Indoor Vegetable Gardening

Don't despair when cold weather comes! While you may need to take a break from your outdoor vegetable garden, your indoor garden can now begin. You can grow all kinds of tasty root crops indoors. Additionally, you can plant a number of other vegetables like tomatoes and leafy greens.

One thing you need to remember is that growing vegetables inside is different from growing them outside. You have to be more careful with the pollination, temperature, and the amount of light that they receive. Indoor vegetable gardening requires you to pay more attention to your plant's growing needs until they are well-established.

Leafy crops and root crops need cooler indoor temperatures. It is best to place them in a bright room that is not used very often and where the temperature in the room cannot fall below freezing. These type of plants will be able to handle the cooler temperature during the daytime (usually 60 degrees) and the nighttime temperature down into the high 30s.

When you are growing hot peppers, tomatoes, sweet peppers, beans, and cucumbers, it is important to remember that they have specific temperature requirements. You should keep the daytime temperature in the high seventies. At night, the temperature should never be allowed to go below sixty degrees.

You will want to choose your indoor vegetable gardening room carefully. It should face south and stay quite warm during the winter months. It is best if this can be accomplished through the use of the sun's rays. Just as with outdoor gardening, you will want to be sure your plants get six to eight hours of sunlight daily. Clearly, your indoor garden room must have lots of bright windows for your plants to enjoy. It is possible for your plants to freeze indoors due to cold air coming off the windows. You can prevent this from happening by supplementing the room's heat with lighting. A mixture of cool-white and warm-white fluorescent lighting should do the trick.

An indoor vegetable garden should be planted in a light weight soil mixture. Don't use soil from your garden. There are many commercially available potting mixes which are suitable for growing vegetables indoor. A combination of equal parts perlite, peat, potting soil, and vermiculite, will produce an indoor soil that is light enough to prevent insects and diseases that can harm your crops.

You will need to water your indoor vegetable garden more frequently than your outdoor garden. Be careful not to overwater either. Remember that indoor plants do not have the sources of humidity that outdoor plants do. This is due to the cooler temperatures and the fact that these plants are kept in an enclosed area. You should also give your plants food supplements every couple of weeks. This will replenish the nutrients that are depleted by frequent watering.