When I first moved to my current digs, I dealt with my depression and the wealth of window space in the new place by planting found seeds. The second year I had this:

...as I augmented my found seeds with a couple of purchases. The bushy trailing vine by the fire escape is some kind of summer squash: there are at least two varieties of hot peppers (habanero and cayenne), and around the corner on the right is, I believe, a tomato vine. Mixed in are a lot of varieties of flowering and other plants whose seeds I had harvested from the neighborhood the previous fall, or saved from grocery store fruits and vegetables. (Weirdly, the cayenne seeds came from a jar of z'hug.)

And then what is inside: even more plants. I was growing swiss chard in a large clay pot just inside the window, as well as a variety of tropical mini-trees (avocado, tamarind, fig, papaya, and limoncillo, all from rescued seeds.)

I have not had such a wild or ambitious window garden since than, mostly because the depression lifted and work demands took over more of my time over the years. But as we enter a New Depression I've decided to get my victory garden working once more.

I have at least three more windows I can populate with plants, although their ledges are too small to support window boxes. For these, I propose to use a bottle garden, inspired by this blogger's work:

The details of the vegetable garden in bottles, including diagrams, are here.

I'll set up a bottle garden for cheap containers for my vegetables and herbs. To make the most of the available space, I want to set up plexiglass shelves in the windows so that I can have (at least) two or three rows of bottles in each tall window. I'll be pricing plexiglass down on Canal Street as soon as the semester ends!

Another thing I want to try after reading Willem's blog, is the tomatoes in a hanging basket. The basket is planted with greens, and perhaps a runner bean; the tomato vines grown through the holes in the bottom of the hanging basket. I happen to have such a basket which has lost the ability to hold onto its bottom tray: what a perfect use for it!

I am fortunate to live in an apartment which gets a lot of sun and which has a lot of windows. This season I will be experimenting to see how much I can make use of them to extend my food budget. I hope other people who live in the city will find some ideas here that they can use as well!