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Windowsill kitchen garden: Week 6

March 18th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Week six of trying to grow all kinds of tasty foods on an inside windowsill. Still trying to get as much deliciousness as possible for the least amount of outlay. What’s growing and what’s not?

The pea shoots have had their fish and chips. They’ve turned into mushy peas and aren’t going to give us a third crop. The first two rounds were great though, two gourmet bunches of pea shoots in one month from a tiny handful of peas and the smallest amount of soil-free compost. Will start another batch at the weekend and ditch the old ones:

The parsley is doing really well, so here’s the last pic of that:

Mint’s catching it up, finally, and the dill is putting out its first true leaves. Basil’s written off until April.

The spicy leaf mix is still fairly useless. Will probably sow another batch next month in a different container.

The iceberg lettuces got off to a good start but are a bit leggy now. Not sure if they need more sun or less. Any ideas?

The mustard greens seem really happy, and the salad bowl lettuces I sowed in the mini propagator four days ago are sprouting already.

So far so good with peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and the mini chili plant:

Finally, the radish tops were so delicious that I’m probably going to grow them all year round as microgreens. The variety I used was Cherry Belle, if you’d like to give it a go too. The flavour was sweet and mild, and you get fairly big fast-growing dark green leaves with red stems.

Have also sowed small pots of chervil and spring onions, but they are supposed to take a long time to germinate, so no pics of empty containers here. If there’s time at the weekend, will start off some land cress and baby leaf spinach too, to see how they get on.

So far the winners here are: pea shoots, common (curled) cress, mustard greens, parsley and radish tops. It might change as we go into Spring and Summer, who knows?

Are you growing any windowsill food? What are you having the most luck with so far?

Tags: grow your own food indoors, grow your own salad, growing food indoors, how to grow pea shoots, kitchen windowsill gardening, windowsill herbs, windowsill kitchen garden
Posted in Home & garden | 2 Comments »

Windowsill kitchen garden: Week 5

March 11th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Week 5 is here, and the longer days and sunny moments have cheered the windowsill up no end. I thought I’d ring the changes with some of the things I’ve been growing, so off I went back to Poundland for another of their bargain £1 mixed packets of seed.

I bought their ‘fresh salad’ multipack, which contains radish, cress, spring onion, tomato, iceberg lettuce and cucumber, all of which I hear can be grown indoors. The tomato variety is Moneymaker, which I won’t be growing this year as I’ve set my heart on growing other varieties (more about that later). The lettuce will probably be eaten at the baby leaf stage, or there won’t be enough room for it. Iceberg isn’t exactly gourmet, but it does have a mild flavour and a good crunch, and it mixes well with pea shoots.

Speaking of which, I cut the last lot of shoots for a garnish. They tasted as good as the first crop, but there were fewer of them and they grew smaller leaves. To complete the experiment I’ll try to grow a third set of shoots from the same pot, although I’m not too hopeful they’ll be as good. Here’s what they look like now, rather depleted.

Here are some of the herbs: dill (new), mint and parsley. The basil is still being finnicky and I’m probably going to end up re-seeding the pots at this rate. I have loads of different seeds left over from my outdoor herb garden so will probably try a few different varieties on the windowsill too to see how they turn out.

Next up, the radishes and cucumber were planted 6 days ago and are already going strong. They’re the pots on the left. Will be pulling up radish thinnings soon and adding them to salads – sowed 8 seeds as an experiment and wasn’t expecting them to have quite so much oomph. Haven’t started the spring onions off yet, but maybe at the weekend…

Mini-lettuces just sprouted, and all I can say is that I hope the other salad leaves start to take note of their work ethic:

The spicy salad leaves are still looking like overgrown cress, the slackers. Might decide to grow a second batch soon, but start them off in a mini-propagator instead and hot-house the little gits.

Speaking of mini propagators, the tomato seeds I planted (cherry and plum) last week are doing really well.

I’ve been bartering on GardenSwapShop and bidding on eBay to get some more interesting salad seeds too, as cheaply as possible. I now have red and green salad bowl, Lazio spinach, red mustard, lollo rossa and rocket to sow, all of which are cut-and-come again varieties so hopefully we’ll get several crops out of each plant. There’s also some land cress, which is supposed to be easier to grow than watercress, but let’s wait and see.

The total spend so far is £3.99, which I’m hoping will keep me in salad ingredients for several months. About the same price as a couple of bags of supermarket baby leaf salad, and with lots of variety so we don’t get bored.

Are you growing food in your kitchen too? How’s it coming along?

Tags: grow herbs indoors, grow your own pea shoots, growing food indoors, how to grow pea shoots, kitchen windowsill gardening, windowsill herbs, windowsill kitchen garden
Posted in Home & garden | 4 Comments »

Windowsill kitchen garden: Week 4

March 3rd, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Can it really be week four already? The windowsill doesn’t seem to be getting much direct sunlight, and it’s not the warmest place in the house, in spite of the double glazing. During the sunny days earlier this week I moved some of the pots outside or to sunnier windowsills at the front of the house.

Here’s how it’s getting on:

First, here’s the pea shoots about 13 days after I cut the first set off (delicious, by the way). I had to throw out a couple of peas that’d gone bad, but nearly all the remaining peas have sent up a new shoot. Some sprout from the cut stems, others grow out of the pea itself. They should be ready to cut again before the weekend, and I hope they taste as good as the last lot. Read somewhere that you can get up to three crops out of one set of peas…

Next up, the cress. No need to mess about with cotton wool, just pop a folded-over bit of kitchen paper in a novelty eggcup, sprinkle with water and seeds and away you go. The double egg cup means you can have one lot ready and another lot sprouting at the same time.

And you can’t have cress without a bit of mustard… The seed collection I bought last month had mustard greens seeds in it – I’m sprouting a few here that seem to be enjoying the party. Will thin a few out to eat with the cress in a salad, and maybe keep some of the others to grow to full size outdoors in a pot. They make gorgeous curry.

My parsley has gone mad. It’s what I’d call ‘leggy’, which is fine for a ballet dancer but not a good thing for a plant, and it probably needs some more light and nutrients. The orange bobbles are granules of slow release plant food I found in the shed. At some point very soon I will have to write about how it went from being The Shed Of Doom to The Shed That Keeps On Giving, but not today.

The chilli seeds sprouted, and I kept the biggest, toughest looking one to grow on. It’s just thinking about stretching out its first pair of true leaves. Thinking about it, not quite doing it.

The spicy baby salad leaves are still doing the square root of eff all, so I’ll give them a dose of plant food tomorrow and hope for the best. Meanwhile, the mint and the purple basil are finally making an effort. That effort is so tiny you might miss it, but credit where credit’s due and all that…

That’s it from the windowsill this week. Next week there might be some new varieties growing away on there – I’ve found a couple of packets of bargain seeds on eBay and it’s time to break out the spare propagator.

What have you been growing?

Tags: grow chilli peppers indoors, grow salad indoors, grow your own pea shoots, growing food indoors, growing your own pea shoots, how to grow pea shoots, kitchen windowsill gardening, windowsill herbs, windowsill kitchen garden
Posted in Home & garden | 1 Comment »

Windowsill kitchen garden: Week 1

February 6th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

It’s been a week since I started the food garden on the inside windowsill in the kitchen. The weather has been mostly grey and overcast, but most of the plants are starting to make their presence felt. I’ve been gardening with whatever’s been lying around, some of which was reclaimed from the recycling bin, and the rest was mainly left behind by the people who lived here before us.

I forgot to say I’d planted some cress, which grew a full crop in 6 days. It strangely vanished, but unconfirmed reports suggest it got into an unlicensed bagel with some smoked cheese at around noon today. Think I’ll forget the compost next time and chuck it into the world’s silliest novelty egg cup with some soggy kitchen paper instead. Here is the last known photograph of batch 1:

Some of the pea sprouts are sprouting, using the method that can take up to 2 weeks:

I’ll be trying a different method next week that involves pre-soaking the peas and using a lot less compost. Fewer resources, less washing up, and allegedly higher percentage of germination. Sounds too good to be true but let’s wait and see.

The spicy purple basil and the green basil are just making themselves known, but they’re a bit shy so far. Hello purple basil, no need to be bashful…

The baby salad seeds have sprouted their first set of leaves, or at least germinated a little, but I won’t be able to tell what type of individual plants they are until they send out their second set. They’ll be more interesting in a few days, but here’s a baseline picture for the time being.

I would like a nice planter instead of this double-punnet contraption, but will wait to see whether the baby leaf experiment works first. At least it’s practical, and the drainage is just right.

As for the bigger pots of herbs, the mint’s still fast asleep under its duvet like a teenager who doesn’t want to go back to school after the end of the Christmas holidays. Come back next week and ask again about that one. The parsley, on the other hand, is doing me proud:

The chili pepper seeds by the radiator haven’t germinated yet, but they’re strange little plants and might take up to 6 weeks so there’s no point fretting about them. Apparently they don’t get out of bed for anything less than 70 degrees F, like finicky supermodels. If they don’t sprout I’ll just nip into a branch of Wahahca and ask if they have any of their little freebie match books of seeds to spare.

Anybody else out there got a windowsill food garden going right now, or planning to make one?

EDITED TO ADD: We now have a little online club for windowsill growers to swap tips, ideas and bargains. 100% free to use and non-profit. It’s right here on the Penny Golightly forum – anyone can read the comments, and it’s really easy to sign up if you’d like to join us and make your own posts and ask questions. Please feel free to have a look and join in.

Tags: grow your own pea shoots, growing food indoors, windowsill herbs, windowsill kitchen garden
Posted in Home & garden | No Comments »

Kitchen windowsill gardening

February 1st, 2010 by Penny Golightly

I’ve just re-planted my kitchen windowsill over the weekend and hope to get plenty of foodie goods from it over the next few weeks.

Most plants do better outdoors but if you have no outside space then you can still grow yourself some tasty crops, with the added benefit of being able to sow and cut most of them all year round. This can be done on a shoestring budget, or you can spend a few pounds more and go for gourmet plants or attractive pots and planters.

The basics

If you’ve never tried it before, here are a few basic pointers. Your windowsill conditions will dictate what thrives and what doesn’t. A cold, north-facing window with little direct sunlight might be better for delicate herbs and salads, and a south-facing window with four or more hours of daily sun might be better for chili or tomato plants. One of the most common problems is things rotting, so pots need plenty of drainage. To avoid waterlogging, a water mister spray can be used to make sure plants don’t dry out, and tiny amounts of water every few days works better than occasional soakings.

Most indoor plants need plant food when they’re in an active growth phase for more than two weeks, in spite of what you may have heard about herbs preferring harsh conditions, and the plant food needs to be one that’s safe to add to anything that’s going to be eaten. While it’s really cheap to use soil from outside, potting compost or sterile growth mediums are less likely to bring pests and diseases into your kitchen so it’s usually well worth paying the extra for it.

What can you grow?

1. Herbs: especially parsley, basil, and coriander. You may also have good luck with chives, mint, lemon balm, chervil, dill and marjoram/oregano, depending on the growing conditions. While I love to eat coriander at dinner time, I don’t like the smell from a whole pot of it while I’m making a cuppa in the morning so it has to live on the outside doorstep instead, but you may feel differently. If you have an outside garden you can bring in pots of rosemary, thyme, sage etc over the winter, but be warned that they may stop growing while inside the house and they’re not usually happy to live on an inside windowsill all year round.

2. Baby salad, microgreens and lettuce: you can either grow whole lettuces or sprout baby leaves and pick them quickly. For the price of two supermarket packets of baby leaves, you should be able to get enough seeds to grow your own salad for several months. Whole lettuces tend to work best if they’re ‘cut and come again’ types, where you can remove a few leaves from one lettuce (or even most of the top of the lettuce) and a few days later new leaves will grow back. They tend to be open lettuces like lollo rossa, and you can also get this effect with more exotic leaves like mizuna.

Baby leaves and microgreens sprout up quickly in 10-21 days and thrive in shallow punnets, and if you stagger the sowing weekly then you can have one punnet growing while another is ready to crop. There are many varieties that lend themselves to this such as: sorrel, dandelion, lambs lettuce, most conventional lettuces, rocket, cresses, chicory, endive, corn salad, radicchio, arugula, purslane, chervil, certain edible varieties of nasturtium and mustards. You can buy ready-made mixtures of these seeds, including mesclun mix and others, or just buy them singly according to taste. Pea shoots also come into this category and are another cut and come again crop, but they need to be planted in pots at least 2cm below the surface of compost.

3. Sprouted foods: sprouted seeds, grains and pulses can be ready to eat in as little as two days. Popular sprouts include alfalfa, chick pea, green lentil and aduki bean, but you can also sprout sunflower seeds and even broccoli seeds. Try mung beans if you want to grow the beansprouts that are used in many Chinese stir-fry dishes. They can be soaked and then sprouted in glass jars with cloth over the top or in a commercial sprouter – a quick search online will show you the best methods. Don’t sprout kidney beans to eat raw as they can give you a form of food poisoning. If you grow the sprouts without waterlogging them, once they’ve sprouted you can keep them in the fridge for a few days.

4. Chili peppers and tomato plants: warmer windowsills can be home to some types of tomato and pepper, but check information about different varieties as some are better suited than others. You need to like the smell of their foliage if you’re going to grow them indoors.

5. Others? Some people say you can grow other plants on a kitchen windowsill, such as beetroot. I can’t vouch for this as I haven’t tried it, but you’d need a fair bit of space to get a decent crop and they’d take many weeks to grow. If it did work, you’d be able to eat a few of the baby beetroot leaves as salad or in stir-fries.

Costs etc

Be on the lookout for cheap seeds, specially in January and February. I’ve had really good luck in the past with ones from Lidl (29p), Poundland (6 for £1) and Aldi. You can also swap half a packet with a friend if you have more than you need of one type. Friends and neighbours with allotments or greenhouses might give away surplus seedlings for free too, if you’re looking to grow whole lettuces, chilis and tomatoes – or you could be offered some on Freegle or Freecycle if you ask politely during Spring. Then all you need are pots with drainage holes, maybe some stones/gravel/broken pottery to aid drainage in larger pots, growing medium/compost and maybe some plant food.

If it’s going to be inside the house, I like a mini-garden to look pretty as well as be practical. If you’re going to grow baby lettuces, it’s easy enough to hide those repurposed plastic pot noodle cartons inside some kind of planter or box. I’ve seen yogurt pots tucked away into pretty teacups, and bigger plants put into old teapots and even old metal fish kettles, but it really depends on your personal taste as some might find that too twee. At the moment we have a long zinc planter from a hardware shop that holds three pots of herbs, and I’ve also managed to use a few empty bean cans (labels removed) to make small industrial-looking mini-planters that go nicely with it.

At Golightly Gardens

I’ve just planted mint, parsley and sweet basil using seeds I had left over from last year, and I’m also having a go at growing pea shoots from surplus seed peas. This time I’ll try to remember to re-seed the pots as I crop the herbs to keep a continuous supply. Some of the window space is taken up by a mini-propagator at the moment, but from late spring that will be replaced by either beansprouts or punnets of rocket. I love spicy food too, so last week I bought the latest Poundland seed bundle called ‘nice and spicy’, from which I’m going to try to grow a cayenne pepper plant, some spicy purple basil, and a lot of baby leaf mix (mizuna, cima di rapa, green pak choi and red mustard). I might even try to grow one or two of the pak choi and mizuna plants to maturity in separate pots if I can hold back from eating the baby leaves.

The Poundland sachet also had mustard greens and coriander in it, but they’ll have to be grown outside by the doorstep and don’t count as part of the indoor garden. The outlay for the kitchen windowsill so far this year is £1, which isn’t too bad at all for what could potentially be quite a lot of fancy food. Pictures will follow when things start to grow, as empty pots aren’t very interesting to look at.

Do you grow any food on your kitchen windowsill? Are you thinking about it?

Tags: baby leaf salad, beansprouts, growing food indoors, kitchen windowsill gardening, micro-greens, pea shoots, windowsill herbs
Posted in Food and drink, Home & garden | 10 Comments »