Indoor Gardening: Growing your house plants

So if growing plants indoors can be good for our health, which plants do we choose that thrive in indoor environments? And how do we take care of them properly? Let's first deal with essentials that every plant needs so we can formulate effective strategies for dealing with these hurdles.

The indoor of modern houses mostly use forced air pumped through vents to heat and cool the environment. Unfortunately, this increases evaporation and desert-like conditions for our plants indoors. Because pots and soils are constantly drying out, the need for constant watering gets burdensome and can lead to instant plant death on those days that we forget to water or if we go out of town.

Mulching with coffee grounds or coco noir can help to delay the rate of evaporation, but inevitably we need a solution for automatic watering. The easiest solution to provide automatic watering is to purchase or construct a self-watering planter.

In a self-watering design, a reservoir of water is located underneath the actual pot, separate of the soil, and uses wicking capillary action to suck up water into the pot. Because this action is passive it doesn't suck up too much moisture and is self-regulating. I've been working on an instructable for building your own sustainable planter in GIY, but here are some other places you can get a planter.

Another slightly more tech-heavy solution involves using an automated timer with a pump.  Of course, if you are home-schooling you can view this as an opportunity for a project. This involves having a container you can use as a water reservoir. You hook the automated timer up with the pump and it will periodically squirt water from the reservoir into your pot when the timer is set. 

The only problem with this setup is making sure little details are correct, like making sure the tubes are secure, purchasing a timer that can be activated for a period of time less than a minute, and finding a small or adjustable pump. 

Going hand in hand with water availability for your plants is making sure they are in the right kind of soil. Many gardening experts will advocate creating non-soil blends using perlite, vermiculite, coconut coir, peat moss, or if they are progressive, biochar. Most of these recipes are recommended on the basis that regular soils become either dried out or too moist indoors.

Unfortunately, most of these alternatives to soil are not sustainable and quite often cost a lot more than their benefit to your indoor plants.

Permaculture design works with nature to promote healthy gardening and this works well in outdoor situations.  Soils teeming with life and supporting a diverse and healthy ecology. The problem indoors is that we don't really want to support the same kind of ecology.

An overabundance of fungi in your indoors soils might lead to an excess of spores causing allergies and breathing problems. Supporting large numbers of insects in your indoor pots usually leads to them exploring elsewhere in your house for more resources.

So how do we solve this soil dilemma? I'm still researching the ideal balance of ecology vs utility, and probably have a higher tolerance for insects than most of our readers, but I can share a few tips I've picked up:

• Larger pots are almost always better than small pots because the amount of soil supports a healthier ecosystem. Ideal pots would be long skinny self-watering planters.
• One of the few animals that I've found really behaves itself indoors is the humble worm.  Whenever you first fill your pot with soil, add a small amount of kitchen waste in the bottom with a healthy handful or two of earthworms.  They'll survive pretty easily and help to regulate both the moisture and bacterial population in your soils.
• I've found that using aged compost is perfectly fine for indoor gardening soil uses, and is much cheaper than buying alternative options.

At the beginning of this article, I talked a bit about VOC-absorbing plants. However, don't feel limited to just growing these plants in your indoor gardening spaces. There are plenty of choices that will actually do better indoors in a strictly regulated environment than outdoors in some chaotic temperate zones. I've listed briefly some suggestions for cultivating an abundant harvest indoors.

Many tropical plants are easy to take care of in containers and are self-fertile so they can produce fruit or berries indoors. It's usually a good idea to put them outside on a patio or deck in the summer to boost your harvest, but many of them can survive the whole year inside your house. Some possibilities include:

• DWARF BANANAS

These varieties grow fast, up to a maximum of 6-7 feet. They have nice foliage that can be used to wrap and flavor foods and can even produce 1 or 2 bunches of bananas a year if they get good sun.

• CITRUS

Dwarf lemons, kumquats, and limes are easy to grow indoors and can produce fruit year-round. Keeping soils moist but not wet will make sure their roots don't rot, but aside from that, these plants are perfectly happy in containers.

• FIG

Fig trees are easy to grow inside because they prefer slightly drier soils. Try varieties that are suited for container culture like "petite Negri." They'll be easier to prune and won't become as root bound as other varieties.

Growing mushrooms indoors is actually an ideal choice because most mushroom varieties prefer little to no direct sun. Some varieties are very easy to cultivate indoors; instead of growing in pots, they grow on a substrate, which is a fancy word to describe a block of material the mushroom grows on. Different mushrooms prefer different substrates, and as they colonize and eat through the food in the substrate, they eventually produce pin-sized heads that swell into large edible bodies.

An easy place to start is by purchasing an indoor mushroom kit (available from Mushroom Mountain and Field And Forest), which already comes with the substrate inoculated with the mushroom of choice. Only a few weeks after receiving your kit in the mail, you can harvest 2-4 pounds of shiitake, oyster, or crimini/portabella mushrooms. After your kit is "spent", you can put it in your compost or garden bed and easily add to the fertility of your garden.

A 1020 seed tray can produce about 1/2 lb of sprouts in a week, more than enough to sprinkle in sandwiches and stews, or just to snack on raw. When you are done with your tray, you can dump the roots into your compost or garden, and immediately start again with a thin layer of soil. Rotating in sprout trays each week can easily produce 20 to 25 lbs of sprouts a year.

Many culinary herbs (rosemary, marjoram, basil, oregano, lavender, thyme) have Mediterranean origins, where the climate is naturally drier. This makes growing many culinary herbs indoors a snap. You can sprinkle these seeds on the surface of an herb pot to get started. Just make sure to keep basil, parsley, or coriander separate from your other herbs since they grow much faster (being annuals).

To learn more about medicinal herbs, click HERE.

If this is your first foray into gardening and you'd like to start simply with house plants, here's a lovely little primer for ya!

And here's a little video showing how to transplant indoor plants. Ideally, the pot one should use would be bigger than the one I have below. This was for transportation purposes only and we've since then moved this bromeliad to a larger home.