drooling over seed catalogs

I recently received a Gurney's seed catalog toward the beginning of the week and I've found myself drooling over the possibilities for planting. I'm even more excited because I'm NOT planning to wait to plant seeds during the spring. Instead, I'm hoping to plant some seeds and get them started in my seed starters with the help of some grow lamps. The only problem? I've been too lazy and too comfy on the couch to get the grow lamps set up just yet. I'm hoping I'll get it done this weekend since my huge piles of grading have been dealt with.

In the meantime, while I decide which day I'm going to tackle setting up the grow lamp configuration, I need to figure out exactly what I should plan to order since I'm limited on growing space. Basically, I have a12' x6' patio and some indoor floor space/ledge space for my planties. The means I need to think square foot gardening or even vertical gardening. And, I'm a big fan of pragmatic gardening so I'd like to find some plants that I will actually use and will be worth putting effort into in order to get output from. Right now, I'm looking at planting some herbs again since I killed a few of the herbs this fall-- I think because of watering with my city water. Right now, cilantro, mint and basil sound like my best bet. As is, I have rosemary going to town in my garage, even though I only open the garage door on mild days (since it is January and all!), which we've had plenty of lately.

I also have a young blueberry bush and a young plum tree that have seemed to be o.k. hanging out in the garage for the mean time. I moved them inside for fear that the erratic Ohio winter would be too much for them since they're merely in pots and they don't get the full protection that most plants would get from being planted in the ground. Once the weather will be mild consistently, I'm planning to bring them back up to the deck/patio area so I can enjoy looking at them each morning from the living room. For the meantime though, I'm debating if I should add some more trees and/or shrubs to my patio gardening collection. I'm keen on the idea of a few cherry trees or some other fruit trees, assuming whichever I choose won't need mates in order to be fertile. Either way, I love the idea of having potted trees on my patio since I'm not planning on being in an apartment for more than another year.

I'm not sure what kind of flowers I'm going to plant, since I do like to have something useful/edible and I like to have some flowers in order to complement the small flowers usually found on veggy plants. Right now, I'm considering purchasing some Echinacea since they attract beneficial insects and butterflies and it can be used in tea as well as simply having a beautiful dusty purple flower. I'm also thinking growing calendula and nasturtia again for their vibrant orange flowers and I just recently found out that calendula are edible *as are nasturtia*. I'm a little paranoid when it actually comes to eating my flowers, so I like to double check on all of this before I begin taste testing since there are so many poisonous flowers out there. I think these poisonous beauts really just make me realize that there's been lots of trial and error over the course of humanity to figure out what's edible and what's definitely not-- especially when figuring in how different each person's body really is when it comes to allergies and sensitivities to plants.

One other thing that struck me as interesting while voraciously flipping through Gurney's is that many of the plants being promoted are hybrids. This means that many of these plants will be sterile, which saddens me to think that they won't be able to have plant babies or at least would have unpredictable plant offspring... so I'm going to stick with the less tampered-with versions of the plants where possible.

With this in mind, what are some other great plants for a pragmatic gardener who's limited on space and lacking deep soil?