Growing at home - a start to your garden - Part #1

It's hard to find fresh veggies in the dead of winter in New England. The selection at the grocery store is thin, and was is there has been flown or trucked thousands of miles. Living in small town Vermont, we're limited to blah tasting freezer veggies or tubers. Not too exciting, eh?

Yum?

It should come as no surprise that as much as I love buying fresh food and veggies, I love growing them even more. Despite winter being my favorite season as far as playing outside goes, I desparately miss getting my hands dirty and feeling the warm sun on my back as I work my garden. Why not bring some of that into winter by growing a garden indoors?

There are a few options when it comes to growing your veggies into winter. Cold frames are an excellent option for extending your season, and if you've got the space and the $$, go for a greenhouse or a sun room. If you're like us, with a tight space and an even tighter budget, you can try a grow table. A grow table is a flat surface with a grow light over it. Easy enough, right? You can buy these things pre-made, starting around $140 from major players like Burpees and Gardener's Supply Co. While they are snappy looking, those were way above our meager budget of about $100 (supplies, planters, soil, seeds).

Originally I had designed a wooden platform with side arms from which a grow light would hang. This would involve some carpentry skills and patience. As soon as I got to the store, I saw wire metal shelves for $30, the same that we have in our kitchen and storing our gear. The shelves are movable, and the mesh strong enough to tie supports to and hang the lights from. Plus, the unit is free standing, unlike the table top one I designed. When not in use for plants, I can dump junk on the shelves. Finally, this would take three minutes together, as opposed to gawd knows how long for a hand built one. Throw in the $12 hanging 4' shop light and two grow bulbs for $8 each, I had what I needed - more, really - for $50. We assembled the unit, setting the shelves at good heights for us, suspended the light from the top rack, and BOOM! - a grow table. But now the question is, what to grow?

Wee baby lettuce sprouts

I felt a little weird checking out of the home depot line with everything I needed to start a small scale pot growing operation loaded into my cart, but I guess because it's Vermont, no one really thought anything of it. The new setup took only a half hour to put together, and I started with lettuce, basil, cilantro and rosemary growing in window box size containers. I set the light on a timer so that it was on 18 hours a day.

  Plants need a lot of things to grow, and it's important to know which of the variables we can control. As far as container planting goes, we can control light, warmth, and depth of soil, as well as added nutrients. I feel that our biggest challenge as growers - especially indoor growing, where mother nature isn't helping out - is understanding and manipulating these variables to our advantage.

Within days I had lettuce sprouts.  A few more and I could see little baby basil poking their heads through the soil. The hardest part about growing these inside was keeping the damn cat from digging in the soil. Of the above listed 'controls', the only one I had a hard time managing was the warmth - our apartment is in a drafty old farmhouse, and keeping it at 55* still cost us $300 in the winter. Lettuce likes cooler weather, but many herbs are regular summer temp plants.

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For a while, that's where my experiment ended. When my lettuce was an inch and a half high, we had a fire in our apartment. The heat was off two days, then the temporary propane heaters had the apartment at well over 100* for a day after that. Every houseplant, seedling, batch of herbs - dead. Several cubic feet of soil in the trash, poisoned by toxic smoke. It was only by the grace of the Compost Gods that the worms survived and then it was only barely.  Things will have to wait until part two to get growing again...