Small Scale Indoor Gardening

The indoor closet garden is exploding, with a deep heady fragrance, that smells like a hot-house, coming from the very center of our home. It’s filled with all sort’s of yummy edible vegetables. From the sweet pea’s climbing up the ropes that I hung from the hanging rails that the builders put in, I don’t think when they were designing a hanging closet they ever imagined sweet pea’s growing from them, to the budding tomato’s that are now starting to get the very first of their fruit, basil, and peppers.

Each week I get 5 maybe 10 big pea pods off of the pea plant not a ton, but it’s just getting into its big production period and it’s nice for topping on salads. Plus the wonderful smell of the flower blossoms is a great treat. Next time I think I will pick a variety with a larger crop, even if it takes longer to get to its harvest period. These sweet pea’s had a really quick time to harvest.

The other tip I would recommend is to always keep your lights LED 3-5 inches above your plants. While the plants will still survive with them even a few feet above your plants, they wont have the super growth you’ll see with the plants nice and close to the lights. It’s hard to manage keeping everything this close when you have plants which are big like the tomatoes and peas, and small, like some of my pots of basil, so I have been trying to stack pots together and pot things doubled up.

The weird thing about our garden is that the only light coming from the room is a deep dark fuchsia. It seems alien, or like something you would imagine seeing in the far reaches of space, or on a Sci Fi show. I love it. I think the coolest part of the LED UFO lights that I use, is how they confuse your eyes, while you’re in the room everything is so pink, the leaves are black, blue, or white if they have died back, but once you leave the room everything white turns a strange yellowy green. It’s trippy, until you get used to it.

I’d like to keep expanding our indoor garden, in the next few weeks we’ll be adding some Genovese basil, as well as some cutting flowers. I can’t wait to see how these Tigerella tomatoes develop!

My Winter Garden

Just like so many gardeners, I dread the winter, when everything dies back and there is just nothing to do. It is just so boring! Living in the south our winter is pretty short but, we’re still lacking the fresh produce that I crave all year round, this year I decided to start my first indoor farming experience. A few months age I started growing two types of peas, purple basil, tomatoes, and an extra licoricy green basil, growing inside a windowless closet and they have been coming in amazingly ever since.

For me the big question was lighting, I have central pain syndrome and the normal  grow lights that are used in doors, sets CPS’s alydonia skin pain flaring like crazy, so I needed lights with a really low frequency, but heavy output for the plants. Plus the regular lights are a major fire hazard, I don’t want my house going up in flames because I need my pesto once a week. I finally decided on these really cool LED lights. They look hot pink to the human eye and are made up of the exact wavelengths of light that the plants need to grow, the lights look dim since they are only producing the spectrums needed for the plants to grow in.

So have fun looking at pictures of my garden, I’m amazed how much I have produced in a 4ft square space. Especially when I can’t seem to keep the dogs and cats out of there.