How To Start Indoor Vegetable Gardening

Why start an indoor vegetable garden?

Growing vegetables indoors allows you to control all elements of the plants existence. You have control of the light, moisture, temperature, and fertilization.

Indoor plants are less prone to pests and parasites. On the other hand, there are still potential pest problems. Insect pests common to house plants will also be attracted to vegetable plants.

Indoor gardens also allow for an extended growing season which can provide fresh grown foods even in the cooler or off seasons.

Starting an indoor vegetable garden:

Indoor vegetables can be grown quite easily in any pot or container. Plastic is usually cheaper, but anything will do. The most important part of the container is making sure that there is drainage in the bottom. If you are using plastic or metal containers, use a drill or sharp object to make drainage holes.

It is important that the soil is lightweight and drains well. A mix that works well is an equal amount by volume of perlite, sand, silica, and forest mulch. Another favourite is equal parts of native soil, sharp coarse sand, and peat moss or compost. You will need a light mix of equal parts of black peat moss, perlite, and vermiculite if your vegetables are growing in hanging containers. Nurseries and gardening centres also have pre mixed mixers, but these will cost you more.

The soil should be lightly packed. If the soil is packed too tightly, there will be problems with root development, drainage and aeration. When you fill the container with soil, make sure there is between one and two inches of space at the top for watering.

You can use the same basic schedule for indoor gardening as you do with outdoor gardening for planting particular vegetables. You can start vegetables from seed much easier indoors because you don’t have to wait for certain weather conditions. As the seeds sprout, make sure that you thin them.

After planting, gently water the soil and be careful not to wash out the seeds. Check twice a day to see if you need to water your indoor vegetable garden. Avoid over watering. Excess water can gather at the base of the container, and cause the rots of your plant to rot.

The only downside that is usually found in indoor gardening is the watering. Plants grown in containers need more care and more attention than plants grown outside. Indoor gardeners need to water by hand and more frequently because plants dry out faster in containers.

Put a label with name, variety and date of planting in each container.

A bright sunny south-facing window can be the ideal site for growing fresh vegetables in containers all year. You need special supplemental lighting for growing vegetables during the winter months.

For your indoor vegetable garden, consider growing vegetables needing minimal space such as radishes, several types of lettuce, or carrots. Another option is small fruit bearing plants, like tomatoes and peppers.

Because you won’t have bees or wind to do the work for you, you will need to pollinate your vegetables yourself once they have started to flower. You can use a paintbrush to transfer the pollen from flower to flower. With vegetables that are self pollinating, you can shake the flower a little so that the pollen falls down inside. Other vegetables have separate male and female flowers, so make sure you are pollinating the right ones.

If you are growing vegetables indoors in the winter, you also need to pay attention to the temperature. Some vegetables can handle cooler air, as long as it is not too cold, but others need warm air to do well. Grow lights can add some heat, but if your indoor vegetable garden is in a garage or basement, you may need to supplement with a small heater. Monitor the temperature closely with a thermometer, because too much heat can damage the plants as well.

Necessities Of The Home Vegetable Garden.

When finding the place for the family vegetable garden it is better to put away once and for all the old notion that the garden "patch" must be an ugly patch in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully planned, carefully planted and thoroughly applied care, it may be formed a gratifying and harmonic feature of the general schema, adding a tint of comfortable homeliness that can ever be produced by bushes, borders, or beds.

With this fact in mind we will not be restricted to any part of the premises merely because it is out of sight at the rear of the barn or garage. In the general medium-size property there will not be much choice as to land. It'll be necessary to consider what is to be had and so do the real best that can be done with it. But there will likely be a good deal of selection as to, first, exposure, and secondly, convenience. Other things being equal, take a place near at hand, with easy access. It might appear that a deviation of simply a few hundred yards may imply nothing, but if one is relying largely upon spare minutes for functioning in and for controlling the garden and in the growth of lots of vegetables the latter is nearly as critical as the other. This matter of handy approach will be of such greater importance than is in all probability to be at first given. Not until you have had to make a dozen time-wasting jaunts for forgot seeds or instruments, or gotten your feet soaking wet by getting out through the dew-drenched grass, will you take in to the full what this may mean.

Exposure.

But the thing of first importance to consider in choosing the patch that is to generate for you happiness and flavoursome vegetables all summer, or even for numerous years, is the exposure. Pick out the "earliest" position you can. Obtain a patch pitching a little to the south or east, that appears to view sun early and maintain it late, and that looks to be out of the direct path of the chilling northern and northeasterly winds. If a building, or even an old fencing, protects it from this direction, your garden will be helped on marvelously, for an early beginning is a great ingredient toward success. If it is not already fortified, a board fencing, or a hedge of some low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will append really greatly to its usefulness. The importance of featuring such a protection or shelter is completely undervalued by the amateur.

The soil.

The chances are that you will not see a position of errorless garden soil available for utilisation anywhere upon your place. All except the really worst of soils can be got up to a real high degree of productiveness, particularly such as reduced areas as family veggie gardens want. Large tracts of ground that are near pure sand, and others so heavy and mucky that for centuries they rested uncultivated, have often been worked, in the course of merely a few years, to where they render each year great crops on a commercial basis. Indeed do not be deterred about your territory. Particular handling of it is often more crucial, and a garden- plot of ordinary shabby, or "never-brought-up" soil will make practically more for the physical and careful gardener than the richest position will produce under average methods of refinement.

Ideally the garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam." It can't go overstressed that such soils typically are made, not found. Let's analyse this description a bit, for here we get to the start of the four primary factors of gardening food. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary stands for full of plant nutrient; more than that, and this is an item of critical importance, it means full of plant food available to be used straightaway, all ready and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where developing things can immediately make use of it; or what we term, in one word, "available" plant food. Practically no soils in long- inhabited residential areas remain naturally rich enough to grow big crops. They are formed rich, or kept rich, in two ways; firstly, by cultivation, which assists to modify the raw plant nutrient stored in the soil into available forms; and secondly, by manuring or supplying plant nutrient to the soil from outside sources.

"Sandy" in the sense applied here, means a soil bearing sufficient particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty and sticky a couple of days after a rainfall; "light" enough, as it is called, so that a smattering, under routine circumstances, will collapse and drop apart promptly after being squeezed in the hand. It's not essential that the soil be sandy in show, but it should be crumbly.

"Loam: a rich, friable soil," states Webster. That barely embraces it, but it does distinguish it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in particular ratios, so that neither greatly predominate, and normally darkly colored, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, still to the untrained eye, but by nature seems as if it would grow things. It is extraordinary how quickly the entirely physical visual aspect of a piece of well cultivated soil will convert. An illustration came under my notice last fall in one of my fields, where a strip holding an acre had been two years in onion plants, and a small bit sticking out from the middle of this had been made for them for precisely one season. The remainder had not took in any extra manuring or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the fall, all three divisions were as distinctly noticeable as is they were separated by a surround. And I acknowledge that next spring's crop of rye, before it is plowed under, will display the courses of demarcation precisely as plain.

Vegetable Cultivation

The uses of cultivation are to get free of weeds, and to arouse development by (1) allowing air into the soil and giving up unobtainable plant nutrient, and (2) by maintaining moisture.

Regarding weeds, the gardener of any experience need not be stated the grandness of keeping their crops sound. He has verified from bitter and dear experience the cost of letting them receive anything resembling a beginning. He knows that one or two days' development, after they are considerably rising, watched maybe by a day or so of rainfall, might well increase the exercise of cleaning a plot of onions or carrots, and that where weeds have arrived at whatever size they cannot be taken from sown crops without performing a good deal of injury. He as well figures, or should, that every last day's growth signifies just indeed much obtainable plant food stole from below the very roots of his rightful crops.

Instead of allowing the weeds make away with whatsoever plant food, he should be rendering more such, for sound and frequent cultivation will not simply split the soil up mechanically, but let air in, moisture, and warmth, every last requisite in effecting those chemical interchanges needful to switch non-available into available plant food. Long in front of the science of the subject was disclosed, the soil cultivators had determined by notice, the necessity of sustaining the soil nicely loosened around their developing crops. Even the unstudied aborigine made sure that his squaw not simply lay a bad fish underneath the hill of maize but ran her shell hoe through it. Plants want to breathe. Their roots need air. You may as well expect to observe the rosy shine of happiness on the white cheeks of a cotton-mill child slave as to expect to experience the fantastic dark green of healthy plant life in a strangled garden.

Important as the question of air is, that of water orders along side it. You might not witness at first what the issue of frequent cultivation has to do with water. Only let's halt for a minute and see into it. Acquire a slip of blotting paper, dunk one end in water, and observe the moisture move up hill, soak up through the blotting paper. The scientists have labeled that "capillary attraction", the water crawls up minute concealed tubes formed by the texture of the blotting paper. Now select a similar bit, cut it across, clutch the two cut edges securely together, and test it again. The moisture refuses to cross the line: the connection has been severed.

In the aforesaid manner the water stored in the soil after a rain starts at once to get out once more into the air. That along the surface vaporizes initially, and that which has soaked in sets out to soak in through the soil to the surface. It is exiting your garden, through the millions of soil tubes, merely as sure enough as if you got a two-inch pipe and a gasoline engine, pumping it into the sewer night and day! Preserve your garden by containing the waste. It is the easiest matter in the world to cut the piping in two. By frequent cultivation of the surface ground scarcely a couple of inches deep for almost all smaller veggies the soil tubings are preserved split, and a mulch of dust is retained. Seek to go all over every last portion of your garden, particularly where it isn't shadowed, once in every ten days or two weeks. Does that appear like too much work? You can press your wheel hoe over, and so retain the dust mulch as a continual protective covering, as swift as you can walk. If you wait for the weeds, you will almost have to crawl through, causing more such harm by distressing your evolving plants, losing all the plant nutrient (and they will take the cream) which they have consumed, and in reality committing in more hours of boundlessly more such irritating work. If the beginner at gardening hasn't been won over by the facts made, there is merely one thing left to convince him, experience.

Having presented so much space to the reason for continuous care in this affair, the question of methods of course comes. Acquire a wheel hoe. The simplest sorts will not but save you an unlimited measure of time and work, but do the work greater, a lot easier than it can be done by hand. You can grow good veggies, particularly if your garden is a very small one, without one of these labor-savers, but I can promise you that you will never regret the moderate investment required to buy it.

With a wheel hoe, the effort of maintaining the soil mulch turns dead effortless. If you haven't got a wheel hoe, for tiny areas very rapid work can be done with the scuffle hoe.

The subject of keeping weeds stripped out of the rows and between the plants in the rows isn't indeed promptly executed. Where hand-work is needed, allow it to be done at once. Here are a few real suggestions that will reduce this exercise to a minimal:

(1) Get at this work while the soil is soft; as soon as the ground commences to dry out afterward a rain is the best time. Under such conditions the weeds may be fetched out by the roots, without breaking off.

(2) Instantly in front of weeding, move all over the rows with a wheel hoe, cut shallow, but just as close as manageable, giving a thin, plainly viewable strip that must be hand-weeded. The best instrument for this use is the double wheel hoe with disc attachment, or hoes for larger plants.

(3) See to it that not just the weeds are pulled out but that every last inch of land surface is broken up. It is amply as principal that the weeds scarcely sprouting be destroyed, as that the bigger ones be drawn out. One stroke of the weeder or the fingers will destroy a hundred weed seedlings in less time than one weed can be extracted afterward it gets a good starting.

(4) Utilize one of the smaller hand-weeders until you become skilled with it. Not simply may more such work be done but the fingers will be saved needless fatigue.

The expert manipulation of the wheel hoe can be produced through rehearse solely. The first matter to ascertain is that it is essential to view the wheels only: the blades, disc or rakes will take care of themselves.

The operation of "hilling" consists of drawing the soil up around the stems of growing plants, usually at the time of second or third hoeing. It used to be the exercise to hill everything that could be hilled "up to the eyebrows," only it has step by step been tossed out for what is named "level culture". You will promptly verify the grounds from what has been stated about the leak of moisture from the surface of the soil. The two upper slopes of the mound, which may be symbolized by an equilateral triangle, yield more displayed surface than the level surface staged by the base. In damp soils or seasons hilling may be better, but very seldom otherwise. It sustains the extra disfavour of making it tough to sustain the soil mulch which is so desired.

Rotation of crops.

There is another matter to be advised in making each vegetable do its greatest, and that is crop rotation, or the succeeding of any veggie with a different type at the next planting.

With some vegetables, such as cabbage, this is well-nigh imperative, and practically all are helped by it. Even onions, which are popularly imagined to be the proving exclusion to the rule, are fitter, and do as well after some other crop, provided the land is as finely pulverized and rich as an earlier crop of onions would result.

Here are the significant rules of crop rotation:

(1) Crops of the same vegetable, or vegetables of the identical family (such as turnips and cabbage) should not follow each other.

(2) Vegetables that feed near the surface, identical to corn, should succeed deep-rooting crops.

(3) Vines or leaf crops should succeed root crops.

(4) Fast-growing crops should pursue those occupying the ground all season.

These are the principles which should specify the rotations to be observed in individual cases. The correct fashion to see to this issue is when producing the planting design. You will then have time to do it properly, and won't need to give it whatsoever further thought for a year.

With the above-mentioned suggestions in mind, and lay to use , it will not be awkward to grant the crops those particular tending that are requisite to make them do their very optimal.