The birth of a new hobby

I have always been my dad's sidekick slash assistant in a couple of things—cooking, fixing broken things, anything that needs assembling (he's quite a handyman)—my role as sidekick even extends to his hobbies.
He's more encouraged to pursue something when I show interest in them as well.
I'd like to think that he enjoys having a hobby buddy.
From assembling thousand piece puzzles, hand feeding birds to breeding flowerhorn fish, now we are on to growing plants.

A few years back he planted ampalaya in our garage, and let the vine crawl on the metal grills, for some time our garage looked like a jungle, which I thought was pretty cool. Unlimited home grown ampalaya was also a bonus.

The problem is we neither have a front yard nor a back yard, gardening wasn't the best hobby to get in to practically speaking.

The lack of space is challenging but we decided to make do with what was available to us—a small balcony space and windowsills.

We started with sweet basil, a really easy plant to grow in containers.

Basil is very forgiving making it the perfect herb to grow for first time gardeners like me.

They grow well in a shaded area and doesn't really require direct sunlight to grow.

On days when there is strong breeze, you get to enjoy the fragrant aroma of basil from inside the room.  Now that's a treat for city dwellers, it's like you're a step closer to nature.

We normally use our freshly picked basil leaves on scrambled eggs, pasta and Three Cup Chicken.

My dad went to Taiwan last November, he left this ginger on the kitchen counter which was already starting to sprout, I decided to pot it up and this is how it looks now.  We haven't tried harvesting, I'll make an update when we do. I'm excited to see fresh ginger!

Since we have a limited space, we chose to grow edible or fruit bearing plants so as to maximize our gardening experience.
It's really encouraging when you get to taste the "fruits" of your labor.

We also have these tangerine plants growing.
The seeds came from tangerines that I ate, since it was really sweet I decided to try planting them with no actual hopes that they will grow.
I peeled the hard seed shell, soaked them in water for a day or two before planting them.
Here they are today!
Will they even bear fruits in the future? Who knows?  I hope so, let's see...

That's it for the time being.  We are still waiting on other seeds to germinate.  I'll be sharing with you other plants we're growing on my next post.

*Disclaimer: I am not a professional horticulturist nor a gardening guru.  Everything written in this post is only a documentation of our own urban gardening experience.  I do not speak for all urban gardeners.