Home Grown - Organic Veggies - Week 2

My indoor veggie and herb garden is now well into Week 2. As you may notice I've expanded into several more pots and containers to accommodate so many more of the seeds that sprouted in the multi-level sprouter I showed in my previous post.

It's been so incredibly rewarding and heart-warming watching the little sprouts grow every day. It's exciting, empowering and I look forward to the days that I can harvest my first leaves of spinach and enjoy the scent of fresh camomile and lavender when I wake up in the morning :)

Here's an update on how everything is growing. I did start this operation in mid january, so the coldest and with some of the shortest days of the year, and yet all the sprouts seem happy and are growing at great speed - facilitated by a daily light watering, the warmth of my central heating and the bay windows providing as much light as an indoor grow can.

Here you can see 5 days of growth from countless Organic German Camomile seeds. These were incredibly fast growing and as you can see have had an excellent sprouting rate. I simply sprinkled maybe 100-200 of the seeds directly on the soil from the packet, lightly sprinkled these with the same organic soil as you can see below, followed by a light watering out of the bottle with a punctured cap.

In the foreground you can see two spinach plants coming up side by side where I out two seeds in the same hole, and in the background kale plants in the same situation. Surprisingly, the spinach seeds that I soaked and then kept in the sprouter for 3 days did not sprout as regularly as seeds sown directly in the ground. In the future I will simply sow spinach seeds directly in the soil, however the kale seeds mostly sprouted through that process and the result has been a very regular sprouting crop so far.

In the above picture you can see the spinach plants sowed directly in the soil from the seed packet. They all appear to be very regular and without the gaps in the planting geometry as seen in the soaked seeds. I'm very excited to see these grow up and to pick my first fresh leaves, as spinach is one of my staple foods- one I eat every day.

Following the soaking and sprouting process, the kale plants appear all healthy and happy, growing well in the rack hung on the window.

interestingly, after an initial quick growth from seed to sprout, the lettuce sprouts appear to have been surpassed in growth speed by the kale and spinach.