and dying. But instead of giving up, it lit a spark. I wanted to grow more, learn more, and build out a proper container garden on my apartment balcony.
What started as a few replacement herbs quickly spiraled into a full-blown urban garden experiment.
Succulents
My first expansion beyond herbs was a trip to Ikea, where I grabbed a handful of succulents. They’re hardy, forgiving, and perfect for someone still figuring things out.
I started experimenting with propagation from cuttings. You can snap off a piece of a succulent, let it callous over for a day or two, then set it on soil.
The cuttings grow a new succulent plant out of the tip, then grow roots downwards.
One of my succulents even flowered, which was a nice surprise.
Avocado
Growing an avocado from seed is one of those things that sounds too good to be true, but it actually works. You take the pit, clean it off, stick some toothpicks in the sides, and half-submerge it in a glass of water. Then you wait.
After a while, the pit splits open. Roots grow downward into the water, and a stem starts pushing upward.
Basil
Basil has been one of my most successful experiments. I’ve grown it from both clippings and seeds. Individual seeds planted in soil outperformed the pre-packaged seed pods by a wide margin.
The mother plant got absolutely huge. Eventually she started producing seeds, and I harvested somewhere between 300 and 400+ seeds from her.
Crazy Growers
Some plants just want to take over the world. Aloe is one of them. It grows fast and propagates even faster, sending out pups left and right.
Then there’s the Mother of Thousands. I collected a tiny one outside a store and brought it home. True to its name, it produces little plantlets along the edges of its leaves that drop off and start growing wherever they land.
Fruits
I picked up a couple strawberry plants and tried growing a pineapple from a chopped-off top.
Peppers!
This is the one I’m most excited about. I’ve started growing peppers with a long-term goal in mind: making my own hot sauce.
Final Words
Hopefully this will prove to be an entertaining and fun series to look back at. I have a weird resonation with gardening mostly from it being analogous to computers from an automated system perspective. I love setting up a system, and watching it take over from there.