Grow a Prolific Indoor Kitchen Garden

Summer’s just about here, if you life in the western hemisphere! Time to enjoy some
homegrown produce. If you only have indoor growing space, no worries! You can grow just
about any veggie indoors when you keep a few indoor growing tips in mind. And the good news
is you can harvest fresh veggies indoors all year long all over the globe.
In her book, Indoor Kitchen Gardening: Turn Your Home Into a Year-Round Vegetable Garden,
Elizabeth Millard shares her many brilliant secrets for growing a wide variety of tasty vegetables
in your indoor garden.
Millard began growing produce indoors during frigid Minnesota winters. She started with some
small stuff, including microgreens, pea shoots and radishes, and graduated from there to
growing just about anything indoors, including mushrooms and even beets.
When she began growing veggies indoors, Millard thought that only experts could do so, and
she was convinced that the process required a great deal of costly equipment. “It just takes the
right mix of light, water, airflow and attention to grow plenty of veggies indoors,” she says. “It’s
a lot like growing healthy houseplants.”
Millard’s reveals how to grow a wide variety of veggies indoors, including advice for how to deal
with pests and diseases. Here are some of Millard’s tips for harvesting tasty produce from your
indoor vegetable garden.
What you need to grow indoor veggies
Light is critical to growing healthy vegetable plants. Several ingredients go into successfully
growing an indoor veggie garden. They are light, including natural and artificial, sufficient
airflow, which is an often missed ingredient, sufficient room to grow, proper watering and
drainage and humidity control.
Lighting tips for indoor vegetable growing
Millard points out that you don’t need special ultra-expensive lighting to grow an indoor veggie
garden. All you need is full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs. These come in fixtures and can also be
found in bulbs that can be put in standard lamps.
Proper lighting is important to produce healthy, full, robust vegetable plans that produce tasty
veggies. It’s also important for keeping pests at bay. Spindly, weak veggie plants don’t produce
anything but a pest infestation.
Veggie crops suited to growing indoors

Crops ideally suited to indoor growing are listed in Millard’s book. She mentions good “starter”
crops, including herbs such as rosemary, mint, parsley, lemongrass, thyme, basil, chervil,
oregano and sage. Other good choices for your initial attempts at indoor growing include leaf
crops like arugula, spinach and lettuce, and potatoes, tomatoes, hot peppers, pea shoots,
sunflower shoots and sprouted grains.
There’s even a section on indoor seeding, so that you can truly take on Mother Nature’s tasks in
your indoor vegetable garden.
Have you tried growing veggies indoors? If so, what types of vegetables have you grown
indoors and what were your results like? We’d love to now!