Hello reader(s) (e.g. Dad!),
My wife and I have been excited about the spring coming so we've been planting a potted garden for our balcony. The weather in Tel Aviv is perfect for balcony/ rooftop gardening. Year-round wonderful weather is one of best things about Israel and most apartments will have some sort of balcony. Since it's so sunny here, you can grow anything, as long as you water it enough.  Also you can grow your own from seed fairly easily; we've started growing some tomatoes, peppers, orange tree, kumquats, and avocados directly from the fruits we bought at the grocery store. The avocado is a fun one-- you can find full instructions directly on wikihow. Since we don't really know how long we'll be in Israel, we'll probably never see the tree produce fruit, but was interesting to watch it grow.

So the first and foremost thing a rooftop garden should have are herbs. They're easy to grow, quick to produce useful things, and don't require much soil. Most grocery stores here sell planters for fairly cheap (we found some for 13 ILS each, ~ 4 $).

Here's a video of us harvesting and using rosemary from our rooftop garden to cook chicken:

Here's a video we also made of how we're harvesting mint, plus making a beautiful, simple nana (mint), lemon and honey tea:


 Here's some basil, grown from seed.
 Some oregano, sprouting from seeds.
 You basically put them in the water until roots come out.


 It's quite fun to watch them grow.
 They sort of crack along the middle, roots come out the bottom and a shoot up the top.
 So you dig a hole and bury the avocado roots, midway up the seed.


 Then you have a nice little avocado growing!
 You can also use orange seeds or kumquat seeds.
 Cut off the tip and put them in a plastic bag with a damp paper cloth.
 They will sprout in ~ 4 weeks and you can plant them.
 Here's some vine-flowers.
 An older kumquat tree.
 It's flowering quite well now!
 Here is one of the avocados, tall with big leaves. The other ones are short and still haven't grown really over the last month.
 One of the stubby avocados. It hasn't really gotten bigger over a month.
 A flower we bought at ikea.
 More vine flowers, with chopsticks as guides.
 I just scraped some seeds out of a tomato for this one, and wallah, a few weeks later we have a tomato plant!
 Here we grew the Kumquats and oranges in a water bottle. Actually it's not a great idea if the base is wider than the middle, since the dirt may not slide out together. Anyways it's a cheap way of making a planter, with a bit of a greenhouse included.
Enjoy Chutzpanim, and get planting!
Sauce