Make sure your roof will hold the weight and bear the foot traffic of you tending the garden. Order your seeds from Baker Creek or another place that sells only Open-pollinated or heirloom seeds, so you can save them each year. Good luck :)

YMMV on the following Liz, but I use a dry 6-10-10 fertilizer (only about 2 bucks at Wal*Reich for a box that'll last me a decade), and apply a handful for every 4 square feet every 3 growing months. And every 6 months, I apply a light dusting of magnesium sulfate (epsom salts, just make sure they're the pure thing). The plants respond well, all else being constant. Congrats on all the newness! Just a word to no one in particular from my experience: stay away from anything that says "potting mix" for herbs... They will HATE it. Way too much loosley-packed raw organic matter. Always go for a landscaping-grade or home-processed compost, manure, or blend thereof... Or failing that, just plain topsoil. Throw in about half a cup to a cup of sand for every gallon of compost or manure, depending on the particular plant's requirements (IE more for rosemary, less for parsley). Just my $0.02 on the subject.

The reason people use potting soil at first is that the plants tend to not get fungi that kill them before the sprouts develop into larger plants. Potting soil frequently does not hold moisture that well, so watering is a bit more tricky than with soil. For your larger pots later, I recommend you purchase bags of topsoil. Most avid gardeners have lots of tough black plastic pots left over from plants they have bought. If you know anyone like that or join a gardening group you could probably easily acquire some of those in various sizes, from one to several gallons. If you are starting from seed, you will have awhile to get those. I have seen folks use styrofoarm cups as starter pots successfully, with a hole sliced in the bottom of each. Those cups easily tear in half, allowing you to get the plant out without disturbing the roots when you place them in a larger pot. When you transplant into a larger pot, if you fill the pot about half full of soil and then make a little hollow in the middle of the soil you can place your starter plant still in its soil into that, fill around it, and tamp the soil down gently with your fingers to eliminate air pockets, and water. You can get quite a few styrofoam cups into a flat such as an inexpensive kitty litter box or any similarly shaped container to catch excess water--even an old baking pan would do. You can find nice containers of all sizes to place your plants in at yard sales, and most plant shops have bargains on planters from time to time. As your herbs grow larger, you can always carefully make divisions of the perennial ones and replant in two pots, if you have none large enough. Many herbs tend to make do with the space they have and adjust their size accordingly. Chives and Thyme will be happy with a quart sized pot (4 inches) for at least the first season. Oregano can spread more than that with the right conditions--maybe a 6 inch or two gallon pot, or even larger. Marjoram does not return in my climate, but its growth habit is similar to Oregano. Basil and Cilantro are probably annuals, with a vertical growth habit, and Parsley is a biennial. The more sun you can give them, the larger the pot they can benefit from. I've never had luck with lavender, but if you give it full sun it can eventually form a large clump, depending on the variety. It's a perennial, so you could try to obtain an 18 inch to 2 ft wide container for it eventually...but probably not the first season. A lot of people purchase decorative pots without holes in them and then place the black plastic plant pots (which do have holes in the bottom) inside of them--if the plants receive too much water they can drain the excess into the decorative pots, which can be emptied of water if needed. If you go away for awhile, a bit of excess water will help keep your plants alive, as well. Good luck with your project. I wish I had known about this site when I began to plant herbs. ;o)

I would also suggest that if your buying from one of the big stores, lowes etc, that you go to an actual nursury, I think they tend to have healther plants and often a better selection (and the price difference isn't much if anything for a 4" pot). With that many problems, If the bugs came on the plants from the nursury I would switch nursuries. (seems like every bug in the world munches on my mints-I figure I can just share) For now, I tend to start herbs with established plants because it takes quite a while to grow from seed. I'm moving more toward growing from seed now. However, things like rosemary are really hard to grow from seed-the seeds have a really low germinaton rate. I would really suggest propigating things from the nursuries. This is the best of both worlds, cause you can get the more unusual cultivars and even if the plant has bugs if it's not too bad you can propigate your own baby plants. Mint is really easy, I propigate by layering. Just take a long bit of stem, pull some leaves off of a one section and burry this section under dirt (hold down with a rock or a hair pin) leaving the tip of the stem with leaves still on it out of dirt and the other end of the stem attached to the mom plant. When it roots, you can snip the baby plant from the mom plant. You can also pripagate the normal way using rooting hormone. Basil can be rooted in water. Parseley, I'm growing from seed now-I poured boiling water over the seeds to get them to sprout faster than something like 21 days (not sure if that's effective but I'll see).