Indoor Gardening: Growing Herbs, Greens, & Vegetables Under Lights: The Hungry Garden, #4

By Rosefiend Cordell

Learn how to grow fresh, organic vegetables, fruits, and greens in your own home -- and using materials that you already have that are cheap.

Gardening is an enjoyable hobby and art, but not everybody has land available to them. You can still enjoy fresh, healthy produce that you've grown for just a few dollars if you have a kitchen window, or an empty bookshelf, and a few well-placed grow lights.

Now you can make a little salad, or use fresh herbs to liven up your meal. A few minutes a day, and you can have sprouts and microgreens for your salad, a bowl of radishes to snack on, and other delights.

Rosefiend Cordell, a former horticulturist turned gardening writer, will guide you gently but firmly through the wild world of indoor gardening.

In this book you will find: 

An introduction to growing food plants indoors, by making a space for them, choosing containers and potting mix. A whole chapter is dedicated to grow lights, as well as common pests and diseases.  

A guide to all the common ways to grow indoor plants -- sprouts, microgreens, herbs -- as well as a guide to the uncommon indoor crops, including peas, tomatoes, and strawberries. For those, we will also cover hand-pollination, unless you have a trained honeybee living in your house to do the pollination for you!

All written to encourage you. 

 

"But I always kill my plants." Look, I'm a professional, and believe me, I've killed more plants than you have! But that was how I -- and many other horticulturists like me -- learned how to take care of plants. Part of growing plants is losing plants, and that's okay. You learn from your mistakes, and you grow, and eventually so do your plants. Life ain't a cover of Home Beautiful -- it's messier and sometimes it breaks your heart, but there's so much to be learned from it. And if you have some pretty little food plants in your kitchen under a grow lamp, it's even better.

Filled with a lots of do-it-yourself in-home gardening information, Indoor Gardening is your gateway to this exciting new world of practical (and tasty) crops.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosefiend Publishing
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215977170

Rosefiend Cordell

This is the gardening pen name for Melinda R. Cordell. Former city horticulturist, rose garden potentate, greenhouse manager, perennials factotum, landscape designer, and small-time naturalist. I've been working in horticulture in one way or another since 1989. These days I write gardening books because my body makes cartoon noises when I move, and I really like air-conditioning. Good times!

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Rosefiend Publishing.

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INDOOR GARDENING: GROWING HERBS, GREENS, & VEGETABLES UNDER LIGHTS

Copyright © 2023 by Rosefiend Cordell, aka Melinda R. Cordell

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Rosefiend Publishing. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, alien transfer, ESP, or other – without written permission from the publisher. And we already know about your attempts at ESP, so watch it.

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge at proof time. Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in the book was correct at press time, the author does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any part for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from menopause, mental pause, metal paws, having to drop everything and find a couple of bucks because the ice cream truck is going by and the kids want a bomb pop, having to write more books so we can afford a bomb pop, trying to find a new job because the current employer can’t pay a living wage so we can afford a bomb pop, dreaming of making it big, working for a hopefuller future, eating avocado toast, or any other reasons.

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Ordering information: For details, contact the publisher at [e-mail]

Cover design by Melinda R. Cordell

Book formatting by Melinda R. Cordell

Evil Empire ISBN: 978-1-953196-62-0

D2D ISBN: 9781953196606

First Edition: 27 January 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 blast off!

For more information (and books!), visit my website at https://melindacordell.com/

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The Hungry Garden Series

Big Yields, Little Pots – Container Gardening for the Creative Gardener

Edible Landscaping – Foodscaping and Permaculture for Urban Gardeners

Beneficial and Pest Insects – The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry

Indoor Gardening – Growing Herbs, Greens, & Vegetables Under Lights

FORTHCOMING BOOKS!

Growing a Food Forest – Trees, Shrubs, & Perennials That’ll Feed Ya!

Wildscaping – Using Native Food Plants to Create an Ecologically-Friendly Garden

Survival Rations! – Foraging in Wild Spaces for Greens, Berries, & Nuts

Victory Gardens – We Can Grow It!

Tiny-Space Vegetable Gardening – Making the Best of Garden Spaces

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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A hearty tip o’ the pen to Keith Rhodes, who took on this manuscript when it was still a wreck with parts strewn all over the place and gave me a hand with edits. Thank you so much. Hopefully this endeavor has not permanently turned you away from editing for good!

INTRODUCTION

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This book is focused on growing edible plants inside in containers under natural light and artificial lights.

Poor lighting isn’t always apparent to the layman’s eye. When I started growing indoor plants, I bought a bunch of random grow lights, not knowing how to do this lighting thing. I tried different lights with different plants, mixed them around. I noticed that some of my setups were great while others didn’t work, but I thought that overall, the plants were fine.

However, I didn’t realize that my light source was mediocre until I noticed that none of my orchids were blooming even though it was winter (their usual bloom time). I despaired of ever seeing my mystery orchid blooming.

But I finally improved my lighting setup. When I put my mystery orchid underneath an LED red and blue light, that plant finally took off ... and put out the biggest flower spike I’ve ever seen!

Sometimes it takes a little while to figure out what kinds of light works best for your plants. And that’s okay.

Now I’m paying closer attention to how my plants react to the lights, adjust them and moving them around to see where the plants seem the happiest.

Indoor gardening is like that. A lot of trial and error is involved. But it’s a fun way to spend time, but more importantly, it’s also a way to improve your life when nutritious produce is selling for sky-high prices. If you can find out how to grow a some leafy vegetables such as lettuce, kale, or bok choy under lights, or grow your own sprouts, and even a tomato plant, you can supplement your diet with nourishing produce, and you can also have more choice in the types of lettuce you grow – because now you can branch out into heirloom varieties that are eye-catching and tasty.

Certain herbs are easy to grow inside. You can grow carrots, beet greens, even strawberries with the right light and potting media. You’re not going to be able to grow huge quantities of them, but they can improve the quality of your life.

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A side note: try not to go overboard in spending a lot of money on these systems. Find out more about them before you make big purchases.

I hear about people who drop $500 on garden supplies and only end up growing a tiny squash when all is said and done. As a gal who grew up reading my grandma’s old Organic Gardening magazines when they were still a small outfit in Vermont living the cheap gardening life, while helping my other grandma in various big gardening setups where she saved her own seeds and didn’t spend money on hardly any of it, this boggles my mind.

I remember seeing my 80-something great-grandpa in the big raspberry garden pushing a small cultivator, which is basically a small plow, between the rows. Would he have used one of those gas-powered tillers if he could have afforded it? Hard to say. Grandpa was a little stubborn, but at the same time, he used what he had at hand, because we didn’t have a lot of money. That’s just the way it was.

So, I was raised in a tradition of gardening on a shoestring, and it’s a good way for a beginner to learn. Start small and use what you have at hand as the old (we’re not that old) frugal gardeners did. Then once you learn the ropes, you can scale up to buying good-quality equipment when necessary.

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This photo is merely to show off my pretty Oncidium alliance orchid.

GETTING STARTED

Honey, Where Are You Putting All These Plants?

The problem with time and space as we know it means that we can’t have a house like Dr. Who’s Tardis. Outside, it looks exactly like a police box; inside, it contains 500 square miles of space, plus a pool (I actually have no idea if Dr. Who had a pool) and a room for really long scarves (for Tom Baker).

So if you’re like me and you live in a house that has, and this is a rough but accurate estimate, about 25 square feet of space – then finding a place for more plants is a challenge.

Not that this has stopped me from buying more indoor plants, oh gosh no.

But if you want to grow food plants indoors, then finding a good location for them might take a little more effort. At minimum you’ll need 1) a space that’s large enough for them to grow to their full size 2) in a place that completely fills their light needs.

If you are design savvy, you’ll also need 3) all plants and materials to be aesthetically pleasing. This book probably will not give you very much on this score, for which I’m very sorry. If I ran a home decorating show, it would pretty much consist of, This space can be improved by piling a bunch of books on top of it, along with this cool rock I found. So I’m not exactly your go-to source for interior design inspirations.

Plants grown for food instead of aesthetics will need full light, whether from the sun or