Lessons Learned in My Gardening for Food Security Indoor Garden Project - Part 11

This year we invested in some grow lights to turn our sun room into a winter grow room.
I'm very happy with the results and it's really made a difference for us this year, being we have had the longest stretch of extreme cold weather in 80 years! With that we weren't getting outside much and didn't even want to start the car to drive to town for groceries.

This grow space helped fight off the S.A.D. syndrome and gave us our fresh greens and herbs. We're planning to expand into other foods next year or perhaps this year for getting a jump start on some of our container out door garden plants.

Now for some of the lessons I learned from this first attempt at indoor gardening.

1. Make real good use of that grow space under the lights for it never seems like enough! Our LED light we got covered a 4' x 4' area and we used mostly rectangular pots so they would fit together with no wasted space plus we tried to use productive plants. I had bought in some plants that were in round containers and they took far more space (although I did stack some smaller ones on top of the larger ones) Some plants that didn't need as much light like our chives and arugula were put at the edges stretching that grow area out.

2. Be very vigilant! Watch for any pests or signs of stress and address them immediately before they develop into bigger problems. I learned that lesson the hard way when I had bought in some coleus plants that were infested with mealy bugs. They spread on to my fig tree which I didn't attend to for it was fruiting. I didn't want to spray it with anything and they became real bad. Because I didn't want to spread the mealy bugs to other plants I took the fig tree outside and being it had become so huge, I just took a bunch of cuttings from it instead of moving it back indoors for the winter. I had aphid problems but I rinsed them off early on when our plants were in smaller pots and easier to manage (that's the one thing about indoor gardening, you can't just take the hose and hose off any bugs. You have to take the plants to the shower or under the tap)

3. Spiders are my friends! I had put out some yellow sticky cards to capture any flying insects but the spider webs did a much better job at catching the bugs. I had a few small spiders making webs near the base of some of my herbs which caught a lot of aphids before they moved up into the tender new growth. When ever I saw a spider in the house I'd catch it and put it on my plants. Saved a few plants from aphid infestation!

4. Chick weed is my friend! Often in the outdoor garden I'd consider this a weed in spots but when I had dug out some of my Malabar spinach plants to bring indoors, I also bought in some chick weed with it. It made a lovely natural mulch on those pots of spinach plus they were excellent added to the salads. I will intentionally bring in some chickweed to add to my pots next year. It's easy to do for they will grow from any little part of the plant plus they are very shallow rooted so easy to dig out and place in the pots along with other plants to cover any empty ground.

5. Mulching helps reducing the amount of watering needed and helps prevent the soil from compacting with less frequent watering. Besides the natural chick weed mulch I had bought in some sphagnum moss to use as mulch on the bigger plants.

6. I learned that having heat around the roots really makes a difference when taking cuttings or starting seedlings. We were just about ready to give up on the cuttings we took from our Cannabis plants when I put them in a warmer room under a small grow light. Low and behold they took hold and grew into healthy plants! Same was true for seedlings I started. The ones at the edge of the heat mat closer to the window never grew as well as the ones that were warmer away from the cool windows.

7. I wouldn't purchase the same grow light with the pink and blue led lights again. Now I have found out there are the white LED grow lights I think I would stick with them. That would keep the cost of electricity down and make it so I can tell what's going on with my plants better. It's hard to tell if they are a healthy green color or if the soil is looking dry for everything had such a pink tinge to it. It did make for a lovely picture outside with the pink glow on the snow!

8. I'm going to plan my outdoor garden to include some late seedlings. I'll start them there to have ready to bring indoors next year. That way I can utilize the natural light and rain outdoors to get a head start and have a continual growth of fresh greens all year long!

See the whole series of the Gardening for Food Security Indoor Gardening Project:

Part 1 - https://steemit.com/gardening/@porters/gardening-for-food-security-indoor-gardening-new-project-beginning

Part 2 - https://steemit.com/gardening/@porters/gardening-for-food-security-indoor-gardening-new-project-beginning-part-2

Part 3 - https://steemit.com/ecotrain/@porters/gardening-for-food-security-indoor-gardening-project-part-3-the-experiment-worked

Part 4 - https://steemit.com/ecotrain/@porters/video-tour-gardening-for-food-security-indoor-gardening-project-part-4

Part 5 - https://steemit.com/ecotrain/@porters/why-i-brought-my-gardening-indoors-indoor-gardening-project-part-5

Part 6 - https://steemit.com/dsnapx/@porters/gye4b7sv

Part 7 - https://steemit.com/ecotrain/@porters/gardening-for-food-security-indoor-garden-project-part-7-a-walk-thru-and-making-cuttings

Part 8 - https://steemit.com/dtube/@porters/k4yhd5b7

Part 9 - https://steemit.com/dtube/@porters/5x0x3oz7

Part 10 - https://steemit.com/dtube/@porters/g8xh0kq2

Thanks for stopping by!

If you enjoyed this post,
Please don’t hesitate to follow me here on Steemit - @porters