I have two grow lamps that stand about two feet tall and are about four feet wide.
Aside from a bed in the other room, I have no furniture, so there's plenty of room for my lovely plants!
I keep the ceiling fan on all the time, usually on the lowest setting. Sometimes I try to simulate a little rainstorm, and I turn the fan up to medium or high after watering.
There is an automatic timer that comes on at 5:30am and goes off at 9:00pm (21:00).
Outside on my east-facing balcony, I have sage and chocolate mint (it really does taste like chocolate!).
Purple basil:
Sometimes I get so eager to grow things, that I overcrowd the pots, and then the plants have no room to grow. I'm getting better with this, though.
Lemon thyme:
The lemon thyme tastes fabulous in this recipe in the back of Crazy Sexy Juice by Kris Carr:
There is also a struggling tomato plant on the balcony. Not enough hours of sun there, I think.
Inside, however, the tomatoes are doing fabulously well! These are purple cherokee tomato plants:
More tomatoes:
The one in the light-brown pot is a scrawny-looking roma tomato plant, not doing as well as the others. It could be the soil. It is older than the purple cherokee tomato plants. When I first started it from seed, I used a mix of cheap potting soil and desert soil from the backyard desert area behind the apartments, because I didn't have money to buy soil. I live in Phoenix, Arizona.
Also, there were random black pots left out there from the recent construction and landscaping. Fun fact: All of the round pots you see in these photos were either found in the desert or given to me by people. I bought the short, long, rectangular containers at Lowe's.
Marshmallow plants, grown from seed, below. This is another example of getting so excited about gardening that I dumped almost the entire packet of seeds into this one long container! Many of the seedlings died.
Can you spot the little spider on the succulent in the photo below?
Parsley wasn't thriving on the balcony, so I brought it inside and it's getting used to the different atmosphere:
I love tropical food and I just planted the top of a pineapple, next to the stalk of a dead mango seedling (I'm not entirely sure why some plants die, but I still love gardening anyway!).
I think these tomatoes are doing so well because I'm no longer using backyard desert topsoil. This time, I bought soil that has fertilizer for up to 9 months.
I also added something called "MYCORRHIZAE: Insurance for plants" that I bought here: http://www.jakemace.com/gardening-store-.html
Radishes have been quite difficult for me to grow and I've never grown one successfully. But that doesn't stop me from continuing to try! I planted a couple seeds around some of the tomato plants.
For a while, my best plant was this pepper plant, but recently it has begun to drop leaves. It grows little flowers, but then the flowers and stems fall down, with no fruit. I'm not quite sure what's going on there, but I'll keep trying!
PEST CONTROL
For a while, I had problems with tiny little flying insects (fruit flies? gnats?). They were everywhere! But I used apple cider vinegar with little drops of dish soap in a little bowl to attract them and then they drown in it. I also sprayed the plants with a mixture of mostly water, dish soap, and a pinch of cayenne pepper.
Now there are little white flies. I'm trying to distract them with petroleum jelly smeared on yellow paper (they supposedly think the yellow color is new foliage for them to feast upon, and then they get stuck in the pj). We'll see how this goes! (I know this paper is kind of green-yellow, but it's all I had, lol)
I hope you've enjoyed this tour of my indoor garden! I'll post updates as the plants grow over time.