Food, food culture, food as culture and the cultures that grow our food

Bloom where you are planted

April 23, 2007

Kitchen garden trend: indoor kitchen gardens are replacing houseplants - at least at Culiblog.org
Planting edible flowers amongst sunflower seedlings

House plants are so passĂ©. And I’ve really had it with demure windowsill herb gardens. They’re visually predictable and don’t yield significant crop for my leafy green rich diet. Because I’m involved with projects that involve me recommending to other folks to grow their own dang food, coupled with the fact that it will be difficult for me this year to spend much time down south at the Occitanian Kitchen Garden, I have no choice. In addition to sprouting, this year I’m going to extend my notion of the kitchen garden to the great indoors - and grow some big-boned scultpural vegetables in my Amsterdam apartment.

Kitchen garden trend: indoor kitchen gardens are replacing houseplants - at least at Culiblog.org
Butternut squash, various sunflowers and nasturtiums in their new termporary digs

My plant preference centre around large, climbing and trailing plants like butternut squash, spaghetti squash, calabash, melons, red and burnt orange sunflowers, edible flowers (nasturtium, marigold, borage and calendula), highly aromatic bergamot as my new home scent and both European and Japanese varieties of horseradish.

Fortuitous coincidence is that the apartment will be painted and the floors sanded and oiled in September making the run up to summer the perfect time to test how invasive and messy it is to grow big edible plants indoors. I plan on training the trailing plants into ‘curtains’ and ‘walls’. I’m still looking for suitably fab pots, the rubber buckets pictured here are just an interim solution because my seedlings were thriving too much.

Kitchen garden trend: indoor kitchen gardens are replacing houseplants - at least at Culiblog.org
The tough-love style of replanting squash

debra at 15:07 | | post to del.icio.us

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