We moved into a house last September. It's been great. I love my house.
One of the benefits of this place is that it has a fairly large balcony. Maybe 1.5mx3.5m. I'm estimating. It's enough room that we can fit a small table and two chairs and have a comfortable time having breakfast or coffee outdoors. It's right off our kitchen/living room so it's great.
Ever since we moved in we toyed with the idea of growing some plants in containers. My cousins (both lawyers) who have a fabulous house just outside Victoria, BC have this amazing patio outside their kitchen. She has several terra cotta urns filled with herbs. They're beautiful and she uses them a lot. It was very inspiring.
Today, we actually got a huge terra cotta pot and filled up some plastic window-box size planters and started our garden.
In the herb pot, I put lavender, basil, parsley, rosemary (very small and I will be keeping an eagle eye on it), oregano and thyme. In one box, we have some tomato plants with a chive plant and a lemon balm plant. I read that these two plants near tomatoes will keep the pests away. I hope so. In the other box, we have two cucumber plants, some chili pepper plants. In the last box, we have the oddballs--some more lemon balm, cilantro and rocket (looks like arugula to me).
I did lots of research on the internet, I wonder if it will do any good. In some places, they say kitchen herb pots like rosemary, thyme and sage are good together. Other places write that rosemary needs its own pot because it crowds out other plants. I got a small creeping rosemary and I plan to prune it well. Maybe that will keep it small.
We also asked the garden centre guy to help us pick out the right kind of soil. I get really lost when I see lots of products that are almost similar and I don't know how to choose. Anyway, the garden centre fella told us what would be good after I explained the plants I want and the planters I was going to use.
My husband and I had a great time playing in the dirt. The plants look okay after a couple of hours, but we ended up transplanting them at night so it is pretty cool and moist now. I'm looking forward to using the herbs and enjoying their scent. It would be pretty cool if we got some veggies out of it, too.