Very interesting thread. Reading garden chats is my kind of "porn" lol. Anyway, about the lighting and I may have missed something but you are planning to go with 7 or so 4 foot CFL's and 2 100 watt MD, or hps? I do not believe this will be enough light to grow big vegetables to fruition, in fact, everywhere I have read you need more Lumens, 5,000 isn't going to cut it except for things like peas, strawberries, small things like that. You need at least a 600 watt MH and HPS bulbs . Both of these are important as the HPS is the red spectrum which brings on flowering and the lumens are well over 100,000. The MH or metal halide is what you use first for green vegatative growth. I started with one 4 foot CFL , a two foot 4 bulb CFL, a led light and a two foot 2 bulb CFL when I started my garden. It all works fine for a small area but in no way has enough lumens and spectrum intensity to grow things like squash, large fruits, melons, potatoes, sweet potatoes, you get the picture. So then I bought a 1,000 watt dimable HP/ HPS bulbs with electronic digital ballast and man that was a game changer. Here is a pic of my garden that is only 2 months old. I also use a "Grow UP" hydroponic grow tower and it is cheap to run and extremely efficient only 25 watts to run and has a twenty gallon reservoir. I also have a "Earth Box" which is in the closet that has my tomatoes groing in it. I wish you could really see the angles but you know how cameras are. Also with the heat the MH/HPS bulbs put out you could eliminate that from your budget, .... I think your ideas are brilliant but just a huge huge thing to take on for your first, start smaller and then get bigger who knows you may tire of it. Thanks for reading.

I put down cardboard (or newspaper at least 6 sheets thick and overlapping) and then mulch over that anytime during the year before the ground freezes. Then in the spring it is good for digging into. I have been doing this for years. I till pretty much the whole garden once a year, usually in spring to incorporate whatever grew and whatever I want to add (not much, usually). I only till about 3" deep, max. I have not had a big problem with weeds because a) I plant rather closely, kind of pushing the envelope in terms of spacing because I want the plants to shade out weeds and lessen the need for mulching and b) I hoe. Hoeing is not at all bad if you have a good hoe. I use a stirrup hoe. I actually enjoy cutting their little heads off.:) I don't use raised beds, either. To me that is just extra work and money. I use regular 4' wide rows with 18" between, each row having a double length of soaker hose. Works good for me, especially because my beds can follow the curves of the sun in my yard instead of being straight, but lots of people love those raised beds. Some people would object to my practice because I don't use a lot of mulch once the stuff is planted. I hoe instead ('dust mulch'). It depends on how much water is in the soil and what is growing there. I have a bed that is pretty dry with no mulch that works well because the plants there like that--they're mostly Artemisias, although I also have a bunch of peppers there that are doing well. Those I have mulched with composted manure. Then I have most of the veggies in beds very thickly planted that get a lot of water and no mulch because they don't need mulch--they create their own shade. I keep the space in between rows very small, like 12"-18". I have also tried living mulches, like letting wild portulaca grow and weeding out everything else in between my tomatoes. This worked pretty well, but I think it was actually more labor intensive than having no mulch at all, because I had to hand pull the weeds instead of hoeing. For watering, I use soaker hoses and water only in the early morning, so it has time to soak in before it gets hot and is wasted in evaporation. Yes, people say you have to cover them. I have never covered them and in my highest watering months I think my water bill has increased maybe five bucks. Covering them for me just gets in the way of hoeing.:) I have clay and I think it is great for growing. Everyone complains about it, but I have gardened in sand and I would take clay any day. Clay has tons of nutrients in it. As long as it doesn't get sopping or get hard on top, it is good to grow in, in my experience. I guess what you can use the city compost for would depend on what it was made of. It must be grass and yard waste, no? It might have broadleaf herbicides in it, which wouldn't be good for your garden. I usually get composted manure instead, although the local prison has a program where they give away compost made out of food scraps. I haven't gotten around to trying that yet, but you might see if your local prison, if you have one, has such a program. I think that would be quite safe and you sure can't beat the price. I know what you mean about next year. I am already planning my next-year garden. Definitely going to be more peppers!

I think if you had some small shelves that are about as tall as the window sill you could grow plenty. If the shelf ended about 10 inches from the sill the plant would be in the sunshine most of the bright part of the day (assuming its planted in a 10 inch tall pot). You would want lights overhead of the plants during the evening when winter days are the shortest. Plenty of plants will survive without the lights but they will barely grow and probably won't bloom and fruit during the shorter days. You could use regular adjustable floor lamps with the bulbs set within a foot of the top of the plants (the closer the better) and either use grow bulbs or fluorescents. Lighting is tricky. People seriously growing under lights use big bulky expensive lamps that won't work well in a home-ey sunroom if you want to also use it as a reading/sitting room. I would at least start out with something simple and expand from there as your experience grows. You'll probably have better luck growing a cherry tomato in a pot outdoors in the summer and then bring it indoors for the winter and toss it out when it goes down hill - it may last all season but they usually get disease or insects before March. I can never get regular tomatoes to ripen when I bring them inside but cherry tom's do fine. Most of the herbs should do fine except the rosemary - in my experience it hates living indoors. Garlic is a seasonal plant that you plant at one point in the year and then harvest half a year later. It is not something that you can harvest off of all year long (there will be a plant but there won't be a bulb). Garlic chives should do fine in a pot indoors though and the flavor is similar. Asparagus will be tricky since the plants get 6 feet tall and about 4 feet wide and they pretty much like full blazing sun - I move them to the outside plant list. Carrots might work but they take more than one season to size up for me. You could grow seedlings all winter that you could then plant outdoors in the spring. Orange trees and other citrus would work and most will stay small when grown outside of the tropics. They can get buggy but if you move them back outdoors in the summer you may not have a problem. Most citrus bloom during the winter or very early spring and then it take all year for the fruit to form and ripen - making them a great winter time crop when no other fruit ready to harvest. They don't need high heat (I keep mine just above freezing!) but they do like higher humidity than what most people have in their homes.

You certainly need to add camellias to your list, both C. japonica and C. sasanqua. They offer a wide range of color, form, and bloom time. With a few careful selections, you could easily have color all fall and winter long. Camellias are evergreen. Though not showy, my Osmanthus fragrans (Tea Olive) blooms off and on all fall and winter and is delectably fragrant. Tea Olive is also evergreen. Pansies can provide some off and on color for you, if you get them planted in the early fall after the worst of the heat has passed. They will suffer in any very cold temps (20s) but usually rebound. Winter jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum, will bloom heavily in the dead of winter with sprays of bright yellow flowers. There are many kinds of holly, azaleas for shadier locations, cleyera, Indian hawthorn, glossy abelia, aucuba, and many more. For trees, you can look at the Southern magnolia, and several of the tree hollies. I know that others will chime in with plenty of others. It's too bad that you don't want any needle leaf evergreens, because there are hundreds and hundreds of beautiful and interesting shrubs, groundcovers, and trees. I also advise you to consider a few deciduous plants, trees or shrubs, to bring into your landscape. They offer a refreshing change of seasons, fall color, interesting winter structure, and more. If I recall, you are in the Cullman area, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. If so, you're somewhat limited to what can flower in the winter. It is a temperate zone...warm temperate but temperate....not semi-tropical. This is a good time to visit your locally owned garden centers for some ideas. I don't mean the big box stores which can load up with all kinds of inappropriate plant material and don't have anyone on staff to advise you.