I decided to setup a small garden on my balcony. Are you surprised?  Anyways, I’m gonna give you a little insight into what has occurred on day one.

Just a quick note, although the blog is about gardening on the balcony, The current temperatures are too low to allow for germination, so all of the plants are getting started inside.  We will move outside when appropriate.

After a trip to the local Home Depot, I had purchased the following things:

• Eight plastic pots and base pans
• One bag of “Miracle-Gro Seed Starting” Soil
• Enough seeds to recover from a nuclear holocaust
• One 3-Lamp Halogen Light

All together at Home Depot, I spent less than $60.00 to get all of the stuff to get this min indoor garden started.

After returning from the Home Depot, we put the soil into the pots evenly, 1 quart per pot.  This worked out flawlessly as the bag was 8 quarts and we had 8 1 quart pots.  That gave us:

As you can see we decided to label each pot with some leftover plastic knives we had laying around.  I also decided to attach the labels that came with the original seed packaging to the back of the knives.  This helps us keep up with the needs and expected germination time of each plant and other needs.

In order to assist in growth, as the bar that the plants are on are located in a rather remote location away from sunlight, extended sunlight hours, and also an effort to achieve the high soil temperatures required, I mounted the lamp directly over the plants about the bar.

The halogen lamp is sure to provide as much of a full spectrum as possible that is needed by the plants for growth.  The light emitted also assists in heating the soil from room temp of 70 degrees to over 75 degrees.  I used halogen as it was the widest spectrum light available at the home depot.  If you feel hardcore into it, you could use a full spectrum florescent bulb from a fish tank lamp.

We proceeded to plant all of the seeds from each package into a pot at the depth prescribed on the packaging.  No need for a picture here, mainly because I didn’t want to touch my camera with “dirt”-y fingers.

So, after a few hours of work we ended up with 8 pots with dirt and seeds.  Joy.

We planted the following seeds:

• Thyme
• Cilantro
• Tomato
• Catnip
• Peppers
• Rosemary
• Mint
• Parsley

We watered and are now waiting to see what happens.

Wish us luck.