Spring Has Sprung...

...and what better way to celebrate it's arrival than adding a little of your own greenery to the budding life all around? It's planting season and I'm starting up my yearly tradition of container gardening. Time for seed starting!

Last year I bought some Jiffy mini greenhouses to start an herb garden and they worked out wonderfully, but this year I decided to do it on the cheap. You don’t need any fancy apparatus for a mini greenhouse if you’re only using it for seed starting. It tends to be a little cold near our windows and these homemade greenhouses keep the little sprouts warm and moist while they’re starting out.

Luckily, I still had some Jiffy soil pucks and wooden garden labels left over from last year.
I also like to save and reuse take-out containers for this, as they are the perfect size and shape. I planted the seeds in the pucks according to how they like to grow, safely ensconced in the takeout containers. Some seeds need to be soaked, others need to be super cold for a day or two, and some just need to be sewn and left alone. I staked them with their respective garden labels and wrapped the whole shebang loosely in a long sheet of plastic wrap. The garden labels keep the “roof” of the greenhouse up. Then all that was left was to put them in a sunny window – an extremely difficult task in a basement apartment – and let them do their thing. Just a week later and all my darling edibles were sprouting!

Pretty soon they’ll be big enough to transplant to larger containers, (usually big ol’ yogurt tubs) but I’d like to build a garden box this year to keep by the entrance to our subterranean abode. In addition to my herbs, I’ve also been growing some succulents from cuttings. They’re almost impossible to kill and don’t require a ton of light, so of course they’ll be living in my bedroom window next to a little moss garden I made round St. Patrick’s Day. None of these plants requite a ton of work or light so they definitely spruce up the cave I’m living in.

Don’t you just love nature?