How to plant an indoor garden

Watch the Hartiverse video on indoor gardening here.
The joy of gardening doesn’t have to end with autumn. Finding a sunny spot in your home and following these tips can help you keep producing fresh vegetables all year. For more resources on gardening, follow these Amazon affiliate links:
Field Guide to Urban Gardening: How to Grow Plants, No Matter Where You Live: Raised Beds • Vertical Gardening • Indoor Edibles • Balconies and Rooftops • Hydroponics
Indoor Edible Garden: Creative Ways to Grow Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables in Your Home
Indoor Kitchen Gardening: Turn Your Home Into a Year-round Vegetable Garden – Microgreens – Sprouts – Herbs – Mushrooms – Tomatoes, Peppers & More
Gardening Under Lights: The Complete Guide for Indoor Growers
Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening: How to Grow Nutrient-Dense, Soil-Sprouted Greens in Less Than 10 days

If you’ve had some success with container gardening on the patio or balcony in the nice seasons, you can keep your garden growing vegetables, herbs and flowers all winter long by planting them indoors. It just takes a few simple steps to continue the joy of gardening year round. The most important ingredient is sunlight. It’s best to plant in front of a sunny window with southern exposure. Otherwise, you’ll need grow lamps, which are available at hardware stores in the gardening department. For example, a fluorescent lamp focused on your tomatoes and peppers will help guarantee an adequate supply of light so they won’t grow spindly or fail to produce fruit.

Up to a point, you’ll be able to prepare the containers the same way you would for an outside garden, with the correct soil mix and good drainage. One issue you’ll have to counteract is the low humidity of winter months. A good way to solve this is to place your pots in large trays, on a layer of small stones, and keep water in the trays. This can not only help your plants access water when they require it, but it will intensify the humidity that surrounds them as well. A notable difference between indoor and outdoor container gardening is that growing indoors requires less fertilizer, since the vegetables grow at a slower pace inside the house.

Your selection of plants will be more limited than in an outdoor container garden, but you can still grow tomatoes, radishes and small peppers, a few types of lettuce, and many herbs. Along with the usual herbs such as sage, basil, and thyme, you can grow cilantro, parsley and chives too. It is easy to grow these in 6-inch containers on a window sill.

To get your garden growing quickly, start with radishes. Take a container and sprinkle seeds on the wet soil, then cover that with another 1/4 inch of soil. To make the seeds sprout quickly, try a “greenhouse” effect, either by setting some glass over the top of the pot to preserve moisture or by stretching some plastic wrap over it until the seeds have germinated. Then remove the cover.

Small peppers, tomatoes, and many types of lettuce will thrive in the house, but they must have sunny, warm surroundings. When it comes to peppers and tomatoes, you’ll need to watch out for aphids and whiteflies and get rid of them with insecticidal soap or another form of insect killer when they first materialize. Ask your local master gardener for organic methods of pest reduction or check the internet. Once everything has sprouted, you should be able to harvest your first indoor tomatoes and peppers in about 10 weeks. You can also grow small-rooted varieties of carrots inside.

Your choices of veggies will be more limited with indoor pots than with outdoor pots, partly due to space considerations, plants becoming root bound in their pots, and partly due to insufficient direct sunlight. By ensuring suitable growing conditions, you can have a small garden to keep you producing fresh food all winter. Planting indoors will also keep your skills fresh for the day you can resume planting outside.

Hopefully this video has inspired you to try gardening indoors. Please click like on the video and subscribe to the channel for more informative content. Thank you and happy gardening!