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Is Indoor Gardening Expensive?

Gardening indoors has its costs in money, time, and effort. Nothing’s free. But is indoor gardening expensive?

To know whether indoor gardening is expensive, you need a baseline. You need to ask, “Compared to what?“. Depending on your circumstances, you could answer that question one of two ways.

If you have a back yard, you might compare the costs of an indoor garden to an outdoor raised bed. If you live in an apartment, where you have no back yard, then you might compare the costs of an indoor garden to buying food at the grocery store.

Non-financial costs factor in the equation. During the pandemic (and still even now), some fresh food just wasn’t available in the grocery store. Is coming home without the fruits and vegetables on your shopping list “expensive”?

What are the Costs of Gardening Indoors Versus an Outdoor Garden?

Estimate the cost of an outdoor raised bed garden

Gardening outdoors can get expensive quickly. The cost estimates below come from building a small raised bed in your back yard. You could save money by forgoing the raised bed and planting directly into the ground. However, a raised bed will likely produce more food in less time with less effort (after you construct it, of course!).

The unit prices shown come from a variety of sources and will change. Take them for the approximate examples they are meant to be. You may have to buy more material than you need due to bundling or volume discounts.

Building the raised bed frame

Let’s sketch out the cost of a 4’x4’x18″ (four foot square, eighteen inches high) raised bed garden.

We’ll construct our raised bed garden frame from cedar lumber. Cedar is naturally resistant to bugs so it’s not treated with chemicals. Treated lumber would work, too, but cedar adheres closer to the ideal of a natural garden.

We’ll need six (6) eight foot cedar 2×6 boards. Cut each in four foot sections. We’ll also need one (1) eight foot cedar 2×4. At $25 per 2×6 and $12 for the 2×4, our cost comes in around $162 for the frame materials. Cut the 2×4 into four 2-foot sections. A box of two and a half inch screws will come in around $20, so we’re up to $182.

Assuming you have a saw and impact driver [affiliate link], you can assemble the four foot long 2x6s into a frame using the two foot long 2x4s as the inside corner braces. Extend the extra six inches or so of the 2x4s into the ground to anchor the raised bed frame. You’ll end up with a frame about four foot by four foot.

I have gophers and other underground critters in my yard, so on my raised beds I added a wire mesh [affiliate link] as a floor before setting the beds into their permanent locations. Wire mesh is costly. You’ll pay a dollar or more per foot for a 48″ wide roll. And you’ll have to buy more than the four feet you want, so this purchase only makes sense if you have a really bad critter infestation or you’ll be constructing multiple beds. At a dollar per foot, a 50′ roll of wire mesh will cost you $50.

I know the wire mesh protects my gardens because when I empty a raised bed I see tunnels crisscrossing right below the wire mesh.

Our costs for our raised bed are up to $232.

You can layer the floor (above the wire mesh) of the bed with scrap cardboard or newspaper (if you can find it). Your call. It’s just an additional weed barrier or water retention tool.

I layered the inside of the raised bed frame with weed barrier fabric [affiliate link]. Fabric comes in 3′ or 4′ wide rolls, although narrower or wider rolls can be found. Thickness of the fabric varies as well. Fabric costs around 25 to 50 cents per foot. Thickness and width factor into the cost. Fifty or hundred foot rolls are very common. At 25 cents per foot, a hundred-foot roll will cost you about $25, so we’ll add that sum to the running total.

A roll of fabric often comes with U-shaped metal anchors. Be sure before buying or buy them separately. However, you’ll need a staple gun [affiliate link] to hold the fabric to the inside walls of the raised bed frame.

You’ll get a couple seasons from your fabric, maybe. The weather really chews it up. The extra you buy can be used to replace damaged fabric later or for a second bed now. I wrap the inside of the bed well, overlapping seams, and bring the fabric up over the top of the frame. You can decide your preferred balance between looks and weed deterrence.

Our raised bed frame price is now up to $282.

Of course, the cost of the frame will vary depending on the materials you use and local prices. Maybe you’ll locate your raised bed on concrete and not need the wire mesh or weed barrier fabric.

Other than the fabric, the frame should last you many years with minimal maintenance. If you want, seal or stain the lumber, keeping in mind you are growing food in this raised bed and roots or branches may come into contact with the frame.

It adds to the cost, but you can build a lip on the edge of the raised bed to act as a bench. Sitting on the edge of a 2×6 can get uncomfortable quickly.

Another improvement you can make to your raised bed frame is a trellis or hoop cover. Since the frame is made of wood, mounting attachments to your frame is easy.

The cost of building a cedar raised bed frame with the mesh floor comes in just under three hundred dollars. You can save money up front by purchasing a metal raised bed kit [affiliate link]. A metal raised bed kit would cost about a third of the cost of the cedar frame bed. However, the cedar frame bed should last years longer than a “kit in a box”. One argument for the metal raised bed kit is that you have a variety of colors from which to choose.

Filling the raised bed frame

A raised bed frame four (4) feet long by four (4) feet wide by eighteen (18) inches tall holds twenty-four (24) cubic feet of grow media when filled to the brim. Grow media consists of some combination of peat moss, coconut coir, vermiculite, perlite, compost [affiliate links], and/or other materials.

Three cubic feet of peat moss costs about $22 at my local big-box store. Compost costs about $6.50 per cubic foot at that same store. Vermiculite [affiliate link] runs about $18 per cubic foot in bulk. Using Mel’s Mix Formula, filling 24 cubic feet of the raised bed costs roughly $262.

The materials breakdown is 3 three-cubic-foot bags of peat moss (you’ll have some left-overs), 8 bags of compost, and 2 four-cubic-foot bags of vermiculite.

Constructing the raised bed frame and filling it brings the overall cost to $544.

Rounding out the raised bed garden

You’ll also purchase incidentals for your raised bed garden. Fertilizer is a given. You may want some soil modifiers. If you construct a raised bed garden, you owe it to yourself to read the book, “All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition” [affiliate link], by Mel Bartholomew. The book has value for the indoor gardener, as well, as you’ll see later in this article.

We’ll just put the purchase price of incidentals at $56, so our raised bed project lands at a flat $600.

The estimated cost of a raised bed garden does not include a drip irrigation watering kit [affiliate link]. Nor does the cost include the cost of using more city water (or electricity, if you’re on a well system). When you spray water on your garden, you water the entire surface, even if no plants grow there. Drip irrigation delivers water directly to each plant. And with your drip irrigation system attached to a water hose timer [affiliate link], your plants don’t suffer from neglect. You could easily spend $50 to $100 on a complete drip irrigation system.

A 4'x4'x18" raised bed garden costs about $600

Our raised bed as described cost us about $600.

You can reduce the cost by substituting treated lumber for the cedar and skipping the wire mesh floor. You could reduce your lumber and grow media expenses by making the bed only twelve inches tall.

You could just purchase a raised bed frame kit, which certainly lowers the initial cost, but probably ends up costing more in the long term as a store-bought kit may deteriorate quicker.

Six hundred dollars sounds like a steep cost for a garden in the back yard. But that’s still less expensive than a powerful gasoline-powered tiller [affiliate link] like you’d need to start a fresh in-ground garden.

But what do you get for that $600?

Square Foot Gardening maximizes the yield of your raised bed garden. You can grow as many as 16 plants in one square foot, and you have 16 squares in your 4×4 garden. The Square Foot Gardening Foundation offers a chart listing many garden foods and how many plants of each you can grow per square foot. 

You could grow 256 radish plants in your 4×4 garden. That’s 16 radishes per square foot, 16 square feet. Or 16 pepper plants, at one per square foot. Or 4 tomato plants, which take 4 squares each.

(OK, actually, you could cheat and grow radishes around your taller, slower-growing plants since radishes grow small and fast. The radishes will be harvested before the tomato or pepper plant grows tall enough to block the sunlight.)

Let’s put this into perspective. The back of a packet of radishes recommends planting radishes in a 12″ wide row one inch apart. 256 radishes (the number that fits in the raised bed) spaced an inch apart takes more than twenty-one linear feet. You need to plow a twenty-two foot long row a foot wide to grow 256 radishes the old-fashioned way.

The benefits of the raised bed add up. Your in-ground radishes grow in dirt. With dirt, you get what you get. To get the most from dirt, you need to have it analyzed and apply compost and/or fertilizers (possibly over multiple seasons) to compensate for any deficiencies. Even dirt isn’t free! Your raised bed garden offers a plant super-soil that encourages faster growth and healthier plants than is possible with plain dirt.

Your raised bed slows down or prevents weeds from competing with your plants. You can lay a weed barrier on top of your garden soil to further discourage weed growth. Your plants get all the food and water to themselves.

So, as you can see, a raised bed garden crushes a dirt garden consisting of plowed rows and makes a worthy competitor to indoor gardening. But how does the cost of a raised bed compare to an indoor garden? Well, this is where we try to compare apples and oranges.

Apples to oranges: Comparing the cost of growing food indoors versus outdoors in a raised bed

Comparing growing food outdoors in a raised bed to growing food indoors is something of an apples to oranges comparison.

In this scenario, your reason for gardening is providing fresh food to your family. You want herbs to include in your recipes and ingredients for salads or salsa. Your goal is to grow exactly what you need, not looking to grow extra that you give away, preserve, or discard.

A 4×4 raised bed has 16 squares. Let’s say you set up your raised bed this way.

  • 4 Basil
  • 4 Parsley
  • 1 Mint
  • 1 Dill
  • 1 Thyme
  • 1 Cilantro
  • 16 Carrots
  • 16 Onions
  • 16 Radishes
  • 4 Leaf Lettuce
  • 1 Bell Pepper
  • 1 Jalapeno
  • 1 Tomato (which takes the remaining 4 squares)

Let’s start comparing costs with some intangibles.

Overplanting

You planted four basil and four parsley plants. The square foot gardening chart said you can put four of each in one square, so you did. Do you need four basil plants? Unlikely. This highlights one cost of gardening outdoors. You plant more than you need to compensate for produce lost to weather, critters, and disease. Overplanting costs resources, space, and time. You’ll give away or discard what you don’t need.

Your indoor garden grows in a near-perfect environment. The only bugs that find your plants are the ones you let into your home. Disease is nearly non-existent in an indoor garden. Feeding and watering follow a beneficial schedule. Therefore, you probably can get all the basil you need from a single plant. 

When comparing the cost of an outdoor garden to an indoor garden, remember you can grow fewer plants indoors. You save space, effort, time, and resources growing fewer plants indoors.

Short growing season

Depending on where you live, your growing season outdoors may be two to five months.

The narrow harvesting season for food grown outdoors increases the cost per plant per year. You can plant seeds each week for a staggered harvest to distribute your yield. But that harvest is still limited by the growing season.

An indoor garden grows food all year long. You can stagger plant life cycles in your indoor garden so you always have a producing plant. Any money spent on an indoor garden kit (discussed later) buys you a garden 365 days a year. When comparing fixed dollar amounts for an outdoor garden versus an indoor garden, remember an outdoor garden is idle half the year.

To be clear, your six-hundred-dollar raised bed frame provides you a garden only half the year.

No long-term storage options

You planted 4 leaf lettuce plants. For the entire season, you’ll clip lettuce leaves for some salads in July and August, and then you’re back to buying lettuce in the store when your plants die from the heat. Lettuce doesn’t store well. This is almost a “Why bother?” situation.

You don’t worry about how to store food or how long your stored food will last with an indoor garden. Your indoor garden grows food every day of the year. You harvest leaves of lettuce for your salad and the plant grows more. You pick tomatoes, and the plant grows more.

Indoor gardening is continuous gardening.

Risk of loss due to uncontrollable variables

Financial institutions use a mathematical formula to calculate the cost of risk of an investment, and they increase how much their investment must earn to offset that risk. You need to calculate the risk to your outdoor plants as a cost.

The plants growing in your outdoor garden are at risk. Severe weather—heat or cold, drought or flood—can kill your plants. Bugs and deer can eat your plants. Disease can ruin a plant.

In the hypothetical raised bed, you’ve planted one each of mint, dill, thyme, cilantro, tomato, bell pepper, and jalapeno. You calculated one tomato plant will supply all you need. But if you check your garden in the morning to find a plump neon-green caterpillar wiping the corner of its mouth as it relaxes on the stump that used to be your tomato plant, you’ll realize you just lost your entire tomato crop.

The time, effort, and resources you expend defending your plants is a cost of growing food outdoors.

By growing food indoors, you protect your plants from nearly all the destroyers. You all but eliminate the risks to your plants. But it gets better.

If somehow your indoor garden plant dies prematurely, you can immediately start growing another. Very soon, you’ll have a replacement. 

Dollar Comparison

The 4×4 raised bed framework, filled with special grow media, represents the outdoor garden. Indoors, you’ll grow your garden in a Hydroponic Growing System and a Self-Watering Container System.

A Hydroponic Growing System is a long, technical name for an indoor gardening appliance. It’s an all-in-one gardening device you can set up in minutes right from the box. A Hydroponic Growing System works wonders growing plants with “normal” roots, but is the wrong tool for plants with bulbs, tubers, and taproots.

A Self-Watering Container System could be described as a raised bed garden, utilizing square foot gardening techniques, adapted for use indoors. Unlike the Hydroponic Growing System, which comes in a box, you assemble a Self-Watering Container System from components you buy separately.

It’s a system

Before continuing, take note that both indoor techniques are classified as a “system”. Not a device or an appliance or a kit. These systems, one started, do all they can to automate the process of growing food for you. You power the system with electricity and maintain the system by adding water and nutrients.

You can build a Hydroponic Growing System from components you have on hand or buy a ready-made device, but, regardless, the system is the same. Follow the system, get a bountiful indoor garden.

Hydroponic Growing System

A Hydroponic Growing System gardening appliance is a “garden in a box”. Setting up a garden is not much more complicated than following these steps.

  1. Unpack your Hydroponic Growing System
  2. Fill tub with water
  3. Add seed(s) to each pod
  4. Seat pods in openings in tub lid
  5. Add nutrients to water
  6. Plug it in

If you’re factoring in the cost of your effort and time when starting a garden, that list should have sold you on indoor gardening already! We’re talking minutes to set up a garden.

A 6-pod Hydroponic Growing System takes up about as much countertop space as a 2-slice toaster.

In the raised bed example, you planted 4 basil, 4 parsley, a mint, a dill, and a thyme plant. That’s 5 square feet of your garden. With a Hydroponic Growing System, using a toaster-sized area of you kitchen countertop, you can grow one each of basil, parsley, mint, dill, and thyme, plus one more herb.

The AeroGarden Harvest Elite [affiliate link] Hydroponic Growing System comes with pods already seeded with parsley, mint, dill, thyme, and two types of basil (meaning you can skip step 3 in the list above). The entire garden is less than 7 inches by 11 inches. That’s a savings of more than four square feet versus growing your food outdoors.

Our example Hydroponic Growing System comes with seats for 6 pods. If you really need those two basil and three parsley plants, just get a Hydroponic Growing System that holds 18 pods (such as this one from MUFGA [affiliate link]). In the area typically occupied by a small microwave, you can grow all your herbs plus the 4 leaf lettuce plants and have room left over for that cilantro plant and two more small plants. Wow!

The cost of a Hydroponic Growing System seems to be coming down. Fierce competition in this market prevents even the most popular company from raising its prices too high. This contrasts with the back yard raised bed garden, which only gets more expensive each year.

For this example, we’ll get two 12-plant Hydroponic Growing Systems. To save a few dollars, we’ll forgo the convenience of WiFi, which is being built into a growing number of appliances.

In one container, you’ll grow your basil, parsley, mint, dill, thyme, and leaf lettuce. You can leave three pod seats unused to space out your plants. You don’t have to use every pod seat.

In the second container, you’ll grow your (cherry) tomato, bell pepper, and jalapeno pepper plants. Choose a Hydroponic Growing System that offers an 18 to 24 inch (preferred) gap between the tray and the light. These are taller plants that will take all the room you give them.

Your two Hydroponic Growing Systems, which replace thirteen (13) square feet in your raised bed, occupy less than three (3) square feet in your house. You can put them on a counter, on an end table, or on a shelf unit. (Leave enough vertical space for the light deck to fully extend.)

What’s your cost? Each 12-pod garden can be purchased for approximately $50. You’re into this for about a hundred dollars ($100). Watch for sales like Amazon’s Prime Day or Big Deal Days.

At this point you’re into the indoor garden for $100. You nourish your plants by adding liquid food to the water tank. Several companies offer plant food compatible with your Hydroponic Growing System.

You can buy a 1000 milliliter (1 liter) bottle of AeroGarden liquid food. At 24mL per feeding every 2 weeks, you’ll get more than a year of feedings from a single bottle for a 12-pod tank. Figure on two bottles for the year, since you have two 12-pod gardens. (Note the dosage recommendations are for an AeroGarden 12-pod device, and you may need to adapt dosage for other brands.)

Alternatively you can buy plant food from the manufacturer of the Hydroponic Growing System you bought. This will be an ongoing expense you can budget for once you get in a routine with your plants.

We’ll set the annual cost for plant food at $100. That may be a little on the high side. But padding the amount allows you to stay under budget even as you experiment with a few different solutions to see what best suits your own garden.

Now, what’s missing? Seeds! We didn’t add the cost of the seeds into the raised bed price estimate because we’ll buy the same seed packets for any garden. But you’ll spend about $4 per packet and we listed 10 different plants that will be grown in the Hydroponic Growing System, so that comes to about $40.

The cost of electricity will be a factor. The power supply for one 6-pod Hydroponic Garden System with a controller, water pump, and 22 watt (22w) LED shows a rating of 0.8 amps at 120 volts. Let’s do the math to figure the annual cost per device.

120 volts * .8 amps is 96 watts.

96 watts * 24 hours is 2304 watts, or 2.3kW (kilowatt), per day.

2.3kW * $0.13/kWh (kilowatt hour) is $0.30 per day.

$0.30/day * 365 d/year = $109 / year

We have two devices, so that totals up to $218 per year in electricity. But that is not realistic. The Hydroponic Growing System only powers the light for 16 hours per day at most. And the pump only runs a few minutes per hour; thirty minutes at most. The computer runs all the time.

We can cut the cost of 8 hours of light and 60% of the cost of running the pump. $218 * .667 (two-thirds) is roundabout $145, or slightly more than $12 per month. We’ll estimate the cost of electricity per year for two 12-pod gardens at $145.

(Note: You can use a Kill A Watt electricity usage monitor [affiliate link] to get a very close approximation of your actual costs.)

We didn’t add the cost of city water to the cost of the raised bed but did include the cost of electricity when calculating the cost of the indoor garden. Growing food indoors just has fewer hidden costs!

Your indoor garden, with 10 of the 13 plants from your raised bed, rings up at a total of roughly $345 (not counting the seeds).

Did you remember this is a comparison between apples and oranges? The indoor garden runs all year long. The $345 is for 12 months of food growth, whereas the raised bed is for half that, just 6 months.

An outdoor raised bed garden costs $600 versus a pair of indoor Hydroponic Growing System appliances that cost $345, but the Hydroponic Growing System appliances provide a continuous growing season.

But we still need to grow our onions, radishes, and carrots.

Self-Watering Container System

To properly grow onions, radishes, and carrots, you need soil. Not dirt. Enter the Self-Watering Container System, a variation of the raised bed garden adapted for use indoors.

The Self-Watering Container System consists of a self-watering container, modified for use indoors; quality soil, additives, and fertilizer; and a powerful grow light on a timer.

A self-watering container participates in watering your plants.

You are familiar with a traditional flower pot. You pour water on the soil surface and a dish under the pot catches the excess. That water just evaporates; it’s wasted, so you have to water the plant often.

A self-watering container holds soil above a water reservoir. The floor of the soil basin dips into the water reservoir, and holes allow water to wet that soil. The water in the soil wicks up through the soil.

To see that wicking action, dip the edge of a paper towel in a puddle of water on your kitchen counter. The water defies gravity to flow up the paper towel.

The water coming up from the water reservoir draws the roots of the plants down to meet it.

Holes in the floor of the soil basin (above the water line) allow deep roots direct access to the water reservoir.

You fill the reservoir by pouring water down a tube in a self-watering container. The only time you water the soil directly is when you establish your garden. The water reservoir allows you to go days between waterings.

A hole in the container allows excess water to spill out should you try filling the container above the recommended fill line. Since you’ll be using this container indoors, you must provide a pan or cup to catch the overflow water.

A Self-Watering Container System works better with seedlings you started from seeds elsewhere than with seeds themselves. This expense is not covered here, like the drip irrigation was not covered for the raised bed garden. Interesting note: you can use your Hydroponic Growing System to start your seeds and transplant seedlings to your Self-Watering Container System. This just keeps getting better!

EarthBox and Emsco offer popular self-watering containers. Those are the EarthBox Original [affiliate link] (rectangular), EarthBox Root & Veg [affiliate link] (square, deeper), and the Emsco City Picker [affiliate link].

The EarthBox website provides a handy planting chart that shows how many plants you can grow and offers helpful information about many plants.

Since the container holds about 2 cubic feet of growing media, it’s easy to just buy a bag ready-made (like Espoma Organic Potting Soil Mix [affiliate link]) and pour it in. You can mix in any soil modifiers (like dolomite) before applying a strip of fertilizer to the soil surface.

You cannot compare a self-watering container directly to a raised bed garden using square foot gardening techniques. Some plants you can grow in less space but others require more space.

You can grow two tomato plants in a single self-watering container. Two tomato plants in a raised bed occupy eight (8) square feet. So a self-watering container truly wins that comparison. But a self-watering container with about two (2) square feet of surface area can grow only 16 carrots or radishes, which is half what could be grown in the same area of a raised bed. The loss is greater for onions, which drops to about 12 in the self-watering container.

In the comparison between the raised bed and the Hydroponic Growing Systems, we chose to grow one basil plant indoors versus the four growing in the raised bed. Could we reduce the number of plants grown in the Self-Watering Container System and still have a fair comparison?

We can grow 16 carrots, 16 radishes, and 16 onions in three square feet of the raised bed. We grew that many because we could. Do we need to harvest 16 onions, carrots, and radishes all at once? We could stagger the harvest so we get one onion, two carrots, and two radishes a week, but that only gets us food for 3 weeks and then we’re without food until each plant matures. And it also assumes three types of plants will be ready to harvest at the same time.

Our indoor garden requires two Self-Watering Container Systems.

You can plant 6 onions along the long edge of an EarthBox, pour the fertilizer along the center line, and grow 8 carrots on the other side. In the other container, plant 8 radishes along one long edge and a mix of carrots and radishes (up to 8 total) along the other long edge. You don’t plant them all at once. Plant one onion and a couple radishes and carrots, then plant again in a week. Continue to get a rotation of harvests and feedings. Adjust to satisfy your needs.

Let’s look at costs.

A self-watering container can run roughly $40 – $70, depending on what comes in the kit. Let’s go with $60 for this example.

A typical Self-Watering Container System holds about 2 cubic feet of soil. As was done above, let’s estimate high at $40.

A pound of 7-7-7 fertilizer can be had for around $5.

You’ll need a pound of natural dolomite, but a 5 pound bag costs only a bit more than a 1 pound bag, so just buy the larger bag for $18 and keep the leftovers for later.

Finally, you’ll need a grow light. Watch the sales and you should be able to get a 100 watt grow LED for at or below $60. The large surface area of your garden requires a large light to cover it all and the extra power handles taller plants.

Add $10 for a basic timer you can program to light up your garden 16 hours per day.

You can calculate the cost of electricity for one light using this formula.

100 watts * 16 hours per day * 365 days per year = 584 kWh per year

584 kWh per year * $0.13 per kWh = $73 per year

Your electrical costs will be $73 per year if you run the light 16 hours per day at full power. With a dimmable light, you can cut that cost down significantly. However, for the sake of this project, we’ll factor in the full cost.

The bill for all these parts comes to $256. If you watch sales and conserve electricity, you can lower the cost quite a bit.

To match the raised bed garden, you need two Self-Watering Container Systems, so the actual total comes to $512.

Dollar Comparison

The $512 for the two Self-Watering Container Systems plus $345 for the pair of Hydroponic Growing Systems brings your one year indoor garden bill to $857.

Wow. That sounds terrible! The raised bed costs only about $600.

But back up. Oranges to apples comparison, remember?

The indoor garden runs all year long, twice as long as the raised bed garden. You can build a greenhouse to extend your outdoor growing season, but that adds considerable cost to the outside garden and you still only get to grow a very limited selection of plants during the cold months.

Your indoor garden rarely loses any plants to bugs.

You don’t have to go outside to plant, maintain, or harvest your garden.

You control just about every variable of your indoor garden, allowing you to experiment to find repeatable ways to improve your yield.

You waste less food by growing only as much as you’ll eat.

Nobody sees your garden unless you invite them into your home.

You don’t get eaten alive by mosquitos while tending to your garden.

Live plants in your home can be very calming and the bright grow lights might reduce the winter blahs.

Conclusion of the comparison of outdoor and indoor gardens

You compared the cost of a 4×4 raised bed outside to an indoor garden comprised of two Hydroponic Growing Systems with 12 pods each combined with two Self-Watering Container Systems. The yield of each garden was different but reflected the strengths of the environment.

The in-home garden came in at a higher cost (although adding in your increased water bill and a drip irrigation system for the raised bed would have narrowed the difference). But you get twice the growing season and many conveniences bundled with the indoor garden. A continuous growing season makes the in-home garden the less expensive option overall. The raised bed outdoors simply cannot compete with that.

The title of the article is, “Is Indoor Gardening Expensive?”. It’s costly, especially when paying for all the equipment that first year. But look at the dramatically lower costs during subsequent years, and indoor gardening becomes much more the bargain.

But how does that indoor garden compare to just buying your food at the store?

What are the Costs of Gardening Indoors Versus Buying Food at the Grocery Store?

You could just forgo the garden (indoor or outdoor) and just buy all your food at the grocery store. Let’s explore the cost difference of buying your food or growing it indoors.

Onions are $1.25 per pound.

Cilantro is $0.60 per clump.

Parsley is $0.60 per clump.

Carrots cost $1.00 per pound.

Radishes are about $2.00 per bag of about eight.

Romaine lettuce is about $2.00 per stalk.

Cherry tomatoes are $4.00 per pound.

Bell peppers cost about a dollar each.

Jalapenos cost $1.00 per pound.

Spices like oregano, dill, basil, thyme, and mint come preserved in plastic dispensers. You’ll pay between one and five dollars per spice container.

Your indoor garden, as calculated above, is $857 for the first year. For later years, your costs will be electricity, pods for your Hydroponic Growing Systems, plant food and fertilizer, and seeds. We’ll figure $325 per year, give or take some, after the first year.

So, when you’re at the grocery store and buy 200 pounds of cherry tomatoes, you’ll just be breaking even! No, you don’t shop like that.

How much do you spend per week on fresh food? Depending on what you need, maybe $10 per week? That’s $520 per year. Huh. $520 per year comes in pretty close to the cost of a first-year garden and more than the annual garden cost after the first year.

Compared to an indoor garden, shopping at the grocery store doesn’t seem to save you much money.

Moreover, your in-home garden provides fresh herbs, not the dried stuff in the plastic containers. There’s value in that.

The grocery store wins on the convenience factor, given you were going there anyway. Just drop it in the cart and pay on the way out. But what if the grocery store shelf is empty the day you shop?

Another benefit of growing your own food is you get to choose the exact variety of lettuce or tomato or pepper you get. And so long as you arrange your plant growth schedules, you can always have something ready to harvest.

Start small and built your indoor garden

When comparing the costs of an indoor garden to a raised bed garden outdoors, we compared two large-scale gardens. But when comparing an indoor garden to the grocery store produce section, we can compare growing individual plants to buying individual foods at the store.

What if you simply wanted to grow lettuce at home rather than purchase it at the grocery? Or cherry tomatoes?

Store-bought cherry tomatoes can be rather expensive, sometimes costing as much as $5 for a small container. And for lettuce, your grocery store choices are iceberg, romaine, or that basket with the random mixed leaves.

What could you do with a basic 13-pod Hydroponic Growing System like the stylish LetPot garden [affiliate link]? Grow 13 types of lettuce [affiliate link], course! One advantage of growing food in your own kitchen is choosing what you grow, and being able to grow it in small batches. Get a matching set of LetPot gardens and grow just your lettuce and cherry tomatoes, two of the most expensive grocery produce products.

Do you like a variety of peppers but cannot find them at the grocery store? Grow your own peppers [affiliate link]. If this strikes your fancy, look for a Hydroponic Growing System with 24″ clearance under the grow light so plants have room to grow. You’ll want a powerful grow light for such tall plants, a light like the 50 watt light on the AeroGarden Bounty Elite (which also has WiFi) [affiliate link].

Manufacturers will promote how many different types of foods you can grow in your Hydroponic Growing System. They neglect to mention you can grow a large crop of just one type of plant, if that is your interest. You have so many options in how you use your indoor garden appliances.

Just a side note here. A “kitchen countertop garden appliance”, the Hydroponic Growing System, makes a superb gift. It’s inexpensive, it’s compact, and it’s useful. People love growing things. If the person you have in mind prefers growing flowers, a Hydroponic Growing System can grow flowers. Check out the Bountiful Indoor Garden page for indoor garden gifts for indoor garden gift ideas.

Conclusion of the comparison of outdoor and indoor gardens

Grocery shopping for produce is less expensive than growing it in-house. At least when compared to the garden start-up costs.

However, product shortages, questionable quality or freshness, and lack of variety make shopping for fresh food unpredictable. And not everything is actually fresh, like many of the herbs.

Key Takeaways

Which brings us back to the question, is indoor gardening expensive? Relatively, no. Does it cost money? Yes. Might you spend more than if you just got all your food from the grocery store? Maybe.

Setting up an indoor garden involves a lower outlay than a raised bed garden outdoors but comes in higher at the end of the first year after factoring in the cost of electricity.

Buying produce at the grocery store is less expensive than either garden type, but you’re dependent upon a shaky supply chain. And growing your own food gets less expensive the second year, potentially even dropping below the cost of food from the grocery store.

The costs of growing food in a raised bed versus indoors versus just buying it come in fairly close. It’s the intangibles that tip the win to growing your food indoors. 

Your fresh food is just a couple steps away from where you’re preparing dinner. You can snatch a cherry tomato off the plant and pop it in your mouth as you walk through the kitchen. You can harvest all the food for salads for you and your guests while they watch. Having plants in your home can be calming.

Don’t let the costs deter you from gardening indoors. Start small, maybe just a single Hydroponic Growing System and a variety of lettuce seeds. Expand your garden as you gain experience and confidence.

The prices used on this page are the “retail” costs. Shop the sales to save money on components. You’ll soon have a well-rounded indoor garden. 

The post Is Indoor Gardening Expensive? first appeared on Bountiful Indoor Garden.

]]> Tips For Growing A Bountiful Indoor Garden https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/tips-for-growing-a-bountiful-indoor-garden/ Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:31:13 +0000 https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/?p=3137 Make your life easier and grow more food indoors with these tips, tricks, and suggestions.

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Tips For Growing A Bountiful Indoor Garden

Your bountiful indoor garden will be your pride and joy. Whether you want to grow a few select herbs in a tasteful kitchen setting or you want to cram as many salad plants into as tight a space as possible, you’ll find ideas to help you succeed on this page.

This article will grow over time. New tips appear at the top of the page, so you don’t need to hunt them down each time you return.

There’s no shame in adding grow lights to your plants, even those in Hydroponic Growing Systems. If you have a full garden growing in a Hydroponic Growing System, the additional light can give your plants a boost.

I’ve grown tomatoes and peppers in AeroGarden Harvest series Hydroponic Growing Systems. Those plants grow so big! I prune to keep them in check, but I’ve found branches growing outside the scope of the light survive just fine. All the same, when I have a few larger plants arranged in close proximity, I believe having an independent grow light aimed at the lot of them provides a boost.

You’ll need to attach supplementary lights to a timer set to roughly match the schedule of the automated light. Your plant needs time to rest. The lights don’t need to be exactly synchronized, but the timers should be closely aligned.

Your Hydroponic Growing System has a very bright LED grow light. Or you added a LED grow light for your EarthBox or vertical garden. Get the most of your light by positioning other plants nearby. They won’t get direct light from the LED but it should be enough for many types of plants.

Position two or more lights close together and fill the space between them with planters. If you have three or more grow lights, you get a central growing area by arranging the lights in a circle. The light in the circle center will not be as bright as a dedicated light but it’s enough for some plant types.

Grabbing some free sunlight doesn’t hurt, either. Using artificial sunlight for your garden doesn’t mean you cannot make use of the real thing, too. Position your plants near a window facing south, west, or east for the most sunlight, but even a window facing north affords your plants a little extra “light food.”

Don’t throw away green onion bulbs after you cut off the stems! They may grow just fine in your Hydroponic Growing System.

Push the bulb down into an empty grow pod. You may fit more than one in a single pod. When the water circulates the Hydroponic Growing System will water the roots, which will grow down into the water in the tub. Pad the bulb with a grow plug cut in half if the bulb sits too low in the grow pod.

Other plants often regrown from stumps include celery and lettuce. You may find the size of the hole in the Hydroponic Growing System tray to be the limiting factor. But give it a try!

Avoid locating your plants near vents for heating and cooling. The air blowing from the vent can be as cool as the 50s to as high as the 90s Fahrenheit.

Provide your plants a location where the temperature is regulated but constant.

Some plants may harm children or pets. For each plant you decide to grow, do a quick Internet search for information whether the plant should be grown out of reach.

You can grow so many plants indoors, listing them all along with any possible adverse effects is not possible here. (Companion article: What Can I Grow with My Indoor Garden?)

Some plants may not be harmful to pets, but they certainly attract them. My cats enjoy chewing on the strawberry runners (and shoelaces, and just about any other strings). So, in addition to protecting your pets from your plants, protect your plants from your pets.

Healthy, happy plants grow tall and wide. This is what you want. But if your plant fills a corner with walls on two sides, you cannot get to all the goodies it grows.

A tomato plant can hide ripe cherry tomatoes better than you may realize. You may not see the little orange beauties due to the dense vegetation. And if you do see them you need to reach through the plant to grab them.

Position your plants where you have access to them from all sides. You can examine the plant from all angles so you miss no ripened fruits.

Your tomato or pepper plants can continue giving you fruits for months. You risk damaging your plants when you move them.

Therefore, when starting a plant that will be large and long-living, find a location for your plant where it can reside for as much as six months, or maybe even more.

Think in three dimensions. This isn’t a plowed field. Stack your gardens.

Countertop Hydroponic Growing Systems fit on shelves. They’ll fit on a narrow rack. Just be sure the spacing between the shelves accommodates the light when fully extended. 

The AeroGarden Farm series of Hydroponic Growing Systems are floor models that stack using a simple bracket kit. Imagine two 24-pod gardens stacked vertically, growing food all year long. That’s a very compact, indoor, self-contained garden!

Another option is to grow plants on a column (tower) garden. Rather than arranging your plants on a flat tray, position plants around a column that stands two to six feet tall. You can grow many plants without taking up more than a few square feet of floor space. (Companion article: Limited Floor Space? Go Vertical With Your Garden!)

Don’t limit yourself to growing your food in the kitchen just because you are growing food. Plants add character to any room.

Decorate your home with leafy greens where you have limited space and jalapenos where a plant has room to expand.

Grow a cucumber plant and spread the vines out from the Hydroponic Growing System. So long as the vines get adequate light and you support the cucumbers it’s not much different than a spider plant. But with pretty yellow flowers! Be creative. Think outside the box.

Choose plants with similar growth characteristics if they share a hydroponic growing system or EarthBox. You want your plants to reach maturity around the same time, to share the light, and to expect the same watering schedule. Don’t plant a desert and tropical plant side-by-side! Or a short and a tall plant. Or a slow-grower and a fast-grower.

Be realistic in what you can grow and when in your Hydroponic Growing System.

You can grow other plants with your dwarf tomato plant if you have an AeroGarden Farm series garden or Hydroponic Growing System of similar capabilities. But if you have an AeroGarden Harvest or Hydroponic Growing System of similar capabilities you’ll need to cap five pod seats. The tomato plant will crowd out any other plants.

You are not always going to grow plants in every pod seat on the tray. Cap the pod seats to keep debris from falling into the water and prevent algae growth in the water.

 

You might think of plants like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, or even sunflowers as being too large to grow indoors. Most likely, you’ve seen these plants growing outdoors and they’ve been huge. But variations of all these plants and more have been bred for growth in tight spaces.

Seed pods you’d buy from AeroGarden include recommendations for the smallest Hydroponic Growing System series you’d want to grow them in. The AeroGarden tomato seed pod grows a plant that expands outside the range of the light of the Harvest series. Just prune a bit and the plant does just fine.

If you want to grow your own seeds in your Hydroponic Growing System, search for seeds using keywords such as “dwarf container seeds”.

When growing plants that grow a large trunk one thing to consider is the size of the openings in the tray for the pods. Watch to be sure the trunk does not grow too thick for the opening. You don’t want the plant trunk to crack the tray. You may never need to worry, but this is a page listing tips for getting the most from your Hydroponic Growing System, and this is a tip.

 

Why are you doing this? Are you happy planting random veggies and planning meals around what you have available? Or do you have a plan for everything you’re growing? You’ll get more from your indoor garden by having a plan for everything you grow.

Set objectives. Maybe you want a salad every day (Companion article: How to Get a Salad Every Day from Your Indoor Garden) or two. You want the perfect selection of herbs for your homemade dinners. Or ingredients for your salsa recipe. Or maybe a selection of finger food snacks to replace unhealthy treats. Decide what you need to grow and how to best achieve your objectives. (Companion article: How to Plan Your Indoor Garden)

Keep a journal. You cannot remember everything.

Use the journal to improve every crop. Just like a real farmer would.

Here are a few things you can track.

  • When did you plant each seed?
  • How long did the seed take to grow into a mature plant?
  • How much nutrients did you add to the water, and when did you do it?
  • How long did the plant survive?
  • How many times did you harvest or how many fruits did you get?

 

You get the idea. Add your own questions to the list.

The point of this exercise is knowing what to expect when you start each seed. When you know what to expect from each plant you can plan your harvests to supply food for salads or meals. You know when to start new seeds to replace your existing plants to ensure no laps in your harvest.

You are growing food in a controlled environment. You can start a seed when you want and terminate the plant anytime. Experiment.

Try different plants. Which do you like better, the AeroGarden Red Heirloom or Golden Harvest tomato plant? Grow your own seeds for plants you don’t think will work well indoors.

Try pruning (or not pruning) the plants or adding supplemental grow lights if they are large plants.

Feed your plants nutrients from different manufacturers. Some people add small doses of hydrogen peroxide or calcium and magnesium to the water. Does that improve your crop yield? Or kill the plants?

Alter the feeding schedule. Is a fourteen day span between feedings optimal, or is it perhaps twelve days? For some plants, fourteen days between feedings works better, but maybe for others, half doses every seven days results in healthier plants.

It’s your garden. They’re your plants. You can grow your plants all year long. Try things out. Track your experiments and the results of your experiments. Over time, you’ll have that bountiful indoor garden you’ve longed for.

If a plant is not performing, kill it, clean the planter, and start over.

If your plants are growing outdoors, and it’s too late in the season to start over, you do whatever you can to revive your plants. That is the wrong way to think about an indoor garden.

With an indoor garden, there are no seasons. Keeping an ailing plant alive prevents you from starting over with a healthy replacement.

Be sure you know why the plant under-performed so your next attempt meets expectations. Think about the long term as you work to achieve your objectives. Your fifth crop should outperform your first crop. Yes, this is for fun, but it’s also about getting food you can eat.

When you garden outdoors, you plan around the four seasons. Plant in spring; harvest in summer and autumn; wait through winter for the next spring.

But your indoor garden enjoys a perpetual summer. You can start growing plants any time. Therefore, you should think in terms of cycles instead of seasons. A cycle is a round of growing food in your Hydroponic Growing System or Soil-Substitute Container.

You control the environment in which your plants grow. Take full advantage of this power. (Companion article: Why Your Outdoor Garden Should Be Indoors)

Plants eventually reach the end of their useful life. Learn to recognize the signs a plant is trending downward. Start a new crop cycle for that plant early enough that when the current crop cycle ends, you have a new crop cycle to replace it.

Your objective in overlapping crop cycles is to always have food to harvest. Sometimes that means leaving a pod seat in a tray empty for a little while so you have a place to start that new oregano plant as the existing one declines.

Since you are growing plants indoors, you probably won’t benefit from the efforts of natural pollinators like bees and butterflies.

Look for self-pollinating varieties of plants like cucumbers. They do exist. Pollinating this type of plant can be as easy as positioning a fan to blow air across the plant to jiggle the flowers. You can jiggle the branches yourself, if you wish.

In the absence of self-pollinating variants, you become the pollinator. You can use a cotton swab, an electric toothbrush, or an AeroGarden Be The Bee pollinator.

Research the plant so you understand how to identify male and female flowers and whether you need multiple plants to achieve pollination.

You may be able to save money when ordering an AeroGarden seed pod kit.

The AeroGarden Harvest has seats for six pods on its tray. Therefore, most people would look for a six pod kit when ordering refills. Stop! Compare the prices of the nine and twelve pod kits. 

Take the total cost of the six pod kit and divide by 6. That is the cost per pod in that kit. Take the total cost of the nine pod kit and divide by 9. That’s the cost per pod in that kit. Which one is less expensive? Do the same for the twelve pod kit.

You may get more pods for just a few cents or dollars more. Why not? You save money and they’ll keep until you are ready to use them.

Be sure to check the contents of the different pod kits. The contents of the twelve pod kit may be different than two six pod kits. It depends on the kit.

Note that the number of fertilizer bottles in the different kits are designed for one cycle of the included pods. If getting a comparable amount of nutrients is important to you, be sure you are not saving money on the pods but losing money on the nutrients.

Do you start your spring outdoor garden with a trip to the nursery section of your local big box store? You pick out a selection of seedlings ready for transplant into your raised beds or patio containers. The price of those baby plants sure seemed to go up a lot in the last few years. Want to save some money?

If you have an AeroGarden Harvest, Bounty, or Farm series Hydroponic Growing System, you can swap out the regular tray with an optional tray designed for growing many seedlings for transplant.

How many seedlings can you grow?

  • 23 seedlings in the Harvest
  • 50 seedlings in the Bounty
  • 85 seedlings in the Farm 12
  • 170 seedlings in the Farm 24

 

How much would you pay to buy 170 seedlings at the big box store? Grow them from seed right in your own home! Seeds are so much less expensive.

And don’t stop with one batch of seedlings. After transplanting one batch of seedlings, just start on the next! 

Key Takeaways

Gardening indoors is no longer a collection of struggling plants fighting for sunlight from a south-facing window in winter. There are so many new ways to grow food indoors now. I trust the tips provided in this article help you save some money while increasing the yield of your indoor garden.

Check back with this page periodically. I’ll add new tips at the top of the page.

Good luck, and have fun growing your own food.

Scroll down for more insightful articles related to your indoor garden.

Get More Indoor Garden Ideas Here

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]]> How to Plan Your Indoor Garden https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/how-to-plan-your-indoor-garden/ Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:44:25 +0000 https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/?p=1606 Get more from your indoor garden by gardening with a purpose.

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How to Plan Your Indoor Garden

You’d like to grow your own food, but you don’t have the time or yard for growing food outdoors. Or, a bad back and aching knees prevent you from the even thinking about it. Maybe you just don’t like being outside. Well, you’re in luck. You can grow an indoor garden that can rival a garden grown outdoors.

It takes planning, time, space, and recognition of the difference between growing indoors and outdoors. It can be work sometimes, but it’s indoors, it’s climate controlled, and—if you want—on a countertop.

Your indoor garden can be small, just a few herbs. Or your indoor garden can replace an outdoor garden. How would you do that, though?

Here are some suggestions and questions for you to consider to help you get started on an indoor garden quickly and for the least cost. Hopefully, answering these questions gets you a jump start on the wonderfully satisfying pursuit of a bountiful indoor garden. 

Start A Journal

Ugh. Please, not another reason for a journal! Yes, you should have a journal for tracking your actions and their effects on your garden. There are simply too many variables for you to remember.

Your journal enables you to compare your current crop to past crops. How else will you know whether that seed should have germinated by now, or how many tomatoes you should expect to harvest? 

Your journal can be a simple binder of lined paper or a software application. I love Microsoft OneNote for tracking my scattered random thoughts. It runs on just about any major platform. Experiment until you find something that works for you.

To get the most value, you need to have your journal handy when you are tending your indoor garden. If you have to walk across the room to record each of your actions, you’ll tire of the effort and give up on the journal. 

Information you’ll log in your journal include the items listed below.

  • What you planted and when
  • Where you planted (which pod or container)
  • When you fed and watered
  • When you saw the first evidence of growth
  • When the harvesting began
  • How much you harvested overall
  • When the productive life of the plant ended

It’s optional

Keeping a notebook is optional, of course. It’s your garden, after all. If your interest in a garden ends with a hydroponic growing system and six herbs, you don’t need a journal. Just replace each pod as plants die off.

However, a garden with a purpose requires intent. Keeping a journal proves intent.

Set Your Budget

A budget is just a plan for how you’ll spend a resource. For planning your garden, you’ll set up a budget for your money and your time.

Your budget helps you prioritize where you spend your gardening money and time. Your money and time are finite; they’re limited resources. Make every purchase count and maximize the results of your invested time.

With each plant or component you plan to add to your indoor garden, ask yourself these budgeting questions.

  • Is the money I spend on this item furthering the purpose of my garden?
  • What is the initial cost in dollars?
  • What are the recurring financial costs?
  • Is the time I'll invest in this furthering the purpose of my garden?
  • What is the initial cost in time?
  • What are the recurring costs in time?

Your initial financial cost might be the purchase price of a hydroponic growing system. The recurring financial costs include the electricity, pod kits, and seeds.

Your initial cost in time would be arranging space for the new component to your indoor garden and set-up time. Ongoing time commitments include cleaning, pruning, and harvesting plants, but also cleaning and maintaining the equipment between crops.

And anything you buy or do should further the purpose of your garden. If you are scattered in what you buy and do, you’ll have a collection of expensive, random plants.

Convenience versus savings

You can save a lot of time if you spend more money. You can save a lot of money if you spend more time.

Your indoor garden can consist of ten hydroponic growing systems. At the hypothetical price of $90 each, you’ve spent $900 to grow sixty to ninety plants indoors. (That’s 10 planters multiplied by 6 or 9 pods per planter.) This is choosing time convenience over savings. Your ten little indoor gardens do almost all the work for you.

If you wanted to grow the same sixty to ninety plants indoors, but are severely limited in funds, you can build your own hydroponic growing systems. You design the system; buy the pump, plumbing, water reservoir, and lights; and assemble it yourself. You maintain the equipment and check on your plants often. Perhaps you achieve an equivalent indoor garden for $400. You paid for this cost savings with your time.

(Note that compared to the cost of building, filling, and maintaining outdoor raised beds you can only use half the year, neither indoor garden strategy is outrageous.)

The conflict between convenience and savings matters less for small gardens. If you purchase a single hydroponic growing system and stop there, you’ve maximized convenience and savings. To grow six to nine plants in a hydroponic system, you would likely spend more money and time to buy and assemble all the components than you would to just buy the indoor garden kit.

Timing your purchases to stretch your budget

Once you’ve read this entire article, you’ll have built a shopping list and have the ability to estimate the purchase cost of all the materials. Unless you are in a hurry to buy everything to get started immediately (I understand!), you can stretch your budget by catching sales to save money.

Amazon has in the past held a large sale in July and another in October when you can get gardening equipment on sale. Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals still offer opportunities to save money. Spring-time sales at the big box stores include countless discounted gardening tools, and although the focus is mostly on outdoor gardens, you can get some great deals for your indoor garden.

In the example above, the ten hydroponic growing systems cost a total of $900 at regular price. Would your plans for your indoor garden change if you bought those ten units for $50 each on sale? Or if you collected all the do-it-yourself materials for only $300? The cost penalty for the convenience is much lower here.

List What You Intend To Grow

Make a list of all the plants you think you’d like to plant, even if it’s a ways in the future. Leave room beside each plant to add more information. A spreadsheet might be a convenient tool for this exercise.

What you want to grow affects your decision on what materials you’ll need to grow it.

Why did you list those plants?

Why do you want to grow the plants on your list? You probably aren’t growing lettuce to grab a couple leaves to snack on during the commute to work. That lettuce is part of a greater plan. What is that plan?

Next to each plant on your list, write your reasons for wanting to grow it. You might want to use a plant for salads, a salsa recipe, general seasoning, a snack right off the vine, and so on. Your plants might have more than one reason. And if you’re growing that plant just to see if you can do it, that’s fine. Write that reason with the rest of them.

You defined the purpose of your garden by listing why you want to grow each plant. Growing random herbs and veggies can be fun, but you risk wasting unharvested food if you don’t have a use for it when it ripens.

If you have a salsa recipe that tastes better with fresh ingredients, focus on how to grow cilantro, tomatoes, and peppers. If you are a wonderful (or aspiring) chef who loves customizing your meals, growing a collection of herbs might be your garden’s purpose. For a salad, you should consider a selection of lettuce, kale, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and radishes.

Look at your wish list of plants with the reasons for growing each plant. What stands out as the most appealing purpose for your bountiful indoor garden? Write down, “The purpose of my garden is {insert purpose here}.” Before you start growing any plants, read what you wrote and ask yourself whether that new plant supports the purpose of your indoor garden.

Highlight the rows for the plants that fulfill the purpose of your indoor garden. These are the plants you’ll focus on to the exclusion of all other plants until you have a consistent and continuous harvest of these plants.

Plants

Salad

Snack

Cooking

Cherry Tomatoes

Yes

Yes

No

Bell Peppers

Yes

Yes

Yes

Cucumbers

Yes

No

No

Radishes

Yes

No

No

Carrots

Yes

Yes

Yes

Strawberries

No

Yes

No

Cilantro

No

No

Yes

Lettuce : Black Seeded Simpson

Yes

No

No

Lettuce : Romaine

Yes

No

No

Lettuce : Grand Rapids

Yes

No

No

Lettuce : Salad Bowl

Yes

No

No

Lettuce : Prizehead

Yes

No

No

Spinach

Yes

No

No

Kale

Yes

No

No

Oregano

No

No

Yes

The sample table above illustrates my list of plants for growing indoors. I determined the purpose of my garden will be salads and emphasized the names of plants dedicated to salads.

I can eat cherry tomatoes as snacks, according to my table above, but to do so reduces the number of tomatoes I have available for salads.

Alternatively, I can grow cilantro and oregano for recipes, but this takes away capacity I could use to grow more lettuce. It’s a trade-off if I don’t have capacity to do both.

Consider The Characteristics Of Your Plants

You have a list of the plants you’ll need to grow to fulfill the purpose of your garden. Now you’ll define the characteristics of each plant so you can set up your garden appropriately.

You’ll add columns to the list of plants you wish to grow. Here are ideas for the columns and the information you’ll include in each.

  • Exclusively Soil: Is the plant root-based, as are carrots and radishes?
  • Height: How high can you expect this plant to grow?
  • Width: How wide can you expect this plant to grow?
  • Depth: How deep (if a root crop) can you expect this plant to grow?
  • Volume: How much food do you expect one plant to offer?
  • Assistance: What external assistance (trellis, fan, etc.) benefits the plant?
  • Growth: How quickly does the plant reach maturity?

The information you’re collecting directly affects how you’ll arrange your indoor garden. You may not be able to answer all these questions until you’ve grown the plants yourself. Part of the joy of gardening is the learning.

The height of the plant may exceed the height of the hydroponic growing system. Only the leaves below the LED grow light get the “sunlight”. This is not a show-stopper, however. I’ve had pepper and tomato plants grow beyond the reach of the grow light and happily continue producing fruit.

Now, if your hydroponic growing system is under your kitchen cabinets and you plant peppers, they’ll likely bump into the bottom of your cabinets unless you grow varieties designed to stop growing at a low height.

Width matters because even a dwarf tomato plant will crowd out all other plants if you are growing your plants in a countertop hydroponic growing system. You have six or nine seats for pods, but a healthy tomato plant can block the light to the other pods. 

This brings up an important point about hydroponic growing systems. Just because you can seat six, nine, or twelve pods does not mean you can fit six, nine, or twelve plants under the grow light. One point of this exercise is to determine how far apart you need to space your plants.

Get more specific with the type of plants

You know in general what you want to grow (for example, lettuce). Take a few minutes to name specific types of lettuce you’ll add to your garden.

Iceberg lettuce may be a poor choice for a hydroponics growing system (unless iceberg lettuce really is the purpose of your garden, of course), but Black Seeded Simpson grows well. You want varieties that allow you to clip leaves as you need them rather than waiting for the entire plant to mature to harvest anything.

Buy a variety of lettuce seeds to grow as an experiment, if lettuce is one of your target plants. If you’ve only bought lettuce at the grocery store, you’ve probably only had iceberg, romaine, and one or two other varieties from which to choose. You have many options, now! This applies to tomatoes, peppers, and many other plants.

Is Your Home Garden-Ready?

Yes, your home almost assuredly is garden-ready. Few homes won’t accommodate a hydroponic growing system. It just needs a square foot of counter space and an electrical outlet. But beyond that, what are the physical considerations for an in-home garden?

Electrical demands

Electricity is a must for all but the most primitive indoor gardens. Unless you have a room with glass walls and ceiling—effectively an attached greenhouse—you’ll need artificial light. That requires electricity.

You’ll get fruit from self-pollinating plants like tomatoes and crisper lettuce if you have a fan agitating your plants. That, too, requires electricity.

As you add hydroponic growing systems or grow lights or fans as your garden grows, you’ll need to spread out your electrical devices. In your house, multiple devices connect to a single breaker. That breaker cuts the power to those devices if they exceed the capacity of the breaker.

Distribute your devices across multiple breakers if your electrical demands approach the capacity of your breaker.

Pay attention to the power schedule of your devices. Avoid having every device start at the same time. If you have several hydroponic growing systems, that means staggering times the LED lights turn on. Many devices draw more electricity to start than they do to run. If they all turn on at the same time, with their higher start–up draw, they could trip the breaker.

Remember, multiple outlets connect to a single breaker, and your garden devices might not be the only ones pulling electricity from that one breaker.

Space and location demands

Your garden needs space in your home and the location you choose depends on a few factors.

If you are going old-school, you need a south-facing window and a large window sill. You’ll grow your plants in soil in containers. The space is small, because you’re limited by the available natural sunlight. The location is set, again because you’re limited to natural sunlight.

Thanks to modern technology, natural sunlight no longer holds your indoor garden hostage. Lights designed to mimic sunlight allow you to place your garden anywhere in your house.

You can cram a lot of garden in a small space, especially with a hydroponic system. A hydroponic growing system can grow up to a dozen medium-sized plants at once on your kitchen counter or two dozen large plants on the floor in a unit the size of an end-table. A full-scale hydroponic system (not the hydroponic growing system) can grow a hundred heads of lettuce in very limited space.

So, you can place artificial sunlight on a plant anywhere in your house and can cram many plants into a small surface area. Can this get any better? Yes!

You can grow plants in a vertical garden. This is a column rising anywhere from a couple feet to eight feet in the air with plants growing from openings all the way around and all the way up the column. Read more about vertical gardens in this post, Limited Floor Space? Go Vertical With Your Garden! 

You can grow more plants in containers of soil by arranging the containers on a rack unit. Mount a rectangular LED grow light on the underside of each shelf. The plants on each shelf (except the top shelf) will get enough light to thrive. Plug the lights into a timer to automate the day/night cycles.

On a five–shelf rack, you get four lit shelves, which is like having three extra gardens versus what you’d have floor space for without the rack. Plus, you get the bonus top shelf where you can store garden equipment.

How Much Do You Intend To Grow?

You’ve determined the purpose of your garden, be it a salad, herbs for cooking, or ingredients for your salsa recipe. Now, you’ll calculate how much you have to grow to meet your needs.

When planning how much to grow, you’ll find this article helpful: How To Get A Salad Every Day From Your Indoor Garden. Use the recommendations in that article to set up a routine for growing your plants that ensures you always have the food you want.

How many people are you feeding from your indoor garden? Multiply all your calculations by that number.

Essentially, if you want a continuous supply of a particular food, such as tomatoes, you need to plan to overlap your crops in such a way as to always have one crop producing food while one or two other crops are in earlier stages of growth. Starting one crop only after the current crop dies leaves you with no produce until the next crop matures. You’re looking to avoid that gap between crops.

You may also need more than one of certain types of plants per crop. How quickly will you harvest all the leaves on a single spine of romaine lettuce? How many lettuce plants do you need to grow so you always have a reasonable supply to harvest? If you need six mature lettuce plants to produce enough leaves to fill your daily salad bowl, that’s one six-pod hydroponic growing system right there.

The amount of food you want to grow determines your capacity needs. If you decide you want three varieties of lettuce for two salads a day, maybe you need two six-pod hydroponic growing systems. Twelve pods means two sets of three lettuce plants being harvested and two sets growing to replace them. Once you run that schedule for a while, you adapt based upon your findings. Maybe you need even more capacity. Maybe not.

Is This For Fun Or Maximum Yield?

What is your level of dedication to your indoor garden?

Is your indoor garden a leisurely hobby, meant solely to supply a few herbs to the homemade spaghetti sauce on Tuesday nights?

Or is this a serious endeavor to diversify your food sources without the neighbors finding out?

Or perhaps you have seen how expensive fresh food has become and you want to grow a safe alternative.

If this garden is for fun, meaning you’ll be disappointed if a crop fails, but you’ll just clean out the hydroponic growing system and start over, you need do nothing more right now. Although, if there is the possibility you’ll get more serious later, consider keeping that journal.

If this garden is considered a replacement for the grocery store or for survival readiness, you need to treat it with a high level of seriousness. Meticulously track your actions and their effects on your plants. Increase the capacity of your garden as necessary to meet your objectives. Be scientific in your analysis. Experiment with alternative sources of plant nutrients and feeding schedules. Stock up on plant food so you never run low.

If you are maximizing your yield, study up on how to preserve your harvest. How long can you store peppers in the freezer? Can you grow food you can preserve through canning? Nothing says you cannot grow green beans indoors year-round!

Consider why you want an indoor garden now. If this is a serious project, become an expert on growing food in your own home.

How Hands-On Will You Be?

An indoor garden is certainly more convenient than growing outdoors and the ability to grow food year-round is wonderful. But growing your garden indoors is not effortless. How much effort do you want to put in? 

Probably the indoor garden requiring the least effort from you would be the hydroponic growing system. It’s about as close to plug ’n’ play as an indoor garden gets. There’s nothing wrong with growing your entire garden this way, so long as you have the room and your house can supply the electricity.

The more hands-on you are, the more formal your planning should be. Growing in soil is certainly more hands-on. 

How involved can you get with your indoor garden?

You can build your own hydroponic growing systems. The benefit of doing this is having a large number of plants in a large reservoir or one large plant in a large reservoir. The downside is that this method is utilitarian and less decorative than a store-bought system.

You’ll be more hands-on by purchasing components of your indoor garden individually. For example, you can buy stand-alone LED grow lights for use with container plants or flats of seedlings. You can move a stand-alone LED grow light to a different plant or adjust the angle. Maybe you want more than one supporting a single large plant. You can be flexible if you get your own components.

So, as part of your planning, gauge whether you want to set it and forget it or if you want to manage every nuance of your plants’ growth.

Do You Prefer Soil, Hydroponics, Or A Combination?

You have your list of preferred plants derived from the list of all the plants you wish to grow. One column should be whether the plant can grow in soil, hydroponics, or either. Do you have a preference? 

You may prefer growing plants in soil. Perhaps you’ve had an outdoor garden for years and you’re comfortable with soil-based plants. That’s fine. To grow your plants indoors, you’ll need one or more LED grow lights and containers of the proper size. A shelf unit provides you the ability to fit more plants in a small space. You can mount LED grow lights under each shelf to make for excellent growing areas. If you suspend the lights from the shelves with chains, you can adjust the height of the lights above the plants.

Hydroponic growing systems are certainly an easy soil-less solution. Hydroponics are very popular. You can buy a large-scale hydroponics system or build one. Hydroponics can be done well with PVC pipes and a water pump in a reservoir. You connect the PVC pipes, drill holes for the pods, and set up the pump to push water through the pipes at regular intervals.

Most plants will do well in either environment. Surprisingly, you can grow root plants like carrots in a hydroponic system (with good planning). But realistically, carrots and radishes are soil-based plants. If you’re just starting off, maybe your salad (with ingredients from the sample table above) will include store-bought carrots and radishes so you can focus on the plants growing in the hydroponics growing systems.

If you are serious about growing a varied and bountiful indoor garden, then for each plant determine the best grow medium and implement that. Yield to the best environment for the plant instead of going with the environment most convenient for you.

Let your garden be educational as well as fun. If you’ve planted in soil all your life, get an inexpensive hydroponic growing system and experiment with growing your favorite plants. Or, on the flip side, maybe you can get your hands dirty and grow some radishes in soil indoors. 

How Experienced A Gardener Are You?

In planning your indoor garden, set reasonable expectations. If you’ve never grown anything before in your life, start small and grow your garden over time. Alternatively, if you are an experienced gardener outdoors, you have some unlearning to do. Indoor gardens are not outdoor gardens indoors.

You have your list of plants associated with the desired purpose of your garden. You know those plants grow in soil or hydroponics. The biggest change is seasons no longer matter.

If you are an inexperienced gardener, consider starting with plants that thrive in a hydroponic growing system. You want to keep that “new project” enthusiasm by getting quick results from your garden. Look at herbs, lettuce, or specialty tomato plants early on. If you want to try your hand growing food in soil, consider beginning with radishes. They grow quickly and take very little space.

As a new gardener, you will benefit greatly from keeping your journal. This is especially true if you grow multiple plants starting off. It’s just too much to remember. 

If you’re familiar with growing plants, but new to indoor gardening, expect just a few changes.

Do You Also Garden Outdoors?

If you will be gardening outdoors, too, you’ll find your indoor garden to be a great benefit. Your indoor garden can help you start your outdoor plants much earlier each spring.

Equipment for starting spring seeds early

You may already have a flat for starting seeds indoors. There are three things you’ll find very helpful you may not already have.

First, you can encourage seed growth with a heating pad underneath your flat. The pad gives your seeds a favorable germination temperature.

Second, you can promote healthy seedlings with a grow light. Without enough light, your plants will be weak and spindly. If you are starting your seeds indoors in the spring by setting the pots or tray near a window, you owe it to yourself to investigate LED grow lights. With the dedicated light, your plants should be much stronger when you move them outdoors.

Third, a 24-pod seed-starter tray in an AeroGarden hydroponic growing system gives your seeds a jump start on life. The hydroponic system with the automated watering and bright LED grow light expedites your plants’ growth. Simply move the grow plug from the tray to the soil when the time is right.

Equipment such as these improve your chances of success growing plants outdoors. They can also save you a great deal of money, considering the difference in cost between a packet of seeds and just one seedling bought at a big box store.

Planning to start spring seeds early

Your indoor garden can help you get a huge jump start on planting in the spring with the above suggestions. However, it comes from planning. You need to schedule off time for your indoor garden to free up the AeroGarden, for instance.

Mark the time on the calendar now for when you’ll be starting seeds for an outdoor garden. Set a reminder to not start a garden in your AeroGarden right before that time, if you are using a starter tray.

If you are using trays, set reminders on your calendar now for when to start seeds for each plant.

Count how many plants of each type you want to plant outdoors and make sure you have the capacity to grow that many seeds indoors. Do you have enough flat trays, if that is your preferred technique?

Reserve shelf space on your rack for soil seed starters and a LED light.

Have a plan in case of a very late frost. As the plants outgrow their starter tray, can you move them to larger pots, like a four inch cup? You’ll need more surface space than a flat and at least one more LED light. You’ll also need more soil.

Bringing plants in for winter

You can bring some plants in for the winter. Each plant’s needs are different. However, the time to think of over-wintering plants is during the summertime. You need the soil, the container, a grow light (for some plants), and a favorable place to put them.

Plants don’t always do well being uprooted and moved indoors. If you’ve never done this before, research how. Be sure you have a storage area that remains within the correct temperature range for your plants.

Be practical. Why are you trying to preserve this plant? Can you not just start a new one in the spring? Maybe you can just start a new one from seed and grow it indoors. Could you grow something else over the winter in the space in your home this plant is going to take?

Do You Intend To Reuse Seeds?

If you intend to capture seeds so you don’t need to buy them next season, you’ll want to choose your starter seeds carefully.

When buying seeds, look for these designations.

  • Non-GMO
  • Heirloom

GMO means the plant is genetically modified, so non-GMO means the plant has not been genetically modified. Heirloom means you can use the seeds to grow the next generation of plants.

Each plant has unique steps you’ll follow to save its seeds. As seeds come late in some plants’ lives, you’ll have to allow your plants to continue growing past the point at which you’ll be harvesting food. Keep this in mind if you’re growing plants to eat. You may need to increase your indoor garden capacity to offset the loss in production from the plants still growing for their seeds.

What Are Your Physical Limitations?

Small hydroponic growing systems are fairly easy to move, even when filled with water. A typical hydroponic growing system holds approximately a gallon of water, which weighs about 8 pounds. Even with plants, a countertop hydroponic growing system probably weighs under 20 pounds. You’ll need to be able to rotate, lift, and move a tub of water.

Height is a consideration as well. Some plants grow taller than the LED light at its highest extension. Will this be a problem? Can you set the hydroponic growing system or container lower?

For You Or A Gift?

The article focused on your interest in starting an indoor garden. However, if you know somebody you believe would enjoy growing their own food indoors, you can apply most of the above questions and suggestions to that person as the recipient of your gift of an indoor garden. Simply answer the questions to the best of your ability from the perspective of the gift recipient. Your efforts will assist you in finding quite the thoughtful gift.

Key Takeaways

The technology and techniques for growing food have advanced greatly in recent years. Your indoor garden can take over growing most plants from your outdoor garden. With hydroponics and vertical gardens and artificial sunlight, you can grow more food in less space indoors. And you can distribute your harvest over the course of the entire year rather than getting it all at once.

You can put as little or as much planning as you want into your garden; it’s your garden. However, you’d sink a lot of time and money into setting up and maintaining an outdoor garden, so applying a percentage of that effort toward the success of an indoor garden is to be expected.

You can set up your entire indoor garden using hydroponic growing systems from a variety of manufacturers and you’ll have the means to grow an impressive garden. All you need is the room to do it. Don’t feel obligated to replicate an outdoor garden indoors. And don’t feel like using hydroponic growing systems is cheating. Growing a bountiful indoor garden with little effort is winning.

You can grow your indoor garden all year long. For this reason, your entire strategy changes. You can stagger your crops so you’ll always have a producing plant. There are no seasons indoors; it’s always growing time.

Preparing an environment and scheduling your crops for your indoor garden increases your return on your investment. Whatever the purpose of your garden, with what you’ve learned here, you should be able to achieve you goals. And have fun doing it.

The post How to Plan Your Indoor Garden first appeared on Bountiful Indoor Garden.

]]> Indoor Gardens Aren’t Outdoor Gardens Indoors https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/indoor-gardens-arent-outdoor-gardens-indoors/ Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:52:35 +0000 https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/?p=1062 When you grow your garden indoors, you leave the old traditions and limitations outdoors.

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Indoor Gardens Aren’t Outdoor Gardens Indoors

Indoor and outdoor gardens are different. If you grow a garden indoors like you grow one outdoors, you’ll miss out on many advantages of indoor gardens. Indoor gardens aren’t outdoor gardens indoors.

Indoor gardens are the next evolutionary step in growing food. What started with rows plowed in fields moved to outdoor raised beds and greenhouses and, finally, indoor gardens. Each evolutionary step in growing food increased the control the grower had over the grown.

Growing food indoors requires a mindset different from that of growing food outdoors.

To get the most from your indoor garden, you need to adopt the indoor-gardener mindset. Take advantage of the many benefits of growing food indoors. And, if you have an outdoor garden as well, use your indoor garden to improve your outdoor garden.

So, what are the considerations for gardening indoors?

Back yard with raised bed gardens covered in snow.

Outdoor Gardens Are Seasonal

Seasons are the definitive limiter on an outdoor garden. The instructions on the back of a packet of seeds tell you the month in which you should plant those seeds to achieve your greatest chances of success. Sowing your tomato seeds in November is the wrong season for tomatoes to grow. Seasons matter more than any other factor in your outdoor garden.

You dutifully plant all the seeds in the packet during the recommended month, adjusting for the possibility of frost. You tend to your garden until the time comes to harvest your produce. Then, over the course of days or a couple weeks, you pick, clip, or dig up as much food as possible.

Then you wait until the next time the recommended month rolls around to plant again.

You Get One, Maybe Two Chances Per Year

With an outdoor garden, for many plants you get one or two windows of opportunity per year to plant each type of seed.

You cannot predict the weather your plants will encounter over the next 50–100 days. You’re making an educated guess as to the best day to put seeds in the ground.

To mitigate the risk of crop failure, you sow some seeds or plant some seedlings every day or couple of days over the span of a few weeks. If you plant too early, a frost may damage your plants. If you plant too late, the hot temperatures may also damage your plants. 

You Can’t Eat It all at Once

When you plant once or twice a year, do you know what you get? You get a harvest once or twice a year.

When you get one chance to produce your crop, you mitigate the risk that a percentage of your crop will fail. How? By planting more than you can eat at harvest time.

What happens to the excess produce from your garden? You probably take some of it to work and give it away. You collected it but it spoiled before you could eat it. Maybe you just stop harvesting after you’ve collected all you can eat, so it rots. In other words, you worked to grow food you did not eat. You may have canning and freezing skills, so you put some away to last you until the next harvest. Better, but it’s still not the same as eating fresh food.

Not Everything Stores Well

But some plants don’t keep well. Lettuce, for instance, is generally eaten fresh. If you spaced out your plantings in the spring you’ll get a few weeks of fresh lettuce in summer. What do you do when you want lettuce the other ten or eleven months of the year? You could get two harvests in a year and maybe even a third. That depends on your weather, your level of commitment, and whether you have a greenhouse. Still, you’re going months between harvests without fresh lettuce.

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Indoor Gardens Are Anytime

In contrast to an outdoor garden, which is based upon seasons, you may start an indoor garden anytime of the year. There are no seasons indoors. This completely changes how you approach your garden. 

With an outdoor garden, you plant everything you have in the spring and harvest everything you grow in the summer or autumn. Then you eat, donate, or store your harvest. With an indoor garden, you plant only as many herbs, greens, and vegetables as will satisfy your needs on any given day.

If you like 5 cherry tomatoes in your salad and you eat a salad every other day, your tomato plant need only average 2-3 ripe tomatoes per day to meet your expectations. Your lettuce plants need only supply a few leaves per day for your salad. One cucumber can last you through two or three salads, so you harvest one or two cucumbers per week. 

See the companion article, How to Get a Salad Every Day from Your Indoor Garden.

Plant Something New Anytime

Inside your house, every day is the right season to plant something.

If you want a larger garden and you have the space for it, whether it’s April or November, you can expand your indoor garden.

When you tire of one plant, you can terminate it and begin another. You cannot do this with plants growing outdoors, because you’ve already passed the season for starting that other plant.

Harvest Your Food Every Day of the Year

When the plant you grow indoors reaches maturity, you may begin your harvesting. If you stagger your planting schedule for such plants as lettuce, you’ll have a new crop reach maturity as the old crop is consumed or reaches the end of its natural life span.

Your plant continues to produce for its natural life span. Frost and freezing temperatures don’t cut your harvest short.

No More Storing Food For Winter

So, if you can plant anytime you want, and you can arrange your planting schedule to ensure you always have a plant to harvest, you don’t need to store food for the winter.

If it can be grown indoors, and if you can grow enough to satisfy your daily needs, you don’t need to grow an excessive amount once a year and freeze, can, or dry it for long-term storage.

Outdoor Gardens Need Outdoor Tools

Your outdoor garden requires outdoor garden tools. Those tools include a tiller, hoe, rake, and shovel. To build a raised bed, you need lumber, screws, a cordless impact driver, weed barrier, and lots of peat moss, compost, and vermiculite. You’ll need a trellis for each large plant.

You might have a cold frame or small greenhouse for extending your growing season.

The tools you need for gardening outdoors are intended for controlling nature. You are turning over topsoil, or you are building large-scale containers to hold a topsoil substitute. But, in the end, you are still subject to the whims of nature.

Indoor Gardens Need Indoor Tools

The toolset for growing food indoors is nothing like the toolset you’d use for growing food outdoors. Your indoor garden uses four or more systems.

  • Hydroponic Growing System
  • Self-Water Container with LED Grow Light
  • Traditional Container with LED Grow Light
  • Microgreens

Hydroponic Growing System

Hydroponic Growing System has to be the absolute worst name for such an ingenious self-contained garden, but it is certainly descriptive.

A hydroponic growing system is a stand-alone device for growing plants indoors, a “garden in a box”. It is a system for growing plants with their roots in water (hydroponic) instead of soil, using a built-in LED grow light as a substitute for sunlight. A computer powers the LED grow light to simulate daytime and nighttime and keeps the plants hydrated by circulating the water. 

See the companion article, How a Self-Watering Hydroponic System Works, for a detailed description.

You insert pods containing seeds into the hydroponic growing system. You add liquid nutrients to the water. The device waters the plants and provides their light. The seeds grow into beautiful, healthy plants. It is truly that easy.

Suffice it to say, a hydroponic growing system makes it hard for even the worst gardener to fail at growing plants.  

You can run as many hydroponic growing systems in your house as you want and will fit. The more common devices will grow six to nine plants each. High capacity devices will grow 24 plants, and some even more.

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Self-Watering Container System

Hydroponic growing systems work great for most plants with normal root systems. Root-based plants like carrots and beets don’t work well in a hydroponic growing system. For these types of plants, use a self-watering container system. Another system!

The self-watering container system is a system consisting of a container designed to wick water (self-watering) from a reservoir to the roots of plants growing in a soil-substitute. A LED grow light provides artificial sunlight to the plants. Instead of watering your plant by pouring water down on the soil, you pour water down a tube to fill the reservoir, and the water moves upward toward the roots.

This is a system that involves using a recommended soil-substitute, typically a sorghum peat and vermiculite combination, along with a fertilizer chosen based up on the type of plants you are growing. 

The system provides an environment highly favorable for growing plants. However, unlike the hydroponic growing system, which comes as a single device, you’ll need to supply a LED grow light and timer to make this a system. These containers have overflow holes to prevent you from overfilling the reservoir. To be used indoors, you’ll want to use a small tray to catch any overflow water.

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Traditional Container with LED Grow Light

You can still grow plants in traditional pots on a shelf under a LED grow light. So long as the plant has a quality potting soil, good fertilizer, and enough light and water, it should grow well. This is not a system; it’s a plant you water. 

You can put the LED light on a timer to automate one of your tasks. Consistent lighting will encourage plant growth. But as the plant grows, you’ll transplant it to a larger pot. You’ll water the plant manually. As mentioned earlier, this is not a system.

However, it is part of an indoor garden, and for that reason, your plant can grow to its full potential and live out its natural life span. Growing plants using a system is a benefit of growing plants indoors, but by no means do you need to have a system to grow healthy plants.

Microgreens

Microgreens are typically an indoor garden. You grow a collection of seeds strewn on a wet surface with the intent of harvesting all the plants that grow when they reach just a few inches in height. The sprouts are the harvest.

Sprouts flavor salads and serve as ingredients in a variety of recipes. You eat the entire plant.

You can grow microgreens using dedicated devices or trays that fit in a hydroponic growing system.

Outdoor Gardens Are Speculative

The outdoor garden is, well, outdoors. And the outdoors has a habit of being unpredictable. And uncontrollable. Your garden is at the mercy of the weather and the wildlife, from bugs up to deer.

You can only control so many variables in an outdoor garden. You can improve the soil with fertilizer and apply water using a timer. You can shade the delicate plants and ensure others get the maximum exposure to sunlight. You can spray bug repellent on the leaves and pluck off those voracious neon green caterpillars that can eat an entire tomato plant overnight. But, in the end, you are at the mercy of the environment.

Outdoor gardens are speculative. You plant with the hopes you’ll get a bountiful harvest, but one hail storm or late frost can wipe out hours or days of work.

Then you start over, if it’s not too late in the season.

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Indoor Gardens Are Controlled

You control the environment for your indoor garden. You manage the temperature and the watering schedule. Bugs can always find their way to a living plant, even one indoors, but they’re more readily controlled indoors. The risk of having a freak hail storm destroy your indoor garden is slight, to say the least.

Fewer variables affect your success growing indoors than with an outdoor garden. The weather and pests are all but irrelevant for an indoor garden. With the time you save not protecting your plants from the environment, you can focus on improving the plants themselves.

You add nutrients to the water at the optimal time. You trim your plants to encourage healthy growth. You harvest at just the perfect ripeness.

For you, that level of care means you can more accurately predict when your plants will be ready to eat. Your plants will supply more tomatoes or peppers or lettuce leaves. Even better, the food you collect will be clean and free of bug-related damage. And you can start growing replacements at just the right time to replace your current plants when they’re no longer producing.

Since you control the environment for your indoor garden, you can experiment. You can try to increase your crop yield by adjusting how much nutrients you add to the water or try different brands of nutrients. You can prune a lot or a little, and compare the results.  And as you learn, you can apply your knowledge to the next crop. Without having to wait until next spring to start again.

Outdoor Gardens are Spacious

Outdoor gardens take up a lot of space. You need a field to plow rows or a back yard to build raised beds. If you don’t have the space for these, then your options for an outdoor garden are limited. You can grow plants in containers, which will fit on a patio, but your volume is limited by the small space.

Square foot gardening techniques maximize the number of plants you can grow in a raised bed. If you are growing food outdoors, and you are not using square foot gardening, you must look into this technique. However, even raised beds are larger than you need because you must grow a surplus of food to be sure you get enough to eat and store for the winter.

Outdoor gardens must be oversized because you only get one shot at producing food for the year. You must grow enough to compensate for plants lost to weather, disease, bugs, or critters. 

One defining factor of outdoor gardens is that all plants grow on a single layer. All the plants grow side-by-side. Even in a raised bed garden.

Indoor Gardens Are Compact

Indoor gardens are compact for three reasons.

  • You can grow your food vertically or on shelves to minimize the amount of floor space your garden occupies.
  • You can spread your harvest over the entire year, meaning you don’t need to grow as many plants at one time as you would with an outdoor garden.
  • Your plants produce more and live longer, so you can plant fewer plants.

Some plants can be grown closer together in a hydroponic growing system than in a raised bed implementing square foot gardening. A self-watering container system uses square foot gardening techniques.

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Indoor Gardens Have Added Benefits

Growing your food indoors has additional benefits over an outdoor garden.

Start Seeds Indoors For Growth Outdoors

If you have started seeds indoors in the past, you have probably used a plastic seed starter tray filled with potting soil or sorghum peat. You may have added a heating pad to speed things along. Now, you have a new way to start seeds.

Your hydroponic growing system may accept a seed starter tray to start many seeds quickly. A seed starter tray greatly increases the number of seedlings you can grow at one time and is not designed to take a plant to maturity. When the time comes to transplant the seedling, just pop out the grow plug with the seedling in it and move it outdoors.

Immediately Available

It’s raining. Is it worth going outside with a bowl and scissors to collect the herbs for your homemade spaghetti sauce tonight?

When you are gathering the ingredients for your spaghetti sauce, your indoor herb garden is just a few steps away. It’s dry, clean, and handy.

If your healthy food is conveniently accessible, you are more likely to eat it. An outdoor raised bed garden is available, but not necessarily convenient.

Key Takeaways

You approach planning for an indoor garden with a different mentality than with an outdoor garden. The timetable is different, with an indoor garden offering far more flexibility. The indoor garden is consistent, steady, and predictable, without the myriad variables that challenge an outdoor garden.

Your indoor garden is unconstrained by seasons. The tools for growing food indoors are completely different than those you use outdoors. You control almost all the variables for your indoor garden except the seed itself. And indoor gardens can be more compact than an outdoor garden.

Your indoor garden is not an outdoor garden indoors. It’s completely different, with different parameters. By treating your indoor garden as an indoor garden, you’ll get a bountiful harvest every time, all year long.

The post Indoor Gardens Aren’t Outdoor Gardens Indoors first appeared on Bountiful Indoor Garden.

]]> How to Get a Salad Every Day from Your Indoor Garden https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/how-to-get-a-salad-every-day-from-your-indoor-garden/ Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:27:22 +0000 https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/?p=1052 You can grow an indoor salad all year long. Learn how!

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How to Get a Salad Every Day from Your Indoor Garden

You can grow many of the ingredients for your own salads with your indoor garden. Unfortunately, if all your plants mature at different times, you get a partial salad with different ingredients each day. Clearly, coordinating the growth of multiple types of plants is necessary to get a complete salad. Luck isn’t going to cut it. If you really want to get a salad every day from your indoor garden, that requires planning.

Here are the steps to set up a continuous growing routine that provides you with a salad every day from your indoor garden.

Define Your Goal

Define your objectives first. For the sake of this article, your objective is to eat a salad every day using ingredients acquired from plants you grew indoors.

Your goal is to set up a system for growing plants indoors such that those plants provide enough produce to make a salad every day.

Answer these questions to help you define your goals.

  • How often do you want to eat a salad?
  • How big a salad are you eating?
  • How many people are eating a salad with you?
  • What ingredients must be in every salad?
  • What ingredients would be nice to have in your salad?
  • What can you grow given the equipment you have or can get?

Your answers to these questions may change somewhat as you continue reading through this article. Over time, your answers will evolve as your skills, capacity, and needs change. Be flexible.

Not Your Goal

You have a goal, but sometimes you can lose focus of your goal. Keep these admonishments in mind.

Your goal is not to grow food in excess so you can give it away or store it long-term. You want just enough to meet your needs for a fresh salad. If you harvest any excess, you’ll use it to get you through the days your plants have nothing to give.

Your goal is not to grow every plant you think possible to grow indoors. At least when you are starting off, you have limited time, energy, and capacity. Focus your attention on the plants you’ll need for your salad.

List Your Ingredients

What do you want in your salad? Here are some ideas.

  • A variety of lettuce leaves
  • Cherry tomatoes
  • Radishes
  • Carrots
  • Bell peppers
  • Cucumber slices

These salad ingredients can be grown indoors using a hydroponics growing system and soil.

Build Your Garden Incrementally

You’ve probably grown some food indoors already. Like many people who start growing indoors, you have a few herbs growing in soil or a hydroponics grow system. What you are learning now is not so much how to grow your food, but how to schedule growing your food. 

Lettuce is easily grown in a hydroponic grow system. It’s like they were made for each other. Lettuce is expensive to buy at the grocery store and your choice of variety is slim. You have many options when growing it yourself. Starting with lettuce makes good sense.

Follow the steps below to create a consistent harvest of lettuce. Buy the other ingredients for now. Once you have lettuce started, branch out to other ingredients as you feel comfortable doing so. Apply the system to each plant you add to your garden.

If you have a hydroponic grow system, focus your attention on maximizing its potential with lettuce and tomatoes before starting a soil-based indoor garden for radishes or carrots. Get one part of the system functioning well before turning your attention elsewhere.

Don’t feel obligated to start growing plants for every salad ingredient on the first day of the project. It’s overwhelming. Start small and grow your skills as your garden grows.

Establish A Baseline

You’ll need a baseline for each plant you want to grow for your salad. You need to know when you start a seed today what days in the future you’ll be harvesting from that plant. You’ll use that knowledge to grow cycles of crops that overlap. You don’t want any unplanned gaps between crops.

To establish a baseline, you need to know this information.

  • How many days does this plant take from sowing to first day of harvest?
  • How many days does the harvest period last per plant?
  • How many units (lettuce leaves, tomatoes, cucumbers) does each plant produce per harvest?

Clearly, the data you collect fluctuates with each crop. For this reason, document the timetable for every crop so you can determine the average numbers for each data point.

Note the shortest and longest time frames for all types of plants, so you can compare what you see with your crop against what you have experienced in the past. If a crop seems to be taking longer than usual to mature, comparing to your records will show if you’ve had crops take longer.

You’re recording how your garden grows so you can plan your sowing days to ensure a steady harvest. You can’t just wing it and get a reliable harvest.

How Much Produce Do You Need Daily?

You next determine your need. You set goals earlier describing how many salads you wanted and how often you wanted them. Now is the time to get more specific.

For that you’ll answer these questions.

  • For one salad, how much do you need to harvest from each plant?
  • How many salads do you need to make?
  • How many plants of each type are required to fill all your salad bowls during one harvest period?

As you answer these questions, you’ll define your salad with precision. You want your salad bowl to include three leaves from lettuce variety A, three leaves from lettuce variety B, four cherry tomatoes, one chopped up radish, four slices of cucumber, and a grated portion of one carrot. That’s precision.

Being so precise may seem ridiculous, but doing so ensures a reliable supply of salad ingredients. If you don’t know how much food to grow, you’ll end up growing too much and wasting it or growing too little and going without your salad for several days.

Once you have a system up and running, where you know when to start seeds and you know how many salads you’ll get from each lettuce stem, you’ll understand the ramifications of changing the size of your salads. But starting off, you need to consciously document such things.

Keep Accurate Records

You have too many different events taking place to keep track of them all in your head. You’ll forget the exact date you planted this, that, or the other thing. You need exact dates if you are to make accurate predictions of future harvest time frames and quantities.

Document the following actions and events.

  • The date you planted any seed in soil or a hydroponic system
  • Exactly what seed you planted
  • When you watered plants in the soil or added water to a hydroponic grow system
  • When you added nutrients to a hydroponic grow system or plants in the soil
  • The date you first harvested a leaf, clipping, fruit, or vegetable from any plant
  • The amount you harvested from each plant every day
  • The size of each plant at its greatest
  • The date you ended the harvest of any plant

Keeping so many records may feel tedious, but stick with it. You’ll need this information to ensure you have a wonderful salad when you want it.

You’re tracking what you plant and when. That’s to be expected.

You’re tracking when you started harvesting from each plant, the yield of each plant, and the date you got your last harvest so that you can later predict when you need to start a seed to get a harvest on a given date.

You’re tracking the size of the plant so you know whether you need to expand your indoor garden to meet your goals. You want a basic salad with three varieties of lettuce and five cherry tomatoes for lunch each day. But if you have an AeroGarden Harvest, you may find the tomato plant leaves you no room to grow your lettuce. You may need to invest in a second AeroGarden Harvest or maybe an AeroGarden 24XL.

Create A Calendar

At this point, you have enough information to create a calendar. The calendar provides you a visual planner for your garden.

You will mark on your calendar the date you planted a seed, then count the days into the future when you expect to begin harvesting food from the plant that will grow from that seed.

You’ll predict the period of time the plant that grows from that seed will produce food. And this is how you achieve your goals, right here. You’ll be able to schedule when you’ll plant the seed that will replace the plant that will grow from the seed you just planted today.

Creating a calendar is the final step in your project. Once you have a calendar, you need only stay on schedule. Plant the seeds when the calendar says to plant the seeds, and you’ll enjoy your salads as planned.

Idle Capacity

You are building a rhythm to your grow schedule. You may find that for one lettuce variety you are starting a seed pod every 14 days. For another lettuce variety, you start seed pods every 18 days. During this time, to help you rotate crops, you may have a pod station on your hydroponic grow system idle for a few days. That’s alright. 

Calendar showing January with the First being on a Sunday. Some dates are marked with a line connecting events written on those days.
Example of a calendar with dates marked for two plants

Adjust Over Time

Sticking too strictly to the calendar can sometimes steer you off course. Be flexible. If you find the radishes are growing in 22 days instead of 20 days, adjust your schedule and your garden. Grow an extra radish or two regularly to cover the lag days.

You cannot know the day you decide to start this project all the different ways your plants will grow. Take advantage of your ability to start an indoor garden anytime. If you look at a plant and think, “This plant is not doing well,” then consider terminating that plant and starting a new one. Reset your calendar, record why you believe the plant failed, and commit to doing things differently on the next try.

Manage Your Capacity

Capacity is the amount of food you can grow given your current indoor garden equipment.

Perhaps you are at capacity for growing radishes with your current equipment, but your salad lacks a radish every third day. Your options are to either reduce how many radishes (or portions of a radish) go in each salad or increase your capacity to grow radishes.

If you double the size of your radish garden when your salad is only short a radish every third day, you’ll probably end up with extras. Radishes keep well in the refrigerator, so you can adjust your seed schedule to include a gap in which you eat your stored radishes while the next crop grows. That’s one option.

Other options include increasing the number of radishes in your salad, eating the radishes as snacks at other times of the day, or giving them away. Maybe you can trade with a friend who has extra food from their indoor garden!

But always keep documenting what you’ve done and the results you’ve observed. You’re not looking to grow too much food on a consistent basis.

Your Refrigerator is Your Buffer

Some of your salad ingredients will be stored for a day or two in the refrigerator. This is acceptable. The refrigerator is your buffer you go to when leaving food on the plant may result in loss. 

You can capture any food from a plant at the end of its life span before you clear its pod to begin a pod with a new plant. If the food you collect exceeds what you need for that day’s salad or is for tomorrow’s salad, keep it fresh in the fridge.

If you find yourself consistently storing extra food in the refrigerator, consider adjusting your calendar to reduce any waste.

Experiment

Allow for experimentation. Try different varieties of lettuce or radish. Maintain your regular grow schedule to ensure you still get your daily salad, but leave room to grow something new.

You can experiment with how often you add nutrients to your hydroponic grow system or the soil. Since you are keeping records, you’ll have the means to compare results. Do your plants seem to fare better or worse? Document your observations on the effects of one nutrient schedule compared to another.

Putting It In Practice

To bring it all together, here is a review of the entire project.

You name your objectives. You want one salad per day. You are the only person eating a salad. Among the other ingredients, you want cherry tomatoes. Five cherry tomatoes, to be exact.

How would you plan your indoor garden so you get five cherry tomatoes per day?

Start the Seeds

You start a seed for a dwarf tomato plant in your hydroponic growing system and mark the date on a calendar. Due to the expected size of the tomato plant, this is the only active pod. The holes for other pods are covered to prevent algae growth.

You grow the tomato plant as per the instructions for the hydroponic growing system.

You mark each event in the growth of your tomato plant on a calendar. To help you visualize the progress, you draw a line between each event. The calendar shows a single line representing a single plant

Observe the Harvest Period

You note on the calendar the day the first tomato ripens. 

When the day comes for the first harvest of your five tomatoes, you mark the happy occasion on your calendar.

As your tomato plant produces fruit, you document how often you water and feed it. This information can help you decide when and how to expand your indoor garden.

Harvesting for Your Salad

As your tomatoes ripen, you begin the harvest. Each day, you select the five ripest tomatoes to grab for your salad.

Knowing the typical yield of a tomato plant allows you to estimate how many tomato plants you’ll need. You document how many ripe tomatoes you get each day.

You don’t get exactly five each day, as the tomatoes ripen at different times. As a matter of fact, you discover your tomato plant provides you only two or three ripe tomatoes daily. You also estimate this tomato plant will be exhausted sooner than expected.

Adjust Your Capacity

You determine a second tomato plant would make up the difference between the number of tomatoes you are getting and the number of tomatoes you want in your salad. You must adjust your capacity to handle a second tomato plant and set up a growing schedule.

However, to ensure a consistent harvest of tomatoes, you decide to add a third tomato plant and stagger the seed schedule of the three plants.

You have taken what you’ve learned about growing tomatoes indoors and adapted to meet your goals.

You purchase or construct the equipment to grow two more tomato plants. You then set up a schedule to overlap the lifespan of your plants. By planting the next batch before the current batch dies off, you ensure a consistent and continuous harvest.

You’ll always have three tomato plants growing, but they will be in three different phases of life. As one tomato plant dies, another one is beginning to offer ripe fruit.

Experiment

You document each watering and feeding, so you can identify any patterns that could help you increase your crop for future tomato plants. 

You read that the recommended feeding is 4 ounces per 14 days for this plant, but you find that by adding 3 ounces of nutrients every 10 days, your tomato plants produce more fruits and they ripen earlier.

Maybe the more frequent feedings resulted in a shorter lifespan for your tomato plant, but that tomato plant gave you 20% more tomatoes. Evaluate your capacity. Can you grow enough tomato plants to offset the shorter lifespan of future plants? 

It’s your garden, in your house. What works for you might not benefit somebody else. Experiment, but document well.

Expand

You started with tomatoes, but now you want to try lettuce. You expand your capacity to allow for three different lettuce varieties producing while three more are growing. You set your goals, plan your lettuce varieties, estimate your harvest needs, and start some seeds.

You continue with the calendar tracking system to make sure all goes as planned. You’ve learned the system for growing your plants, and you can now use that system whether it’s tomatoes or lettuce or radishes or just about any other plant. You’ll find you succeed far more often with a good plant.

Key Takeaways

Growing your garden indoors is fun, but if you want predictable harvests, you’ll need to plan. And if you hope to plan accurately, you need data, which comes from your observations.

Your indoor garden was never an excuse from work if you wanted comparable results to an outdoor garden. The work just changed. You’re planning a year–round harvest now. On the plus side, you get to do it in an climate–controlled house with less kneeling.

So, take the planting system articulated above and apply it to your other goals. Maybe you want to make your salsa recipe each weekend for the crew to eat with chips while watching the games. The same system works for tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro.

Eventually, your calendar system will become second nature. You may be tempted to abandon recording events on your calendar, but you have so many things to remember, it’s best to continue the practice.

You’ll have a highly productive indoor garden while wasting the least food using your system. And you’ll enjoy a great salad, too!

The post How to Get a Salad Every Day from Your Indoor Garden first appeared on Bountiful Indoor Garden.

]]> What Can I Grow with My Indoor Garden? https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/what-can-i-grow-with-my-indoor-garden/ Sat, 23 Sep 2023 11:41:58 +0000 https://bountifulindoorgarden.com/?p=883 Spoiler alert: Almost anything! This is a LONG list. And it’s really easy.

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What Can I Grow with My Indoor Garden?

If you’ve never given much thought to just how diverse your indoor garden can be, prepare yourself to be amazed. The variety of plants your indoor garden can grow is greater than can be listed in this article. Hopefully, the list of plants included below can do justice to what your indoor garden is capable of providing you.

Three Ways To Grow Food Indoors

This article focuses on the three major options for growing food indoors. If you are just starting off with an indoor garden, you’ll employ one, two, or all three techniques. The three major techniques for growing food indoors are hydroponics, soil, and microgreens.

Hydroponics

Hydroponics is broadly defined as growing plants with their roots submerged in water or periodically washed over with water. Hydroponics uses no soil. Plants absorb nutrients you add to the water supply.

Hydroponics takes on two major categories. You can wash water over the roots of the plants, leaving the plants’ roots in the air between washings. That’s one option. You’ll typically see this in large-scale operations, either residential or commercial. The plants occupy cups set in holes drilled on the top side of pipes laid horizontally and the water flows through the pipes, wetting the plants’ roots.

The other option is to leave the roots submerged in water. Some roots remain above the water line to provide the plant oxygen. Some very popular products called hydroponic growing systems use this hydroponic method combined with built-in LED grow lights to form a self-contained garden.

You can employ either hydroponic technique in your home, but the hydroponic growing systems are designed to be easily set up, operated, and maintained by the average person. 

Soil-substitute mixture

The “soil” used to grow plants indoors is never dirt brought in from outdoors. Any mention of soil below refers to a soil-substitute mixture found to encourage plant growth. Exact ingredients and quantities of ingredients in a soil-substitute mixture vary, but peat moss and vermiculite are commonly recommended.

While you could drop a plant into a pot filled with soil, pour water on it, and call that good, there are better techniques available to you that improve your chances of a bountiful crop.

By employing a self-watering planter combined with a precise soil-substitute mixture and fertilizer, you’ll typically see vastly healthier plants that grow quicker than will grow in dirt using traditional techniques. For your indoor garden, these self-watering planters are the way to go.

Microgreens

A microgreens garden consists of a large quantity of seeds grown with the intention of harvesting very young plants. The entire plant is the crop, and the harvest is the entire forest of baby plants. Microgreens are a healthy addition to salads and recipes.

You can grow microgreens with a flat tray under a grow light, with a hydroponic growing system using a special tray, or in a mason jar using a special lid.

Your microgreens garden can be as large as you have room for it or as small as you want for the occasional treat. You can buy bags of seeds either as a variety or specific plants.

Hydroponic Growing System

A hydroponic growing system is a water tub, a LED grow light, and a pump to circulate water to the plants. Plants grow through holes in the tub’s lid so their roots dangle in the water. Timers regulate the light, water pump, and feeding reminders. Sensors monitor water level. A hydroponic growing system is a system, not a passive container.

These self-contained hydroponic gardens typically grow 6–12 plants on about one square foot of countertop space. Larger systems can hold 24 or more plants, but are engineered to sit on the floor like end tables.

Manufacturers have made hydroponic growing systems into inexpensive, effective, efficient, and convenient stand-alone indoor gardens. Dozens of companies offer their versions of Hydroponic Growing Systems.

EarthBox: Soil-Substitute Mixture

A self-watering container is a planter that holds soil in a chamber above a water reservoir and moves water up to the plant’s roots through some wicking mechanism. You pour water down a tube into the reservoir. The wicks draw the water up into the soil. The wicking encourages the plant to grow roots down. The plant gets water without its roots being soaked. You simply keep the water reservoir from going dry.

Now if you fill the self-watering container with a carefully mixed soil-substitute, and then apply a measured supply of slow-release fertilizer to the surface of the soil, you have created an extremely plant-friendly garden.

Plants grown using this system should grow healthier and quicker than in the traditional dirt-based outdoor garden because you have given them almost every possible advantage. They’re well-fed and properly watered in a weed-free environment. And by setting up this garden indoors, you eliminate weather as a factor, giving your plants yet another significant advantage.

EarthBox products are self-watering gardens combined with a system that includes precise soil-substitute mixtures, fertilizer, and a cover to prevent competition from weeds and hold in the moisture. You follow the system and you are almost guaranteed of getting great plants.

The EarthBox can be used indoors when combined with a LED grow light and a cup to capture any overflow water escaping the reservoir. The light replaces sunlight for the plants. The EarthBox planter has a hole high up on the water reservoir to prevent you from overfilling the reservoir, so set a cup to catch overflow water and stop pouring water when the reservoir fills up.

The EarthBox series of products represents the self-watering planter market with distinction, but is certainly not alone. You can buy self-watering planters from other manufacturers. The EarthBox as a system certainly enhances your chances of success with your garden, though.

Check out the companion article, A Raised Bed Garden Indoors? Bring It On!.

Plants You Can Grow Indoors

This article opens your eyes to the many types of plants you can grow indoors. You may find some plants on the list you’ve never considered growing indoors. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to try it yourself.

Categories break up the list of plants into manageable chunks. The categories loosely describe the plants. While some (many) plants may truly belong in multiple categories, no plant is listed twice. Some subsets of plants are listed along with the main group simply because people may seek them out specifically.

Most plants in these lists can be grown in a hydroponic growing system or a self-watering soil-substitute container with a LED grow light. Some require special accommodations due to their size or nature of growth.

Note that the list is generally limited to food plants. Obviously, you can grow many more plants indoors than are listed, including flowers and medicinal plants such as aloe vera. A hydroponic growing system or a self-watering planter can just about do it all. It’s your garden; try new things!

And, as always, before you add a plant to your garden, know if it is safe for children and pets.

Herbs

If you cook with fresh herbs, an indoor garden is just what the chef ordered!

Many herbs used for ingredients can be grown in a Mufga, iDOO, or comparable Hydroponic Growing System. The rest can probably grow well in an EarthBox-style container.

You can grow herbs not intended as cooking ingredients, such as catnip.

Not all herbs are meant to be grown in a hydroponic growing system. Chia is one example.

  • Basil
  • Catnip
  • Chia
  • Chives
  • Cilantro
  • Dill
  • Fenugreek
  • Lavender
  • Mint
  • Oregano
  • Parsley
  • Peppermint
  • Rosemary
  • Sage
  • Sorrel
  • Spearmint
  • Tarragon
  • Thyme

The herbs listed are what you can grow, but be sure to check whether any herbs (or any other plants listed in this article) are safe for your use and you know how to prepare them safely. Some plants may trigger allergies. Take proper precautions. 

Soil-Based

Many plants simply grow best (or easiest) when grown in soil.

People have experimented with growing radishes in a hydroponic growing system and carrots in a hydroponic garden. But for a standard residential indoor garden, we’ll go the traditional route and expect such things to be grown in a soil substitute.

  • Beets
  • Brussels Sprouts
  • Cabbage
  • Carrots
  • Cauliflower
  • Celery
  • Chervil
  • Clover
  • Eggplant
  • Fennel
  • Flax
  • Garlic
  • Ginger
  • Jerusalem Artichoke
  • Kohlrabi
  • Konan
  • Leeks
  • Lemongrass
  • Lentils
  • Okra
  • Onion
  • Peanut
  • Potatoes
  • Purslane
  • Radish
  • Rhubarb
  • Scallions / Green Onions
  • Shallots
  • Strawberries
  • Sweet Potatoes
  • Turnips
  • Turmeric
  • Wheatgrass

The long list of plants you can grow in a soil substitute shows how valuable an EarthBox or comparable self-watering planter can be indoors when paired with a grow light.

Some plants on this list (and others) must go through winter cold to meet their full potential.

While some plants can be grown indoors, indoors isn’t the optimal environment. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you probably can grow it. Try it.

Greens

Some plants take to hydroponics like they were always meant to grow in water. If you want to grow any of the plants listed below, research hydroponic growing systems as your solution.

  • Arugula
  • Bok Choy
  • Chard
  • Collard Greens
  • Cress
  • Endive
  • Kale
  • Lettuce (Bibb)
  • Lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson)
  • Lettuce (Buttercrunch)
  • Lettuce (Green Oak Leaf)
  • Lettuce (Oakleaf)
  • Lettuce (Red Oak Leaf)
  • Lettuce (Romaine)
  • Minzuna
  • Mustard Greens
  • Pak Choi
  • Rainbow Chard
  • Red Mustard
  • Shungiku
  • Spinach
  • Swiss Chard
  • Tatsoi

The list includes specific varieties of lettuce as opposed to a single “lettuce” entry. You may find leafy lettuce types preferable for growing in your hydroponic growing system as they offer you the ability to simply clip leaves for use in salads and such. Head-style lettuce like iceberg require you to wait for a single harvest and their horizontal spread may block access to other grow sockets you could use for other plants.

Sprawling

Plants that spread far and wide grow fine indoors, but pay special attention to their space and lighting needs.

  • Cantaloupe
  • Cucumber
  • Grapes
  • Green Bean (Vine)
  • Melons
  • Peas
  • Watermelon

You can grow these plants from a hydroponic growing system. You’ll need to watch the water levels as they may drink more than the average plant. Prune your plants carefully and arrange vines to be within range of the grow light.

While you can grow probably any variety of cucumber you wish indoors, varieties of cucumber plants that grow in compact spaces make life easier. These are ideal for indoor gardening as they produce fruit on short vines.

Tall

You’ll want to position these tall plants where they have vertical clearance. You may consider auxiliary lighting if you’re growing them in a hydroponic growing system with a light that does not extend high enough for these plants.

  • Green pepper
  • Green Bean (Bush)
  • Jalapeno
  • Sunflower
  • Tomato (Large)
  • Tomato (Roma)
  • Tomato (Cherry)

Seeing sunflower on this list may surprise you, but short varieties of sunflower do exist.

When researching varieties of tall plants to grow, add the word “dwarf” or “container” to your search parameters. Plant varieties have been bred for tight spaces.

If you intend to grow these plants in a hydroponic growing system, be sure to select a device that allows the plant to grow tall while still staying under the light. The AeroGarden Farm 12XL and 24XL models handle plants up to 36 inches tall. With AeroGarden out of business, you’ll have to find a used model. Alternatively, you can set up your own LED light over an EarthBox rig, which allows you to raise the light as high as you see fit.

Large

Leave some horizontal clearance for these larger plants. Big leaves and big fruit take up a lot of room, but you won’t complain come harvest time!

  • Acorn Squash
  • Bay Laurel
  • Broccoli
  • Butternut Squash
  • Spaghetti Squash
  • Yellow Squash
  • Zucchini

When planning an indoor garden with large plants such as zucchini, take into consideration your plant is going to be healthy and enthusiastic about growing. You’ve given it the perfect environment! Leave room for expansion. This means that if you are using a hydroponic growing system, you may not be growing anything in the sockets surrounding this plant. Seeds started there may be in the shadow of the larger plant.

Another consideration when growing larger plants in a hydroponic growing system is the thickness of the base of the plant. Will it grow larger than the size of the socket hole in the tray? Watch this, as the plant may damage the tray if it outgrows the socket opening.

Shrub Or Tree

Shrubs and trees require special planning for indoor growth. Depending on the size of the plant you may want a large south-facing window or skylight to avoid having to use multiple grow lights.

  • Apricot
  • Banana
  • Blackberries
  • Blueberries
  • Fig
  • Grapefruit
  • Ground Cherries
  • Lemon
  • Lime
  • Olive
  • Orange
  • Passion Fruit
  • Peach
  • Raspberries

You may not get fruit from a banana tree grown indoors, but the leaves are edible. Sometimes, the benefit of growing a plant isn’t the result you expect!

What else?

What other food can you grow indoors?

Microgreens are a popular micro (forgive the pun!) indoor garden.

Mushrooms can be grown in indoors. The kits for growing mushrooms tend to be good for a handful of crops before running their course. Pay attention to the growing instructions and the number of crops you can harvest when buying mushroom growing kits. You may be required to tend to the garden several times each day to maintain proper hydration.

Wrap-Up

Don’t dismiss out-of-hand any plant you want to grow indoors. As is clearly evident from this long and varied list of plants you can grow indoors, your options are vast. If you aren’t sure, give it a try. Why not? Be adventurous!

Do keep this in mind. When looking to purchase seeds (especially if you intend to grow your plant in a hydroponic growing system), pay attention to the full-grown size of the plant. Like tomatoes, many plants have varieties that grow small for tight spaces.

Jump-start your EarthBox garden by starting the seeds in your Hydroponic Growing System. Just transfer the grow sponge with the seedling from the pod to your indoor garden bed.

Key Takeaways

Manufacturers of Hydroponic Growing Systems and self-watering containers like EarthBox have made growing plants just about as easy as is possible while still allowing you to be able to truthfully say you grew the food yourself.  

You can grow just about any common garden plant indoors with Hydroponic Growing Systems and EarthBox products assisted by LED grow lights. There are approximately a hundred plants listed on this page alone.

Not sure if the seeds you have will grow indoors? Try it! Observe, repeat, improve, observe, repeat. You’ll probably have yourself a respectable indoor garden in no time.

The post What Can I Grow with My Indoor Garden? first appeared on Bountiful Indoor Garden.

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