Indoor Winter Gardens

One of the problems with growing your own vegetables during the summer and then preserving them, is the of lack of fresh produce during the winter months. I am a firm believer that freshness in food is always the best. While fresh produce are easily found at the local grocery store, that isn't the desirable thing to do if you are wanting to become self reliant and self sufficient. Or if you care about how and where your food was grown.

This year, I attempted to grow some fresh vegetables indoors during the winter months. I have a friend, who does this on a regular basis. He though, has an atrium in the middle of his house that is two stories high. His indoor garden is vertical and is watered by a sprinkler system and his grow lights are powered by solar. I have nothing that elaborate. I only have a few windows facing the south. Still I was able to plant leaf lettuce, a couple bushes of tomatoes, celery, and a few potatoes. While this is not meant to, and cannot usually, provide for all the fresh produce that I may want or need , it does help to stretch what I have preserved while adding a freshness to what I canned, frozen, and dehydrated.

For those of you that live in areas where you cannot have an outdoor garden at all, planting an indoor garden, might be an alternative for you to try. Empty two-gallon ice cream buckets, plastic food storage boxes, coffee cans and so on can be used to hold your dirt and plants. A good site to learn more on how to do this can be found here. And it doesn't need to cost you very much to grow them either.

1. Potatoes – Unless you are wanting to grow some strange or usual kind of potato, just save some of the potatoes that you bought from the grocery store. I have never bought seed potatoes. There is no need to. When the eyes of the potato start to grow, cut the potato into sections so that each section has two eyes. Plant in soil about six inches deep. Water and place in a sunny window. A potato about the size of a chicken egg will regrow about five pounds of potatoes.
2. Lettuce – I used a regular packet of leaf lettuce seed. Just sprinkle seeds on top of the soil. Lightly cover with dirt, water and place in a sunny window. As the lettuce grows you can pick it as wanted.
3. Cherry Tomatoes – I have never tried any other kind of tomato, but it is to my understanding that you can also grow Roman tomatoes indoors. If you try growing indoor tomatoes, you will need to hand pollinate them. A video that you can watch to learn how to do this can be found on YouTube here.
4. Other vegetables that are easy to grow indoors are carrots, radishes, mushrooms, bean sprouts, dwarf beans and peas, beets, green onions, wheat sprouts, and of course celery.

Growing Celery Indoors

Cut off base of a bunch of celery.

Place in a small bowl, saucer ot other container with the base side down and cut stalks facing upright. Place near a sunny windowstill.

Let the celery sit for about one to two weeks. Change the water at least once every other day. (I changed mine every day.) The tops of the cut stalks will dry out, so I slightly dampened mine whenever I changed the water.

Plant the celery in a mixture of dirt and potting soil and place back near the sunny window. Water generously.

As the celery grows, I use the leaves and small stalks to make a wonderful fresh additions to salads and soups.

Enjoy and thanks for visiting my blog. :-)