Grow & Gather

Apartment living was really cramping my mother nature side the past few years.

Before Nate & I had moved in together, I had a full on, 6 row garden in my parents yard. It took so much work, not just from me, but the rest of my family as well. I loved that thing to pieces. Watering it & watching all the veggies grow. We had cucumbers, radishes, cherry & "regular" tomatoes, green beans, green peppers, corn & eggplant. Everything grew pretty dang well. We had corn on the cob once & enough cherry tomatoes that we had to give them away by the bagful. I had numerous green peppers & eggplants and I was anxiously waiting for them to get to the perfect size. But it appeared the wildlife was also waiting for that perfect day because they plucked each one before me. I hope they enjoyed them because we never got to.

The next summer Nate & I moved in together. Our little first apartment was on the 3rd floor with a tiny deck. We hardly had any natural light during the day & our deck would get a sliver of light in the afternoon. Even with the lack of sunlight I decided I'd plant some basil in a large pot just for shits & giggles. Well those couple of plants grew like crazy & we had enough pesto to last a lifetime. 

The following summer I decided I'd add some cherry tomatoes & a jalepeno just to see what would happen. Mind you, I am no expert gardener. I don't follow the whole spacing rules of planting. If it fits in the damn pot it's going in. Clearly the plants don't necessarily follow those rules either because we had pesto multiple times & enough tomatoes to pair with the basil to have caprese all throughout the summer. We also had about 5 jalepenos!

Now we are lucky enough to live in an apartment on the first floor with a patio & a small patch of grass that gets sunshine all day!

We decided to build a mini raised garden bed in that little patch of grass (all the old ladies are totes jealous). We planted jalepenos, green peppers, buttloads of basil (can you tell we love basil???) and two types of cherry tomatoes. We also have parsley & lavender growing in pots.

We're really living the high life now. Although we still have to worry about the pesky wildlife thieving our goods.