I’ve learned the hard way that your indoor garden room needs a fan.

I’ve gardened indoors for some time and thought I knew what I was doing, but I found out that I definitely missed something in my planning when relocating my garden room.

My old garden room, which is now the dining area again, has a ceiling fan that I left running on low all the time. It intuitively seemed like a good idea. I had no idea how important it was.

My new garden room is a portion of my bedroom. I realized that our lights were on the same hours that I am awake and that I had a mostly unused 6’ x 10’ space at one end of the bedroom. I lined the room with mylar, making panels to screen it from the bed, and moved all the containers into the room.

The bedroom has a register that blows constantly when we have the windows closed. We keep a good air filter in the return air in order to keep the air in our condo relatively clean and change it every three months. This is a lot of why we leave it on, and I thought it would be adequate for the garden room.

At first, everything was fine, I planted the containers and everything started growing. After about a month, however, the issues were becoming apparent.

I had redone my containers with new soil, soil that really had more wood in it than I should have used. To that soil I added some modern organic fertilizer that contains a number of varieties of fungal and bacterial species.

The presence of these fungi was all well and good except that they were taking over. Even though my garden room is in dry New Mexico, and the indoor humidity in the garden room remains in the forties at that time of year, the lack of a breeze allowed the humidity right above the soil to become quite high.

This enabled the explosive growth of various species and even the production of some fruiting bodies, often called mushrooms. You are trying to grow vegetables. The way to keep the fungi in the soil is to keep the humidity in the room below 60% and to have a fan or two.

Not only was the moisture from the watered pots not being carried away from the soil, but similarly the heat was not being removed. I water my largest container using ice, and it remains wet, but it has powerful LED lighting. Even though these make much less heat than other forms of lighting, it was too much for one of my favorite crops, snow peas.

I researched on the internet and eventually figured out that both of these issues had been prevented before by the ceiling fan. I had a fan in the closet which I placed on some pots, but have decided to get a pedestal fan for my long-term solution. I was not the first person to notice this, many mention it on the internet and I do not know who to credit.

Snow peas sprout and grow very quickly and I decided to pull these and start over even though they are producing new foliage. Grown indoors, they bear for months, and so I have decided it is worth it not to have damaged plants. I’m glad I did, they look like this now, and I eat some almost daily.

The soil surfaces that were covered with mold now appear normal with just the addition of the oscillating fan.