Since it’s only February I’m not getting ahead of myself, and am mostly growing plants that are likely to stay on the sill throughout the summer. This includes:

• Sweet peppers (traffic light mix from last year)
• Aubergines (Black Beauty from last year, and some free mini-aubergine seeds kindly donated by @Amberlaw via the magic of twitter)
• Chilis (Cayenne and Hungarian Hot wax saved from last year, Serrano seeds pilfered from Wahaca at the weekend, and early Jalapenos where I went kerrrazy and bought some new seeds)

Apart from the Jalapeno seeds there’s been no real outlay. I mixed some leftover peat-free compost with sand to make potting compost, and I have pots and propagators to re-use from last year. Very thrifty so far.

Tomatoes can wait until next month, as the sunlight isn’t strong enough yet and I don’t want to end up with a load of spindly, leggy plants. There will probably be enough room for two of the cordon types if I rig up some canes and cables for them to grow up, and if they get too big for their boots then it’ll be easy enough to pinch out the ends of the vines.

The end effect is going to be like a mini greenhouse by the summer. Can’t wait.

Are you growing any food on your windowsill this Spring? Tell me all about it please.

First up, there’s one stick of Brussels left. That’s about six helpings of sprouts (nice halved and added to stir fries), and a full sprout top to cook as spinach/cabbage.

Next, we have the monstrous sprouting broccoli, purple and white varieties. It’s still a little early for them to start making their tasty bits, but I’ll start cutting them off as soon as they appear so the plants start to make more.

There’s also a little Spring cabbage and curly kale, and a few straggly Spring onions…

This growbag contains some unusual winter-variety carrots. I was given a free packet of these seeds in the Autumn and they’ve grown quietly and slowly over the winter. We’ve eaten some of the thinnings already, and the proper carrots should be ready in a few weeks. Quite good timing to fill the ‘hungry gap’ in the middle of Spring.

The mini greenhouse contains some winter sowings of chard, spinach, Arctic King and Tom Thumb lettuce, parsley, coriander, chicory and a few others. With hindsight I should have got these going as soon as I cleared out the greenhouse in the Autumn, to get the seedlings more established before the winter hit. They will be ready in a few weeks, it’ll just take a while longer for them to get going.

The surviving herbs (pic above) are thyme, sage, rosemary, chives, chervil, oregano and peppermint. There is some cold damage but I think it’ll be OK. They just need some dead leaves removing.

On the windowsill indoors we have winter sowings of parsley and coriander, plus a very healthy Sweet Genovese basil that’s survived since last Summer. The cat ate most of my baby lemongrass plant last week, but I hope it might somehow revive itself. Once again, bad kitty, bad.

And last of all we have a cayenne pepper plant, still making me hot chillis. One day M-Cat is going to eat one of these by accident, and I don’t think I’ll be entirely sympathetic when it happens.

In the next few days I’ll be writing about dealing with garden pests on a budget (and/or organically), and working out my wish list for this year’s planting plan. My seeds and new plants budget is strictly capped at £10, but that should be plenty I reckon. Let’s see.

Do you have any kitchen garden plants growing? Has anything survived the harsh winter where you live? Plant-saving tips and any garden gossip welcome!

I picked these today, some ready to eat now and a few to ripen on for later:

There are still two plum tomato plants growing, along with sweet Genovese basil, purple spicy basil and Greek pot basil from summer sowings. One is on its last legs (roots?) and the other is almost certainly going to make it to the end of November. We might get six or seven more fruits from them before they go, not bad at all.

I moved the cayenne chili plant in from the greenhouse about two weeks ago and it seems so much happier indoors, happy to the point of producing another 30 or so flowers. Potentially a lot more of the hot stuff on the way, so I’ve misted the open blooms with a tiny amount of warm water to help them make fruits. The two lemongrass plants came indoors at the same time, and they’re doing better too with lots of new green shoots.

There are also some new sowings: baby salad leaves, land cress, peas (for shoots), parsley, coriander, spinach and giant red mustard. Nice to have a few salady ingredients within easy reach to chuck into sandwiches and side salads.

I’ve scrubbed down and sterilised the mini-greenhouse, and it’s now home to a completely new set of sowings, including leaf beet, Arctic King and Tom Thumb lettuces, Italian chicory, White Lisbon spring onions, lamb’s lettuce, golden purslane, lots of rocket, dwarf kale and more herbs. Will be interesting to see which ones grow the best.

Outside in the garden at the moment there are: Shimonita onions/leeks, spring cabbage, curly kale, mustard greens, mizuna, sorrel, the last few carrots, purple and white sprouting broccoli, and a couple of Brussels sprout plants. On the herb front we have the hardier plants such as sage, thyme, rosemary and chives, plus some surviving mint, chervil and oregano.

If I have time this week then there are a few more bits of preparation for the winter that need doing, mainly sowing some pak choi and a few other oriental leaves, tidying the beds up, sowing green manures and washing out any remaining empty planters.

Are you still getting crops from your summer sowings? Have you planted anything for the winter or early spring this year? Please let me know how you’re getting on, or what varieties you’ve had lots of luck with.

Only a few so far, but let’s wait and see. On to the crazy cucumber plant, which is now sprouting lots of yellow flowers (which hopefully means heaps of mini cucumbers starting soon):

Both those plants are getting too big for the windowsill, unfortunately. I think I’m going to have to get them into bigger pots and get them used to the great outdoors over the next couple of weeks.

The chervil and the dill have already been outdoors a few times, going back into the greenhouse at night. We’ve been eating them too.

The tomato plants are looking kind of scruffy, but apparently that’s normal.

The experimental pot with spinach, land cress and rocket is now growing quite well – the land cress is probably the happiest:

We have some nearly-there spring onions too:

As for the rest of it, the cut-and-come-again salad leaves haven’t grown back (surprise!), the second crop of pea shoots have grown back (slowly but surely), and the basil and parsley are very happy. We ate all the alfalfa (nicer than I remembered) and radish shoots, but might do some more next week.

Are you growing any herbs or veggies indoors? How are they doing?

Meanwhile, back on the windowsill, the not-so-dwarf beans are about to burst into flower. And they’re too tall to go into the greehouse, so maybe I’ll have to put them out in a bigger pot on the back doorstep soon.

Here’s the alfalfa, nearly ready to eat. Maybe needs a couple more days. I suspect that this will be a lifesaver in the winter when not much else will grow – it’s quick and it’s healthy, it’s easy to grow (just rinse daily and drain) and it costs pence. OK, maybe it’s not what everyone would call gourmet, but it’s good for a bit of variety.

We’ve had a couple of home-grown salads in the last week. One was a gorgeous mix of pea shoots, baby lettuce and radish microgreens. The pea shoots are re-growing already:

Last week I also learned that some cheap brands of dried peas can be used for pea shoots, including ‘Leo’ brand. They’re 26p a packet in Asda at the moment, or 27p in Tesco, if your local one stocks that type. When I finally get my hands on some I’ll be growing them by the trayful.

The lettuce is supposed to be a ‘cut and come again’ Salad Bowl, but I have my doubts about its ability to regenerate. Seriously, look at the state of it:

We didn’t eat all the radish sprouts – here’s what’s left of the first big batch. They were delicious. Greenhouse or not, I think these, along with cress, pea shoots and herbs, will always have a home on the widowsill.

The land cress, spinach and rocket experiment is not doing much at all. Fingers crossed that at least the rocket will grow this week – it’s like a weed outdoors.

Those spring onions have got their act together now:

Some of the many tomato plants:

I think I’ll grow a couple of them indoors anyway, in case of blight. And finally, the cucumber plant seems set to make an escape bid. Either that or it’s doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate. Not sure which.

Are you growing your own food this year? Do you have any success stories?

My other new addition is some closely-sown radish seeds to try growing them as microgreens:

The pot that was new last week is doing OK now – spinach at top left, rocket top right, land cress at the bottom:

Those Salad Bowl lettuces have revived after their recent strop:

While the spring onions have improved, I think they take too long to grow and probably use up too much space that could be given over to faster or more expensive crops.

My crazy beans got even crazier. I’m going to have to cut one of them back:

Cucumber plants doing really well:

The biggest chore of the weekend was pricking out all the tomato plants and potting them up. They all germinated, all grew OK, and all seem to be fine in their new pots. Which, I think, is rather unusual. Here are eight of the 32 surviving plants:

Something tells me I might have a few tomato plants to give away next month. Just a few…

Thinking about sowing anything, or buying some seedlings? What’s growing itself silly on your windowsill this week?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.