Indoor Harvest
Grow garden-fresh ingredients year-round.
Go ahead and keep on gardening even after cool autumn weather officially arrives. Many edibles, such as tomatoes and strawberries, can be grown indoors all winter long. Follow these simple steps for creating a robust indoor garden.
LIGHT IS ESSENTIAL
“If you are going to invest time, effort and money into indoor growing, quality supplemental lighting should be your No. 1 priority,” says Leslie Halleck, the author of Gardening Under Lights: The Complete Guide for Indoor Growers. “Tomatoes and peppers need the equivalent of full sun conditions indoors, for a long enough duration, to provide meaningful harvests.”
Leslie uses ceramic metal halide high-intensity discharge 315-watt grow lamps to fruit her tomato and pepper plants indoors. She says you can also use a large T5 fixture (one that holds eight lamps) with highoutput T5 fluorescent lamps. For some dwarf cherry tomato varieties, you can get away with smaller LED fixtures and a bright window.
PAMPER PLANTS WITH A GROW TENT
Serious indoor growers may want to consider a grow tent. “Grow tents create a microenvironment where you can manage light, temperature, humidity and photoperiod,” the number of hours of light that a plant needs in a day, Leslie says. Some grow tents can accommodate tomatoes and peppers, as well as cucumbers, beans and squash.
POLLINATE BY HAND
Flowers of indoor fruiting plants need to be pollinated to develop. Wind-pollinated plants like tomatoes can be given a gentle shake from time to time to spread their pollen to other blooms. For crops like strawberries that are normally insect-pollinated, use a paintbrush to move pollen from the male stamens to the female pistils.