I was looking through the seed catalogs on a snowy winter day a few years ago. We were living in an apartment with a balcony and I wanted to continue with vegetable gardening as I had done in our house in Florida. I had grown cactus terrariums the year before after a dismal failure with houseplants but now I wanted to get into gardening like I used to. The problem was money was tight. Then I had an idea for growing a cheap kitchen container garden.

I gathered all kinds of containers from around the apartment. A friend worked at a delicatessen and brought home some large buckets that their salads were delivered in. The garden centers were closed until spring, the ground was frozen, and I needed soil. My husband went out to buy some wood glue at the hardware store and came home with potting soil and 25 cent packages of carrot and herb seeds (parsley, chives, basil, oregano, and thyme). It turned out that the hardware store sold gardening supplies all year and in the winter they were half-price. His total expense for the gardening supplies was approximately $5.00. So my cheap kitchen container garden was starting to take shape.

I wanted to grow organic vegetables as I had always done. So the next time that I went to the grocery store I bought organic produce. Before refrigerating any of it, I cut out the seed part and then planned my menu around the rest of the vegetables. I had heard that much of today's food is irradiated and that it would be difficult to germinate but that was not the case.

I had purchased tomatoes, scallions, bell peppers, strawberries, and cucumbers. I also had all of the seeds that my husband had purchased. The scallions had roots so I cut off the bottom 3" with the root and put it in water overnight. Then I planted them in the flower pots. I started the seeds in small glasses of water until they germinated. Then I put them in soil and lined up the planters along the sliding glass door. I still had the grow lights from when I started plants this way when we lived in the house so the seedlings had a good head start. My cheap kitchen container garden was actually growing.

Some of the germinated seeds never sprouted above the soil but there were plenty that did. That was in late February. They were growing taller and had several leaves but were still a little spindly when I started putting them outside on warmer afternoons in early April. They were moved to the balcony permanently in early May and quickly turned into robust plants. Plants that are kept on an upper floor balcony cannot be put outside as early as plants that are placed in the ground. Air blows beneath as well as above the balcony so it stays a cold slab of cement year-round.

The plants produced a good quantity of produce right up until late October. I was able to over winter the herbs. I practiced what is called succession planting. It means that if the first plant to be grown in a container pulled a lot of one nutrient from the soil then the next plant grown in that container would be one that did not need that particular nutrient in large quantities.

I saved hundreds of dollars by not having to purchase expensive herbs and organic vegetables for the dinner table. My only expense was the $5.00 for the initial bags of potting soil when I planted the carrots and herbs and another $5.00 for more potting soil when I bought the organic produce. I bagged the soil in late October to be used again in February when I started the next year's even cheaper kitchen container garden.

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