Gardening the Great Indoors
Hydroponic growing delivers on the dream of fresh, local produce year-round.
Bringing the Light Inside
Powering an Indoor Garden with Grow Lights
In the ancient world, people viewed eclipses with awe and wonder. Today, the mathematical predictability of solar eclipses makes them seem routine by comparison. But science also allows us to control sunlight, in a sense—to bring life, even in the dead of winter.
While it isn’t as dramatic as an eclipse, an indoor garden can provide a bit of romance and unpredictability. For the average person, growing edible plants indoors doesn’t have to be a major undertaking. With a lighting setup and some space, you can easily start seeds for crops, grow edible flowers and even grow many different kinds of microgreens.
Meredith Preve works full-time as a retail and marketing manager for Lavocat’s Family Greenhouse and Nursery in East Amherst, but she also grows plants and starts seeds indoors using her working knowledge and a full-spectrum lighting setup.
“It’s really, really fun to see little leaves emerge on your seedlings,” she says. “It’s very uplifting in the middle of March when everything is grey and icy slush.”
Seed starting is probably the most basic form of indoor gardening. It’s mostly used to give a head start to crops that require a long growing season, like tomatoes and peppers, so they can be harvested before cold temperatures return in the fall.
Essentially, the only lighting you need for seed starting is an old lamp and a full-spectrum bulb. “I used to do freelance photography, so I had a bunch of full-spectrum bulbs that I put in some clamp lamps,” Preve says. “I still grow a lot of my houseplants that way, and that light is strong enough for many plants.”
Typically, indoor growing light fixtures can provide better light coverage. Unless you’re looking to go the commercial route, the types of bulbs to consider are fluorescent or LED.
Fluorescent lights produce a broad spectrum that's good for growing. You could buy old-school fluorescent tube lights, but it’s probably easier and more useful to go with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs).
LED lights are the top-tier choice for amateur indoor gardeners. They’re more expensive than fluorescents, but they’re highly efficient, and they emit a spectrum of light that’s ideal for plant growth. In fact, some LEDs can be tuned to generate violet-blue light that encourages photosynthesis, or red light that promotes flowering.
Regardless of which you choose, ensure it provides the appropriate spectrum of light. Your lights should be able to illuminate your entire garden. It’s also important to position your grow lights the optimal distance from your plants or seed beds.
At Rooted Locally, a company that grows edible flowers and microgreens, owner Justin Brocato uses a lighting setup that’s somewhat more involved. While microgreens can be grown with a simple full-spectrum fluorescent light, Rooted Locally uses professional-grade LED lighting. The edible flowers at Rooted Locally are exposed to different colors of light depending on the point in their growth cycle.
“If you’re growing flowers indoors, you’re going to need to use grow lights,” he says. “Modern LED lights are pretty efficient, though. Our microgreen lights are 18-watt bulbs and the bulbs we use for our flowers are 60 watts.”
If you’ve grown flowers outdoors in the past, it isn’t a big leap to growing them indoors. In fact, Brocato says, it can be much easier to grow healthy, beautiful flowers inside. Rooted Locally grows about a dozen different edible flowers, including nasturtiums, borage, dianthus, and bachelor’s buttons.
“The biggest difference is that the pest pressure is down,” he says. “Bugs aren’t landing on your plants and nothing foreign is falling on them. You still have to water them regularly. If they’re really growing, they’ll surprise you and go through a fair amount of water.”
While seedlings and edible flowers can be fairly forgiving, microgreens are comparatively more finicky. These small versions of herbs, greens and vegetables are full of flavor and nutrients. Popular microgreens like radish, speckled peas, mustard greens and broccoli have become favored in professional kitchens, but many people also grow them at home as a way to add pops of flavor to savory dishes.
Microgreens are grown in shallow trays, and they can be ready to harvest in as few as seven days after planting. Because microgreens are harvested so quickly, they don’t develop much of a root system. So to optimize yield, it’s more practical to plant seeds very close together in their trays.
“If you’re growing microgreens, you’re using a high seed density, so you’d probably want to buy large seed packages from an online company,” Brocato advises. “You could buy seed packets from the store, but that would be more expensive if you’re growing microgreens regularly for yourself.”
As soon as the seeds start to germinate, they should be placed under grow lights and watered once per day. Once tiny seedlings emerge and sprout leaves, they can be harvested. Experts recommend using a sharp knife to make clean cuts, not scissors. Although microgreens are slightly more demanding, they do provide quicker gratification with their relatively fast turnaround. They can be harvested in as little as a week, but plants will remain in a microgreen state for about two weeks.
Rooted Locally tells its retail customers that they can leave their tray of microgreens on a kitchen counter for about 10 days and cut them fresh whenever they are cooking. After a total of about two weeks, microgreens will start to lose their punchy flavor as they transition into mature plants.
Getting consistent results from an indoor garden will require a bit of trial and error with everything from the types of lights you buy, to their positioning, to the amount of watering. The learning curve for indoor gardening isn’t steep and perhaps this year’s eclipse can inspire you to invest in a setup.
“The main thing is just to try it!” Preve says. “Sometimes people want to grow a really specific thing that happens to be a really hard seed to start. Instead, people should start with tomatoes and peppers because they’re usually easy seeds with a high germination rate. That way, you can get some wins in your pocket before you try to grow something harder.”
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