If you do not have a garden or even an outdoor gardening area, you still can grow food — indoors. It is not as easy as growing food outdoors, especially during the winter, but it can be done. The challenges for growing edibles indoors are low light and a lack of pollinating insects and wind.
Indoor plants need more care than outdoor plants do, partly because they are not watered in a natural way. And the indoor environment often makes the plants smaller. During winter you might want to invest in a grow light for your plants.
Here are some more tips:
- Make sure pots drain properly.
- Grow the vegetables in commercial planting soil or soil from their own compost.
- Use pots, old plastic trays and jars for the vegetables to grow in.
- Plants need as much light as possible, so place them in a sunny part of your home.
- Give the plants regular nutrition, preferably at every watering.
- Put infested plants in “quarantine” so the pests can be combated.
- Harvest regularly, then sow new vegetation so that you always have fresh plants in progress.
Good foods to grow indoors:
Tomatoes—Tomatoes are wonderful plants because they are pretty, smell good and who doesn’t love fresh tomatoes?! Although growing tomatoes inside is more challenging, it’s absolutely doable. Here is how to grow tomatoes indoors.
Herbs—Herbs are popular to grow indoors, and you can cultivate pretty much any herb e.g. basil, parsley, dill, oregano and many more.
Lettuce—Lettuce is fairly easy and fast, and it’s a good food to propagate indoors because it adapts very quickly to the temperature.
Garlic Chive—All you need to do is plant a couple of garlic cloves in a pot; the green that grows from them is known as a garlic chives or greens, and are delicious. Simply harvest the greens and more will grow.
Sprouts—One of easiest vegetables to cultivate is sprouts. They even grow without soil, depending on the sprout. Here is a post on growing sprouts. In our home right now, we grow sweet pea, mung bean, and broccoli sprouts; and they grow so fast. I grow sweet pea sprouts in soil in my window, mung bean sprouts in a sprouting bag, and broccoli sprouts in a jar on my kitchen counter
Micro greens—Micro greens are wonderfully easy to grow. I like raising baby arugula, leaf lettuce and radishes. Here is how you can grow micro greens.
