And it begins…

This is my very first post on my very first blog. Aren’t you proud of me? There will probably be a lot of aesthetic changes to this site because I’ve just started. I really have no idea what I’m doing, but I read lots of other people’s blogs and figured I should contribute back.

So here it is, a blog about my balcony garden.

I have always wanted a garden (just ask my parents– every spring or summer I’d ask them to dig me a little garden somewhere in the yard…). I think that I’m really a midwestern girl at heart, even though I grew up on the “urban” east coast. Maybe the fact that I was born near Chicago has something to do with it….

The summer before I went to college (I think) I finally was able to plant a cherry tomato plant in one of the mounds in the backyard. I faithfully cared for it every day and watched it grow, and then when the fruit started to ripen, I counted my harvest each day and marked it down on my calendar. It was a good plant and it gave me lots of yummy tomatoes. When I had to leave for college, my mom continued counting the ripe tomatoes each day and mailed me reports so I could keep my log. And it came back the next year from the seeds that had dropped!

Fast forward to graduate school. I’ve been here for about four years living in the same place– and it has a balcony. With mostly northern exposure, but enough western light that I began dreaming of someday growing vegetables out there. In January, I told my husband that one of my resolutions was to start a garden, and he smiled and has helped me make it a reality.

So last Sunday, a gorgeous day, we headed to Prairie Gardens to check out their plants and pots and get some help from the staff. They were enormously helpful… The first woman we spoke to had “Dr. B” on her nametag and turned out to be a retired horticulture professor. She was hilarious and knowledgeable, though she told us her emphasis was trees and shrubs. So she pointed us to another employee who had more vegetable experience and told me she would send me an email with the title and authors of a good container gardening book. The next employee, Niki, told us what sizes of pots we needed and how many plants could go in each pot. We asked her for recommendations about tomato varieties for pots, and she told us that though some say that the smaller the tomato, the better for containers, she has grown Big Boys with success in pots. She also confirmed that we could try training cucumber plants up a tomato cage so that they don’t vine everywhere.

With this advice in hand, my husband and I chose our plants and pots and headed home. Oh the giddiness (well, on my part) of finally starting a garden!!