Last year, I attempted to grow a basil plant and a dill plant. The dill plant did not fare so well, and most of the basil plants died, but two of them stuck around. My new apartment has a lot more natural sunlight exposure than the old one, so the basil is doing better even with the reduced light in winter than before, when the best I could provide was grow lamp.
I found some Thai chili peppers at Dillon’s recently, and of course had to buy a bunch. I figured I’d break one up and plant a bunch of the seeds to see what happens. Today I checked on the plants, and discovered that they were growing! We have multiple baby chili plants starting to poke out of the dirt, preparing to cause massive amounts of pain for me in the future. I’m excited.
impulse buying
I was bored today, so I went to Wal-Mart to walk around—a rather normal activity for me when I’m bored. I was kind of looking for a snow shovel, but not really. I didn’t find any, but I did discover that they already have seeds available. 
With the recent success fresh in my mind, I was inspired to buy a bunch of seeds. For $1 a pack, it’s pretty cheap to just buy a bunch and give it a shot. I stuck mostly with herbs, because those are easy to care for and harvest in an apartment. I also got some tomatoes. I have no idea if I’ll be able to get them growing, but it couldn’t hurt. I had to limit my selection somewhat to things that grow above ground. Things that grow underground (such as almost everything else they had) are rather hard to grow from a second story apartment with limited balcony space. I’m excited about the tomatoes. They should be delicious.
I went to Lowe’s for some planters and some soil, mostly because I couldn’t find them at Wal-Mart and Lowe’s is next door.
on to the planting
I gave the sage and the chives their own pots, and I added some new basil seeds into the pot with the current basil plants. We’ll see what happens. According to the back of the seed packets, the chives and sage should both thrive as a potted plant. Even better: they are both perennials so maybe I won’t have to buy seeds again!
In the big pot, I planted everything else. The herbs all said that they love tomatoes and that the two plants will compliment each other while growing—cause each to grow even better. Again, we’ll see what happens. I’m not out too much money and if these things grow, I’ll have a really tasty spring. After all the frost threat is gone, I’ll probably move the bigger pots outside and possibly the basil. They like warm weather and the basil definitely seemed to do better.
On a side note, I had no idea how small oregano seeds were. All the seeds were really small, but these are just crazy tiny.
