This page provides an overview of why you might choose to make a garden room in your home. If you are already gardening indoors, or otherwise know you want an indoor garden you can skip to the next page.
If you are not already gardening indoors, I recommend that you browse through all the pages in this series before you start creating your own indoor garden. It’s a fairly big deal and it is a good idea to be informed about what you are getting into before you try. By the time you have reached the sections on preparing the garden room, I hope to have you fully aware of what is required to maintain it.
Gardening indoors means gardening in containers, and there are advantages and disadvantages to various container designs. I hope to have you well enough informed about these to make good decisions for your space and your budget.
Your vegetable plants are alive, of course, and require nutrients, water, and light. Indoors in containers, you are entirely responsible for all of these things. This gives you a fine level of control over the conditions that your plants are in. You don’t have the sun or the rain or the benefits of as many organisms, but you also don’t have the problems that come with being exposed to the elements or the detriments of as many organisms.
Growing vegetables indoors is generally a lot less work and the results more predictable than growing outside.
Why Grow Food At Home
There are several clear benefits to growing food at home. Unless you keep at it for quite some time, you are unlikely to save very much money growing food. This is because the cost of produce is pretty low, and there are some expenses that you have to fulfill. The lights last a very long time and the containers are reusable, so eventually you can break even and get ahead if you stick with it. I eat things from mine every day, but it took some time for me to get to that point.
The space that I am currently using is a large bedroom in my condominium. The lights are on for 16 hours during the day and then off for 8 hours at night, so I simply set the timers for when I am sleeping.
The things I have done to set up a growing area are documented on these pages. Now onto the various other reasons for growing your own produce indoors.
Disease
Disease contamination has been causing frequent recalls of fresh produce. Some of the diseases are very serious. For example, people have suffered kidney failure over no worse a failing than eating a salad made from romaine lettuce. Admittedly, that e.coli reaction is more severe than that people have to the far more common listeria food poisoning.
As you may know, these diseases are usually the result of fecal contamination. Most typically from birds, pigs or other humans. I mention that because species matters. Good compost from an open outdoor pile, for example, is largely the waste of the organisms that live in your compost pile. Many the gardener, including myself, back in my outdoor days, got that stuff all over us. The old farmers would have called that “clean dirt”.
Birds are diverse and fly. They leave droppings of whatever, wherever. The most common thing to get from it is some variety of salmonella bacteria. There are a number of other, and sometimes more severe, things that you could catch.
Humans and pigs share quite a few diseases. Your bigger risk there is more typically humans not washing their hands. It’s somewhat possible some unscrupulous farmer is letting hog manure that has not been adequately composted near the crops, but it’s almost a sure thing that people were handling your produce.
While you, of course, had no control over that lettuce you bought at the grocery store, if you grow it indoors, you will know exactly where it came from, and hopefully you wash your hands. Unless they are your pets, there will not be any birds. Also, you will not be storing the food or shipping it in plastic or other packaging that might, in some cases, facilitate the development of various offending organisms.
Food Quality
There are other aspects to food quality, beyond whether or not what you eat makes you ill, or how much you have to pay for clean produce.
Growing your own vegetables enables you to consume nicer varieties of produce, that don’t sacrifice flavor for characteristics that are desirable to commercial growers, such as shelf life. You won’t have to worry about the shelf life of the food you eat from the kitchen garden because you will harvest it just before preparing it to eat.
Sometimes you grow different varieties than you can get in the stores. For example, cutting celery is a variety the commercial growers do not usually produce because they would rather sell you the weight of the stalk celery. The cutting celery has a more concentrated celery flavor, especially in the foliage, and you use less of it. This is great in your kitchen garden, but not for someone selling celery by the pound.
Fruits, like tomatoes, can be harvested when they are fully ripe and taste their best. There is no better time to eat a tomato than the day the plant lets it go. This is simply impractical for grocers and tomato farmers. Those tomatoes have likely been harvested at a farm, put into crates, shipped on trucks, stored in a warehouse or more than one warehouse, and shipped to your store, where they were displayed. Even in your backyard, mockingbird and others might be waiting for your tomatoes to ripen. just like you are.
As you will discover, if you don’t already know, food tastes a lot better right out of the garden. Freshness, and the ability to harvest when ready, make a huge difference to your food quality. I’m not talking about safety here, I’m talking about enjoyment.
Cost
There are costs associated with indoor gardening. If you carefully accounted for them all, and then subtracted the grocery store value of the produce that you grew, you would find that it takes some time before negative numbers would show you that you were saving money after the upfront costs.
Some items save more money than others. For example, the cutting celery (also known as leaf celery) that I referred to earlier. Grocery stores don’t usually have this variety, but it was long favored by people with kitchen gardens. I often cook with onions and celery. The cutting celery can have ribs cut off repeatedly for use, and it simply keeps growing more. The ribs on cutting celery are arranged loosely, as opposed to packed together like the stalk celery in the grocery stores.
This enables the celery ribs to be cut individually. The plant continues to grow more, so you do not have to grow a whole celery plant each time. Crops like these are referred to as cut-and-come-again varieties.
There are a lot of products that you could use in order to grow more vegetables per area of floor space inside your garden room. Basically, they arrange the plants vertically and provide them with more lighting from the side, or have lighting on multiple levels. So far I have included a lot of detail about one such product, the Garden Tower Project 2. You definitely can spend more upfront, and grow more vegetables more quickly, without construction, using fancy containers.
The floods and droughts of the climate crisis create additional weather-based food price volatility for produce.
Obviously, none of this applies to food you yourself have grown inside your home. The ongoing costs after setup are not very high, and even the initial setup need not be very expensive.
You could do this for a fraction of the cost using pots and hanging baskets, but the salad tower, with additions, gets 72 plants and their lighting into a fraction of the space. I have other pots with it on the floor in the garden room for larger or perennial plants. The device is basically cylindrical but has three feet that define the ‘sides’ and a drawer on one side that must be emptied. I do this each time I water. I’ll have much more on this later.
Weather
Winter cold and scorching heat are never an occurrence in my garden space. The sun is never too intense, hail stones do not fall, and heavy rain won’t wash out my seeds. This is easier and less energy-intensive for me than it would be for many others because I live in the mountains and rarely need to run an air conditioner to keep the indoor temperature inside my desired growing range of 70 – 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, due largely to how sunny it is here and the fact that I am on the top floor. I have discovered that the dehumidifier I use for my garden room heats my entire condo in the winter, when the windows are closed, and I leave the heater off. Amazingly, I’m using less electricity than I did using the furnace and reclaiming water. I’m still surprised. I’ll have more on this later. I’m lucky in my situtation, and your costs may well be higher. On the other hand, you might well be heating and cooling the space anyway.
Light
The natural sunlight where you live may not be suitable for growing vegetables. Here where I live the sun is extremely intense, and many plants just can’t take it. You have to actually put up some screening shade to grow quite a few things. Others live in places so cloudy or near the poles that there is inadequate outdoor light. Gardening indoors under lights enables you to tailor your light levels and your light colors for the plants that you are growing.
You can’t control either the day length or the light color outside, and both of these factors can cause your salad greens to bolt, which you generally don’t want. ‘Bolt’ here is gardening jargon for a plant going to flower. Many plants do this very quickly once they start, hence the verb ‘bolt’. The details about this appear in the lighting section.
The Environment
The produce in your grocery store was likely harvested, kept refrigerated, and shipped to your area, from somewhere else. In some cases, it may have been exposed to specific gases or had other things done so that fruits especially could be picked unripe but appear fully ripened in the store. There is the energy consumed all along the way. Your efficient lighting is very affordable to run, and electrical power is increasingly produced by renewable energy sources such as wind or solar. The amount of energy required for produce to arrive in your kitchen is obviously going to vary widely. It’s hard to beat the food-to-table distance of growing food in your spare room, however, you will be running lighting 16 hours a day, so it is not without some small costs.
Enjoying the Experience
People have always enjoyed the benefits of gardening. Not only do you get fresh, clean food, but there are also less tangible benefits from being around the lovely plants, as well as the sense of accomplishment you gain from successfully doing it.
I live in a condominium in the middle of town. If I had a house, not only would I pay a lot more, I would have an exterior to maintain, and a yard. Living in a condo and having a garden room in many ways provides me with the best of both worlds. I never have to deal with the yard, paint the exterior, shovel snow, etc. because I pay a condo association fee for all that. Yet, I have a little private oddly natural feeling space, even if it does have shiny silvery-looking walls. There’s just something about being surrounded by plants.
People who come into my home often stand there, smiling, looking at them. Little children are drawn to them. Healthy vegetables are just pretty. Almost all of us humans had many generations of farming ancestors. I can’t claim to know to the exact causality, but it’s easy to observe that people are a little more happy and relaxed being around the healthy, nice-looking food plants. Our ancestors have been at this for a long time and I believe that we all have farming in our blood.