Grow Food Indoors
House plants are out, and indoor gardening is in!
No one ever said you had to keep traditional house plants, so why not grow what you can eat?
Eight years ago when we moved back to Michigan, we bought a home with a heated enclosed porch that we dubbed, “the day room.”
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The day room use to have a comfy couch where we sat and watched the birds flock to the bird feeder. When one of the children moved out, the couch went with her.
After the couch went, I took inventory of what plants I had (many) and decided I needed more since I now had extra space. So I started to incorporate the philosophy of “only plant edibles,” like we do in the yard. (I’m not always good at sticking to the rules.)
The first edible indoor plant I bought was a banana plant. I have yet to get it to flower, but I’m still holding out hope that I’ll get bananas. The banana tree was surprisingly easy to grow, so I grew more edible indoor plants…
Things from scraps around the kitchen like; lemon seeds, lime seeds, grapefruit seeds (I keep killing those trees), so many avocado pits, and pineapple tops. I’ve also grown tomatoes too. They aren’t prolific in the winter like they are in the summer months outdoors, but I still got tomatoes here and there.
With the recent Covid-19 scare, and all the grocery stores having their shelves cleaned, I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to start some more edible house plants besides tropical fruit.
This spring when I started seeds for the garden indoors, I decided to hold back a couple of grape tomato plants, two mini red bell pepper plants, and two sweet bonnet peppers to plant indoors. I prefer vegetables to be grown outdoors, but I want to have a few things growing in the house during the cold months.
Do you grow your own food indoors? Or do you just have tropical plants indoors?
While it helps to have indoor grow lights (this is the one I use) to grow indoor plants, it’s not always necessary if you have a sunny window. I’ve successfully grown indoors:
- Leaf lettuce
- Romaine lettuce
- Spinach
- Herbs of all kinds
- Pineapple
- Tomatoes
- Peppers
- Tomatillos
- Strawberries
- Peas
- Tiger Melon
- Celery
- Radishes
No one ever said you had to keep traditional house plants, so why not grow what you can eat? The cactus you’re growing in the window wont do a thing for you when the grocery store shelves are picked clean.
Later this summer I’m going to start a larger indoor garden complete with:
- Swiss chard
- Leaf lettuce
- Zucchini
- Peas
If you decide to grow fruits and vegetables indoors, you will need to hand pollinate some fruits and vegetables. Pollinating is easily done with a small paint brush. Just like bee’s I move the paint brush from one blossom to the next. It won’t matter if you brush tomato blossoms first and then brush the cucumber blossoms, bee’s do the same thing. Just be sure not to wash the paint brush, as it’ll hold the pollen in it from one day to the next.
