Susan Slobac asked:


How do cherry tomatoes in the dead of winter sound to you, a gardener in a northern clime wishing for summer? Impossible, you say. Not if you garden indoors. Vegetables of all types can be grown year-round indoors, with the proper light, soil, fertilizer and temperature, as well as focusing on suitable plant varieties.

If you are going to grow indoor vegetables in winter, you will need to start by raising plants from seed in late summer or early fall. It’s best to buy your seeds in the spring if you wish to do this, because it is not always easy to find seeds for sale at local garden centers in the fall.

Use a light seedling mix for starting your seeds. Its loose consistency will make it easy for the plants new roots to start to develop. After the seedlings have two true leaves, you can begin to carefully transplant them into individual four-inch containers. You can use any good potting soil for this purpose, but do not use regular garden soil. It is usually very heavy, has poor drainage and can also harbor disease and insects that can kill your new starts.

Because you will be watering these plants every day or every other day to keep the roots properly moist, you are also washing nutrients out of the soil. So feed your plants with a complete organic fertilizer every couple of weeks to give them the food they need to grow and flourish.
You will be playing with temperatures when raising indoor vegetables to suit the particular plants you wish to grow. Some vegetables, such as lettuce, endive, and radishes like cooler indoor temperatures. Daytime temperatures in the 60s work well, while night temperatures should go no lower than the 40s. A basement situation might work well to provide these temperatures, or an unheated porch if it doesn’t get too cold.

Sun lovers like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and beans must have daytime temperatures in the upper 70s and nights can go down no lower than 60 in order for these plants to flower and produce fruit. You will likely need to provide bottom heat to your containers to make sure they are warm enough to do well indoors.

If you do not have the proper hydroponic lights, you will be doomed to failure when it comes to growing vegetables indoors. This is of utmost importance to your success. You need to keep your light two to four inches above your plants for them to thrive. HID lamps, in conjunction with digital ballasts or electronic ballasts can be purchased in as hydroponic grow light kits, work well for this purpose. These grow lights provide a complete spectrum of light for every stage of plant growth, and work well in indoor applications.

Jesse Akre asked:

If you’re itching to get your green thumb on, but want to do more than grow flowers, you should consider your own vegetable and fruit gardens. You may be thinking your backyard doesn’t have good enough soil to grow great vegetables and fruits. That may be true, but you still don’t have to give up. Instead, create a better yard, through garden planters.

You don’t want to pay a fortune to add layers of right topsoil to your whole yard when you really only need the richer soil in the specific places where the plants are going to be growing. You may not have done the research before, but it could be hundreds to thousands of dollars to have a complete layer of topsoil placed on your yard. So, why not just create smaller rich planting venues with garden planters?

Instead of trying to prepare a whole yard, you can decide where you want your garden to grow and put garden planters in the right formation. Then fill them with potting soil or topsoil that the plants will thrive in, and plant away.

If you really want to dress up your garden area, you can choose some of the more decorative garden planters out there. Some can go with the theme of your yard, being made to look like a number of animals outdoor scenery pieces that blend in with your natural backyard look. Others will look like they are finely sculpted pieces of stone that were meant to be in a statuary.

Not everyone wants that look through. Some want it to look like they planted their back yard with a very traditional and simple garden. Even if you don’t want to see the garden planters, you can still have them in the yard; you just need to make sure they are not visible. In this case you will want to get the simple and economical garden planters and bury them in the backyard, with the top right at the surface of the ground. Then you still have the same rich ground to plant in, but no evidence.

Another beneficial part of using garden planters is that you can be the envy of the neighborhood by having the first harvestable garden on the block. While they will think you put out a lot of money to have full grown plants imported, so you could drop them in the ground as soon as it was ready, you will know that you really started some of those garden planters early on in the pantry or another room in the house. It’s also nice to know that when you have a desire to do a little gardening that even Mother Nature and her freezing fury can’t stop you, you just need to relocate the already growing plants when the outside temperature is ready for them.

With the help of garden planters you’ll be able to enjoy gardening all year round and also reap the rewards of fresh fruits and vegetables on your dinner table.