The first brave plants in our living room

After last Tuesday’s +19C in Calgary, the weather went back to being very wintery. Overcast and cold and by today -11 and 6cm of snow. Nevertheless we believe that spring will not be long now and Easter Sunday we planted some seeds as a start of our herb garden. We had been to Canadian Tire (no, it’s not a car tire store, but sells everything for home – like a Home Depot) and bought soil, pots to put the seeds into and gardening tools. They even had something for the real beginners – little boxes with dried soil and seed packet with instructions on how to get the seeds to germinate.

We bought pretty much every herb that there was – chives, oregano, estragon, dill, thyme, basil, parsley, mint, sage, lemon balm and one packet of petunias. The instructions said that it will be 7-10 days before the seeds will sprout and behold – one week later some of them had already raised their green heads and were turning towards sunlight.

Now we can see every day how quickly they grow. The patch of chives had started leaning too much towards the sun and I turned them around to avoid childhood crooked backs  – 2 hours later they had already straightened themselves and probably by tomorrow they have aligned themselves the other way.

As soon as they have sprouted the second leaf, we need to re-pot them into something bigger. I showed the garden patch to a friend of mine from Estonia (the wonders of Skype) and she expressed concern that we’ll have too many plants to replant. Fortunately we have a balcony that is big enough and I’m also counting on us eating them on a daily basis. But let’s wait and see – there are a few more weeks, before we can actually start harvesting anything.