This page is mostly cautionary. It is about potential issues you may have with having too high of a level of humidity in your home. If you are confident that you already understand about mold and other issues, you may skip to the next page.

Water can be a major issue in your home. You do not want your indoor humidity to be above 60% or else molds are very likely to grow.

If your house has a central heating and air conditioning system, molds could even grow in your ductwork. These can create numerous respiratory issues and cause other reactions. It’s best to keep your indoor humidity in the 30% to 50% range.

That is one reason I have documented an in-soil container-based approach to indoor gardening. This is not the only workable approach to growing produce indoors. The other approaches use recirculating water to carry the nutrients to the plants. They are known as hydroponics and aquaponics.

In hydroponics, nutrients are added to recirculating water in order to feed the plants; while in aquaponics, fish live in the recirculating water, the fish are fed, and their waste provides food for the plants.

While I am very attracted to aquaponics, it involves aerating the water. This is usually done by showering the water down into the fish tank at the end of the re-circulation. The fish need the water to be well aerated in order to breathe. This process not only aerates the water, it also increases the humidity in the air. For this reason, I consider aquaponics impractical for most home users. It simply adds too much moisture to the air.

Some hydroponic designs on the other hand, keep the moisture well enough contained that they could be used inside the home without worry. There are a number of low cost home built designs.

Hydroponics is more complicated than container gardening has to be for the new gardener. This is due to the fact that concentrated nutrients are used, and these must be used carefully to avoid over or under feeding. While their are some milder organic liquids available that might work for your plants, these tend to smell very badly and so you probably do not want them in your home.

I do not wish to overwhelm people or turn them off by making things appear more difficult than they need to be. Easy to use organic fertilizer products that will not burn your plants and will not require you to have much knowledge are available.

Growing your own salads and other vegetables under lights is not really very difficult. Many have done this before you. It is however, easy to do it wrong. A lot of people had to learn a few core lessons the hard way before they succeeded. I hope to get you past most of these issues in these pages.

Even using soil in containers, you might increase the humidity in your home enough to create mold. It might easily vary a lot with the seasons.

Devices that display both the temperature and the humidity are common and inexpensive and you should get one so that you are not just guessing.

If your indoor humidity is regularly above 50%, your garden room will need a dehumidifier. It should probably also have a door that closes.  Dehumidifiers come in a lot of sizes and, for our purposes anyway, yours will only have to be big enough for your garden room. This will reduce your power consumption by not controlling a larger area. 

I, myself, use a heavy-duty dehumidifier for a somewhat larger space than the garden room contains. I live in New Mexico, and usually, the outdoor humidity is quite low. I only use the dehumidifier in the winter, when I have the windows entirely closed, and am not using the air conditioner.

I made an amazing discovery. I didn’t have to run my heater at all during the winter, so long as I was using the dehumidifier. It made sufficient heat for my entire condo. I should say here that I’m on the second floor, and though I live at high altitude, I am in New Mexico. It’s not that cold. That being said, it was interesting that it was cheaper to operate than my central heat.

I used a fan to blow the heated air from the garden room toward the return air, and left the fan only on in the central unit, to move the heat all over the condo. It worked amazingly well, and I kept the humidity down to 50%, and the condo in the seventies fahrenheit, with the heat totally off, all winter long. The few times it got extremely cold, I had to set the humidity to 45%. I was pretty amazed. I hadn’t expected that, and only discovered it, because I was keeping careful track of those things for a time.