Growing vegetables indoors over winter isn’t hard at all. The key to being successful is providing enough light, using a proper growth medium, and keeping the soil moist without over watering. Sounds exactly like gardening outside right?
Lighting
Providing enough sunlight can be hard depending on what types of plants you’re growing and where you live. One way to gain that vital sunlight is being using grow beds in southern facing windows. Depending on where you live, you may still have to supplement the natural light with growth lights.
Soil Type
We use a mixture of compost and shredded newspapers for our beds. The newspaper helps keep the soil wet and helps with run off. There are commercial soil brands that specialize in indoor winter gardening but they are really expensive. Face it, one of the reasons we choose to grow our own food is to reduce our food costs in the first place, right?
Proper Moisture
Winter air is dry and gets even drier when we run a heater. This is honestly the hardest part of growing a winter indoor garden I think. The easiest way we’ve found to keep the plants properly hydrated is to mist them down daily. We’ve also used a soil humidity detector to track the moisture levels.
Our Grow Bed Set Up
For our windows, we built a shelving unit that fits in front of the window. Each shelf has 3 feet between it and the next shelf. Most indoor plants we grow don’t grow taller than 2′ so this works fine. Each shelf we plant according to needs. Plants that require more light are grouped together on higher shelves. This way my grow lights are hitting the plants that actually need them without burning plants that need less light.
To combat leaking from irrigation, we built our shelves on an incline. As the water drains off the top shelf, it gets redirected to the shelf below. We then cut a foam swimming noodle in half as a gutter for the bottom shelf. The noodle gutter dumps the excess liquid into a bucket so we can use it else where.
We also use worms in our grow beds to help keep the growth medium loose and fertile. Then when spring comes, we use those nice fat worms for fish bait!
Logging DIY Ideas 
Ooh! What kinds of veggies are you growing indoors? I have some lettuce that does well in part shade and a couple pepper plants that are setting out baby peppers!
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Right now for vegetables we have a couple types of lettuce, grape tomato, potatoes, pepper, carrots, radish, and turnips growing. We’ll be restarting a new batch of potatoes in the next week or two. We also have a batch of misc. micro greens and a mung bean sprouts growing.
I’ve read that dwarf lemon trees do well, but I haven’t talked to someone who’s tried it yet.
Isn’t it great to harvest fresh vegetables when it’s freezing outside?
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