We’re starting a vegetable and herb garden! Living in Arizona [Phoenix Metro, for the last 1.5 years.] initially discouraged us from trying a garden because of the heat and intense sun. Plus, we don’t really have any experience growing food. We did have a short stint in Colorado with a couple of tomato plants that yielded a couple of tomatoes. But that’s about it. So if we can grow some of our own food, reduce our carbon footprint a bit, save money and get a better tasting food than the supermarket, why not try?
Project Grow Our Own Food Starts Now
More specifically, project “grow a salad” – Lettuce, tomato, cucumber, radish, beets. If we make this happen, we’ll be ecstatic. It’s fun to think about growing our own food and being sustainable and living off grid. But for now, we’re starting small. Or at least trying to set realistic expectations.
How We Started an Edible Garden
Or so we hope. Follow along for updates. We’ll be keeping track of if and when things sprout, growth, fruiting, deaths [sad face] and more.
If you’re a new gardener, subscribe or save this post so you can garden and grow with us! You can use our successes and failures as a gauge. We find the hardest part of growing and learning about plants is that we learn from the pros who are posting perfection as the results. Which is great and needed, #goals. It’s what we’ll all get eventually, hopefully. But we also need to see the beginner results, which often look a lot different.
Materials:
You can use any seed starting containers you have on hand. / Any small plastic containers you have in your recycling. Just cut little holes in the bottom for drainage. Saran wrap or old plastic container covers can be used for the “greenhouse” affect.
- Red Cherry Tomato
- White Cherry Tomato
- Cherry Radish
- Sumpter Cucumber
- All Lettuce Blend
- Yellow Spanish Sweet Onion
- Genovese Basil
- Slow Bolt Cilantro
- Italian Flat Leaf Parsley
- Oregano
- Dill
- Garden Chives
Soak the seeds.
Prepare the seeds you’ll be planting by soaking them in warm water for 1 -24 hours. You don’t have to do this – but for various reasons it should speed up germination and increase success rates. So ours soaked for maybe 2-3 hours while we puttered around the house a bit, prepped the potting container and went for a swim. We weren’t patient enough to wait 24 hours but we wanted to give ourselves the best leg up that we could.
We filled our mini green house seed starter around 80% full with potting mix made for vegetables and herbs.
We used Sta-Green. We gave the potting mix a spritz so it was damp and gave it a stir with the tooth pick.
We put 1-3 seeds in each spot depending on the size of the seed. In theory you would just do 1 seed per spot but we’re rebels and we’re hedging our bet against duds that won’t sprout. We used toothpicks to help place the “bigger” seeds. We used the spray bottle to spray the super small seeds into the potting mix off of our fingers. [Tiny, sticky, little suckers.] Those spots got several seeds.
Top with potting mix. Spitz with water. Press down gently. Say a little prayer to the garden gods. Cover with the green house dome.
*The sticks were too tall to put the dome on. So we’ll put those back in after our seeds germinate.
Now we wait. Stay tuned for updates/ let’s compare results!
Thanks for follow along, Alyssa & Grace