My First Microgreens Harvest: What I Learned
I’m not exactly known for my patience. Just ask my sister Lisa, who still brings up the Christmas morning when I unwrapped all her presents while she was still asleep…
My Hydroponic Deep Water Culture Bucket System
The first hydroponic system I ever built cost me $743. It was a sleek, pre-fabricated NFT system with digital monitoring, automatic dosing, and a user interface that looked like it…
My Hydroponic Peppers: From Seedling to Harvest
The first time I tried growing hydroponic peppers, I killed them with kindness. Not the gentle, well-meaning kind of kindness, but the overeager, helicopter-parent kind where I checked them literally…
My Indoor Garden Lighting Solutions: What Worked
I killed my first batch of seedlings with kindness. Specifically, with a 1000-watt halogen work light that I salvaged from my dad’s garage and set up approximately 8 inches above…
Indoor Gardening Without Soil: My Experiences
The first time I tried growing something without soil, it was completely by accident. I’d absentmindedly stuck a cutting of pothos in a glass of water on my kitchen windowsill…
Vertical Growing on My Balcony: Systems I’ve Tested
My balcony measures exactly 5 feet by 8 feet. I know this because I’ve measured it approximately 47 times over the last three years, always hoping that somehow the dimensions…
Urban Garden Pest Control: My Organic Solutions
If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d someday be deliberately releasing insects into my apartment, I would’ve assumed you were describing some kind of nightmare scenario. Yet there…
Solving Pressure Problems in My Home Drip System
The precise moment I realized my home drip irrigation system had serious pressure problems was when I glanced out my kitchen window to see what appeared to be a miniature…
Container Combinations That Thrived on My Balcony
If my downstairs neighbor still harbors resentment about the Great Soil Spill of 2021, she’s polite enough not to mention it anymore. In my defense, who designs a 12-inch wide…
My Indoor Tropical Garden in a Northern Climate
The exact moment I decided to grow tropical plants in my Illinois apartment came during the bleakest February day imaginable. I was staring out at a landscape so colorless it…