Growing Food Inside for Fun and Headaches

Frost October 17, 2015. Just made deadline for bringing in houseplants. Philodendron did very well, too well; had to move a couple chairs down to the basement to make room for it. Sad about season being over. Start scanning seed catalogs for next spring planting.

Why wait? We can keep growing plants starting today. Here is a food for thought website; Planetnatural indoor gardening 101, a comprehensive seed-to-harvest how-to for setting up our own indoor farmers' market. Discusses in detail how to plant vegetables, fruit, herbs--all indoors. Will give you a moment to check it out. Then come back please and let's discuss. Hope you checked out comments at end. If you noticed, no one had yet put it into practice. But commenters just couldn't wait to try it out!

We gardeners like to think big. We are optimists and dreamers and sometimes not very practical. We'd like to believe that if an expert tells us: Go ahead and try to plant indoors a tomato or two, a lemon tree, a dozen jalapeno peppers, forty different herb plants, that it sounds so appealing we are convinced we can actually pull it off.

Let's take as an example the tomato. It takes maybe 80 days or so from seed to our mouths. If we plant a few herbs along with this and the pepper, salsa is only 100 days away; provided we hit pay dirt, aka success.

The cost for this set-up isn't cheap. We need pots/containers, light (lots of light so add cost of artificial light), humidity (we won't have enough), fertilizer, special soil and room (lots of that too). We cannot downsize to a tiny house and grow a week's worth of food unless planning to sleep in our cars. Set the thermostat at a temperature between 65 and 75. Nothing like giving the plants the run of the house. Is that okay you ask the tomato? Too cold? Too warm? Just right? Then there's this nifty little accessory called the Gorilla Grow Tent. Add an extra three hundred dollars for that. It is very cool!

Unfortunately, we still have bugs to contend with, even inside. There are reasons we have dead leaves --where did we go wrong? There is a host of ailments that are not eliminated because we chose to grow stuff indoors. But there is always the internet to check out where to find solutions to our growing woes. And won't our friends be impressed when we tell them that homemade wine they are drinking came from the grapes we planted in our living room over the winter?

Let us know if that worked for you? I am passing.