Celery is growing her own veggies and herbs

[Edit - first photo included!]

I have always wanted to grow my own herbs and vegetables but I never had the time and space to do so. Now that I'm between jobs and the apartment is big enough to accommodate my efforts, I have decided to start growing things.

This is not the right time of the year to be growing new plants, but I knew that if I didn't start now, I probably never would.

The one major problem I have always had was obtaining the compost for planting the seeds. Unlike in Poland, where you can buy small quantities of compost at your local florist, here you have to trek to a garden centre, where they do have compost alright, but in bags of 10kg and upwards. This clearly was not ideal for me - I don't have a garden, but a balcony and a few window stills and no space to store bags of compost!

The perfect solution came when I was wasting time in a nearby "Euro Shop" where one can buy an assortment of very cheap things. That's where I saw sort of an easy-grow bundles, you got some de-hydrated compost and seeds in a pack for a quid each. Inspired by my love for tomato soup, I purchased one pack of basil and one of tomatoes.

I still had nothing to plant them in, so I swung by The Corkscrew, a fancy wine shop on Chatham Street in Dublin, where one, if lucky, can sometimes get a wine crates for free, then by a hardware store where I bought a small can of white oil paint.

It took 4 days to cover the wine crate in 3 layers of paint (which makes perfect sense when you realise that the crate has to lie on one side while the other sides dry) and on Thursday last week I lined the crate with some plastic (cut out of a bin liner) for extra protection, hydrated the compost and planted the seeds.

A week later, they started sprouting! As of now, my tomato seedlings are about 5cm tall and my basil seedlings about 2cm.

I can't wait till I can eat them!