6 Vegetables You Can Grow Indoors

Ah, summer. You are the most popular season. You’re the time that everyone spends outside on their porches, watching the sun go down. Which is really the only comfortable time to be outside, since daytime consists of 95% humidity and nighttime is a swarm of mosquitos. As a result, gardening can be a bit of a challenge.

Of course, just because July and August may not be the best time to be outside doesn’t mean you need to give up on your gardening dreams. You may need to do a little bit of prep work, of course, but an indoor garden can turn your home into an oasis in the summer, and a tropical wonderland in winter. If you’d like your indoor garden close to where you’ll be cooking, you’ll need quite a bit of light.

Tomatoes

Pretty much any variety of tomato plant will grow well in a container. Of course, tomatoes are heavy, and they’ll need some support, but you’d have to do a trellis outside as well. Cherry tomatoes will spawn the biggest yield as far as sheer numbers go, and they’re wonderful if you have a few smaller helpers. Children are much more likely to enjoy cherry tomatoes, since they’re just their size. Plus, the weight of the fruit is less likely to break the stems.

Carrots

Root vegetables are surprisingly simple to grow inside. Plus, carrots can be used in almost any recipe, so you don’t have to worry about a surplus. Round carrot varieties or a deep window box will allow you to grow your carrots indoors. Most of the time, it’s easiest to find them as seeds (your local grocery store will probably have them). When grown inside, carrots don’t have much of a season. Therefore, if you harvest one crop, you can simply plant the next batch and expect fresh carrots year-round.

Garlic

Another root, garlic has some huge health benefits. However, it also grows with almost no help. Ever gotten too many garlic cloves and seen them sprout? That’s just from sitting around! Imagine how well they can do with a little soil and water to help them out. By simply planting whole cloves of garlic (instead of adding them to the spaghetti sauce), you can end up with a whole plethora! In order to make it edible, the new garlic cloves will need to be dried and stored. Luckily, all that is easily accomplished in a basement or storage shed.

Salad Greens

The only warning I would give with growing salad greens is to keep an eye on the kind you choose. Some of these lettuces can get pretty big, and unless you have a rabbit, you may find that you’ve planted too much to make use of. Greens also need plenty of space in the pot, so once they begin sprouting, pull out all but the healthiest ones. This will ensure that you have a good crop, and that you don’t end up overcrowding them. Then just lop off what you need for salads!

Mushrooms

Pretty much the only plant that you can water and literally toss in a dark closet, mushrooms are ideal for a beginning, or lazy, gardener. You can buy a bag of compost and some spores, water them, and then toss them in a closet or cupboard somewhere. A few weeks later, they’ll be ready to harvest. Since mushrooms are delicious but deadly to get wrong, this is a much safer option than trying to learn how to gather them on your own.

Herbs

Ok, so herbs aren’t technically a vegetable. However, they are excellent to grow indoors, you can use them year-round, and they’ll make your home smell amazing. Mint is a great one for indoor growing. Outside, mint likes to take over, and your herb garden may easily become a mint problem. Keeping them in pots prevents this.

Oregano, thyme, verbena and rosemary also grow well inside. Individual planter boxes are the best ways to keep them separate, but some varieties will do quite well together. Figure out what you’d most like to have first, then decide how to plant them. Ones that like similar amounts of water and sun (and won’t crowd each other out) are best to combine.

If you’ve decided to start an indoor garden, you’ve chosen one hobby that’s sure to get some attention. There's not many people who have fresh vegetables in the middle of winter, or who manage to bring in the harvest without breaking a sweat. So roll up your sleeves, get the brightest areas of the kitchen set, and start looking forward to fresh produce, and a lower grocery bill.

[via Live Love Fruit]

Companion Planting

May 15th is the traditional cut off date for a final frost. Meaning, starting next week, everything goes – in your garden. I will be seeding watermelons and transplanting chile peppers. As you prepare to fill your summer plot, consider not only what you’re planting, but where you’re planting. The logic and tradition of companion planting is based on setting up mutually beneficial relationships between plants. This method of organization can encourage pest control and stimulate vigorous growth. It is even said to produce tastier tomatoes.

Every plant demands and provides differently – absorbing certain soil nutrients, attracting specific pests while repelling others. It makes sense, then, to arrange your garden in a way that takes advantage of these individual properties. Companion planting originated with the Native American custom of the “Three Sisters” guild. Historically, Native Americans would plant corn, squash and beans side by side on a small plot of land. The tall stalks of corn provided a trellis for the beans, while the sprawling squash offered ground cover, stamping out potential weeds. Beans, a legume, are nitrogen fixing, and will not disturb nutrient intake of corn or squash.

Trap crops are another example of companion planting. If you are concerned about squash bugs attacking your cucumber bed, plant zucchini nearby. Summer squash leaves are sweeter and more preferable to the pests, thus deterring them from your main crop cukes.

Overtime, growers have collectively developed a comprehensive guide to companion planting. Inevitably, these guides are part truth, part lore, but in any case, a home garden offers the perfect scale in which to trial some of this knowledge. We can’t tend to our garden at all times, so why not let the plants themselves do some of the work?

Here are a few suggestions:

Basil with tomatoes – repels tomato hornworms

Nasturtiums with squash – deters squash bugs

Radishes and cucumbers – trap crop for cucumber beetles

Lettuce and carrots – for best flavor of both

Bee balm and tomatoes – for enhanced tomato flavor

Tomatoes and lettuce – tall trellis can provide welcome shade for tender greens

[via Wilder Quarterly]

Building a Covered Greenhouse Garden

If your garden is subject to a lot of wind activity, try building an above-ground covered garden.

 

Building a little green house to protect your vegetabeles from the wind and to elevate the temperature during the colder days. This should also help with the "year round" gardening.

Start out with 2x12s at 8 feet and 4 feet. (I do not recommend 2x12s as they are very expensive, and you can get the same results with stacked 2x6s.) Level out the dirt a bit before assembling them.
 

 

I used the pocket hole system once again to join the pieces of wood. If you have some resident pests (moles, etc) in the yard, staple some chicken wire to the base and flip the whole thing over.

 

Build a frame to go on top out of 2x2s and 2x4s for corner braces. This will be the base for the covered part.

 

 

Then attach 1/2" 10-foot PVC pipe to create the arches.

Put one screw into the inside bottom of each pipe (to keep it from slipping), then secure it with a pipe clamp.

 

Use electrical tape or 1x2 screws (into the PVC) to secure the wire mesh to the pipes.
 

 

Staple some 3.5 mil plastic to the 2x2 frame - do attempt while it is breezy outside. Plastic everywhere, suffocation, etc.

 

Attach two hinges on one of the short 4' sides.

 

And some chain on the long 8' side. (plastic chain is not recommended, as it bends and stretches far too easily).

 

If you're planning on rigging up an automatic watering system for my soaker hose, install this adapter in the side. The garden hose will go on the blue side and the soaker hose will come out the other side.

 

Mix some compost and existing soil from your yard and a healthy amount of pine needles.

Now it's time for planting! Your tomatoes, basil, squash, onions, garlic, herbs, etc. are planted and safe from the cold and wind!

[via swingNcocoa]

Growing Celery Indoors: Never Buy Celery Again

[via: 17 Apart]

Remember when we tested and shared how to grow onions indefinitely last week? Well, at the same time, we've been testing out another little indoor gardening project first gleaned from Pinterest that we're excited to share the success of today — regrowing celery from its base.

We've figured out how to literally re-grow organic celery from the base of the bunch we bought from the store a couple weeks ago. I swear, we must have been living under a rock all these years or just not be that resourceful when it comes to food, but we're having more fun learning all these new little tips and tricks as we dive deeper into trying to grow more of our own food.

This project is almost as simple as the onion growing project — simply chop the celery stalks from the base of the celery you bought from the store and use as you normally would. In our case, we had a particular homemade bean dip that needed sampling!

Instead of tossing the base, rinse it off and place it in a small saucer or bowl of warm water on or near a sunny windowsill — base side down and cut stalks facing upright.

We let our celery base hang out in the saucer of water for right around one week, give or take. Over the course of the week, the surrounding stalks began to dry out significantly, but the tiny little yellow leaves from the center of the base began thickening, growing up and out from the center, and turned a dark green. The growth was slow, but steady and evident.

After the 5-7 days were complete, we transferred our celery base to a planter and covered it completely save for the leaf tips with a mixture of dirt and potting soil.

We watered it generously and after planting in the soil, the overall growth really took off. Not only do we have celery leaves regenerating themselves from the base, but you can see clear stalks making their way up and out. It's truly fascinating what we have not even a week after planting in the soil:

A few notes:

• Change out the water every couple of days while in the "saucer" phase of the project. We also used a spray bottle to spray water directly onto the base of the celery where the leaves were growing out. 
• The tutorials we saw showed planting the celery directly into the dirt outside — you may want to go this route if you live in a temperate area or want to be able to harvest outdoors. We went with an indoor planter since it's still pretty cold here in VA, we have limited outdoor space in the city, and the space we do have is currently unprotected from our curious puppy.
• Continue to generously water the celery after planting to keep it thriving. 

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