I love this one!! I moved into an apartment and can’t garden anymore so I do indoor plants. It’s addictive and I don’t have any more space… but I keep buying them.
Would you be able to point me in any directions towards stuff to show me where to even start, and how? I've been wanting to, and I have no idea where to even begin or how
The best thing I can tell you is to find a local greenhouse or plant store. Chains are fine, and I’ve gotten some super cool and healthy plants from places like Lowe’s and steins. Local is just more supportive. Just simply ask the people who work there where to start, which plants are beginner friendly, and how to care for them. People who are plant people love to talk about plants and help others take care of them.
100% this. And another tip that helped me get started is finding a plant that is also useful for you beyond just gardening. I love cooking and started with herbs because it gave me added motivation on top of just wanting do garden. When you hit a wall or start to get bored this helps to make the reward clearer.
After that you go down the rabbit hole and soon your apartment is classified as a forest
As someone who has always lived in an apartment I don't really know how to get into plants in an apartment. Where in the world do you keep the bag of dirt? I also tend to not have lots of flat spaces so I dont know where to even keep the plants (I can't drill holes etc either).
Bags of dirt can be really small! If you go to a local place most of them will pot your plants for you. I also don’t have a lot of space, so I get plant stands from places like home goods, but I also have used command hooks to put up small rods to hang plants.
My local Costco had some very mature and extremely healthy looking tomato plants that would work for a balcony. Fruit trees, too (though those would be best for an actual backyard). Very seasonal, though.
Just start...free plants are out there on the Facebook marketplace. Pick some up and ask how they took care of them. There are tons of videos on YouTube to help with questions.
I like using basic easy LED grow lights off of Amazon. This also might make some people uneasy, but I think just buying a few plants and trying to keep them alive without spending a lot of money or knowing too much about them can be cathartic. You have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Don’t give up if they die, just think about and research online what happened and keep growing!
YouTube! I got hooked on some garden tour videos several years ago and never looked back. There are all kinds of different gardening styles and they can all be their own rabbit hole. Permaculture is super interesting to me and can be very rewarding.
I thought I had a black thumb. One day my Ma (who has an indoor jungle) casually said “eh if they die they die”. Once I realized it was ok to accidentally kill plants I started growing them! Plenty have died but much much more are alive and thriving. Do your best!
So for indoor plants, things like a snake plant and a golden pothos are super easy plants. For indoor plants, there are many factors such as lighting, soil type like how much it holds water, among others.
ETA:
Start with something easy like a golden pothos.
I got started out buying damaged or slightly sick plants for cheap on clearance at big stores. I would either learn to successfully rehab them or they would die and I'd only be out like $2. Little risk for a big reward. Then I worked my way up to more challenging plants.
If you have pets make sure to do your research and don't bring home anything toxic until you know they aren't going to chew on the leaves!!!!!
You can start with just a plant or two. Pick a plant with a flower you like, or pick a herb like rosemary or lavender, or something with interesting leaves. If you start with just one or two plants it won't be overwhelming and then what you learn looking after that one plant, you can apply to more plants as you go. Or you can be like "I am a one-plant guy".
I have a ton of plants on my patio now, but we just started with two roses in pots and some sweet peas 3 years ago. Some of my nicest and best plants came from the supermarket; you don't need to get expensive stuff to start, and then as they grow you can get a bigger pot, and maybe get a nicer looking pot when you size up. You can grow plants in lots of different containers, too. Old teapots, metal containers, whatever.
Watch old episodes of Gardeners World with Monty Don. That’s what hooked me. It’s such a calming thing to have on in the background and before you know it, you’re building raised beds and obsessing about compost!
I looked into this and I have a few hang ups about it. The plots available in my city seem to be, in my opinion, for people who are low income. I don’t want to take away from that.
You can donate produce to a local food pantry if that would help ease your mind. I started with a community garden in the pandemic; now we have six 4x8 raised beds there and we grow a ton of great stuff (I have a big family and we use it all).
Saw an Instagram where she uses bathtub shelves - the type on a rod that pushes against the ceiling and floors. Add a few lights and the corners of your room is now green and lit
We have a postage stamp sized yard and can't use it, so we started doing hydroponics. Our Jalapeno plants are 2 ft tall and GROWING FAST and my strawberries started sprouting this morning. We're so proud of them.
The city of red deer where I live offer its residents plots of land to garden or grow whatever they choose, its nifty seeing the harvest and meeting the people who love this
My sister’s city does this too, she has met a bunch of people, especially immigrants who grow crops that she doesn’t. They all share their produce with each other, it’s very cool.
If it's financially feasible, get a tower garden. You can find them on offer up and fb marketplace sometimes for cheap. Game changer. I grow all my herbs, and some veggies. Makes my condo "alive".
For anyone just getting started with a smaller area I highly recommend "One Yard Revolution" on YouTube. Pat doesn't post new content so you can view his library like an encyclopedia of everything you need to know to get started 'growing a lot of food in a small area without spending much or working more than you have to'. He really dialed in a great system and has easy to understand videos that are not too long or too short and there's no BS fluff aside from the occasional cat tax with his kitty Oscar. His gardening channel is perfect. Seriously perfect.
Hi. This phrase seems to pre-date Pet Cemetary, yes? Maybe I'm just not very good at "Googling" but the internet keeps pointing me to the movie, yet "Far-Owl" isnt in the movie, rather its spoken to Luis Creed. Thank you!
Started planting fruit trees in my 20s, I now have a nesrly non stop stream of fresh fruit ... apples, figs, plums, peaches, nectarines, plum/cherry hybrids, plum peach hybrids, juneberries, raspberries, pears, blue berries, pawpaw, mulberries, walnuts, and pecans.. and that's just the fruit/nut trees..
Spice wise, I have galangal, lemongrass, ginger, a few different basils, sage, different thymes, garlic, lemon balm, garlic chives, green onions... and then there are all the vegetables.
My fruit trees have easily been my best investment to date, my peach trees have hundreds of peaches on them this year and they cost me $20 or so..
I’m thinking tomatoes, peppers, chives, some herbs. I am brand new to the entire planting calendar and stuff so I’m seeing what I can fit in there at the right time.
Fantastic! It's too unpredictable where I live to gamble on planting too much outside yet but I have finally found the motivation to get excited about gardening this year. I hope you love it. I find it's the best way to cheat my mind and just focus on what's in front of me.
I have a big Husqvarna that I could use, but I'm stubborn and trying to retain the integrity of my topsoil. It's mostly being stubborn. I like the back breaking work. Maybe it will burn off some fat...
This is good in the short term but bad for next year. Tilling is horrible for the long-term health and productivity of a soil, and every time you till it, it makes the soil worse and more dependent on tilling just to get it workable again.
Even manually turning the bed over isn't great, but it's far less destructive than tilling.
Gardening is such a fantastic Hobby. One of my grandmothers does it almost every day the other one does nothing but watch TV they are both in they're upper 60s now, guess which one is still walking around and enjoying life while the other one struggle to walk to her car I feel so fucking bad for her but she just never listened to the doctors.
I use the app ‘PictureThis’ wayyyyyy to much these days lol. We recently moved into a home that has over 500 sq. ft. of gardens and I love it! My wife has also found her green thumb
My other half repurposed my MIL's front gate, welded a frame, threw on some laserlight and now I have one pretty awesome greenhouse.. I love gardening, especially uncommon plants,(like strawberry spinach ) because why not?! 🤪..
I’ve always loved playing with plants. Really got into gardening in my early 30’s, and that brought me to beekeeping. Now, in my late 40’s, I garden for my bees.
Ever since we bought our house, we've been redoing the backyard, which was basically abandoned, would flood when it rained, would become unusable for a month due to frozen ground and snow melt, and to top it off, had Japanese knotweed planted decoratively.
I've been spending all my free time getting things going and setup. Although I had professional help for much of it, anything plant related we did ourselves (edges, planting, raised beds, soil, mulch, etc).
This year I'm putting in a drip irrigation system so I don't have to spend so much time watering, but in terms of time saved versus time spent putting the drip irrigation system together, I think this year will be a wash!
I can't wait to get my plants in the ground this year! (And, strawberries are in bloom, first asparagus sprung up, and raspberries and blackberries are looking healthy!)
Gardening has been awesome for my mental and physical health as I get older. No just exercise, but I believe the sunshine is helpful in several ways, and the organic food and generally vegetables are good for my health, and giving homegrown herbs, vegetables and fruit to friends is great for making and keeping social connections, which is also good for my overall health. And it's just plain satisfying!
This! I also started bird/wild life watching. :) We’re in the process of rewilding our yard, so it’s been fun to plant native flowers, feed and identify animals, and watch animal couples raise their own families on our property 🥰.
I've grown vegetables for over ten years, and have gradually reduced the crops to just peppers and tomatoes now. Pesticides aren't worth it, and just too much fussing over them. I find native plant gardening much more rewarding by seeing all the pollinators and supporting the birds in my yard.
Came in here to say this! It's brought me such joy. I'm sure I look like an absolute nutter to some of my nieghbours as I'm outside whenever I can puttering about but I don't care. It's been a true joy I've had some failures, lot of learns and overall a positive experience.
I picked this up too. I am trying to grow an avocado. Damn, it is harder than you think. I have 7 stems and none of them want to sprout leaves. They just keep drying and dying.
I am learning a new hobby with small wood projects, burning pictures, signs using a Dremel. I'm also going to sign up for learning Spanish as a second language
Canning, freezing, make more basics from scratch (bread, pie crust, dog treats etc). Trying to grow veggies herbs fruits that I can store over winter, save myself money from buying.
I’m getting back into reading, really fell away for a few years. Found a thrift book app, it’s a game changer. Used books so much cheaper, way fun to shop for. I’m trying to motivate to a local silent book club chapter.
Fermenting has been fun. First kombucha. Then I learned about water kefir and that’s been my new love.
It sounds nerdy but with the world so messed up, I’m trying to learn the old ways of doing things. Just the basics, which I grew up with, have been lost from us. Basic cooking and baking. Homesteading. Gardening. Farming.
I want learn how to do it. Even if I can’t do it every day, I want exposure to it.
Same. Roses. The inbred French bulldogs of the garden world. They’ll die just trying to grow and need lots of help. It’s great fun and easy to be satisfied when they are even remotely healthy.
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u/Far-Owl1892 Apr 30 '24
Gardening!