We’re gardeners. We don’t need a patch of earth to grow our own food. No siree. We can grow our food on our windowsill. In a plastic salad box. In a mason jar. Heck, we can even grow food FROM food. Yep. Gardeners can do all of that!
Sprouting
I do my fair share of sprouting in the winter months to ensure that I’m full of freshly snipped healthy greens year round. You can grow a crunchy salad mix of peas, beans, and lentils in a mason jar…
…use a recycled plastic salad box to grow sunflower micro greens…
…or sprout teeny radish, broccoli, alfalfa, fenugreek and more as seedlings right on your kitchen table.
Herbs & More
Herbs are probably the easiest to grow indoors. Those that we eat for leaves need the least light and indoor light is just never the same as the outdoor sun. Plus, herbs pack a punch so you can snip a little for a lot of flavor.
Try growing them in a hydroponic window farm! This very cool system uses plastic bottles and drip lines to grow plants without soil right in your window. This would be the perfect system for a foodie or chef, but I think it looks pretty cool as well.
photo courtesy of windowfarms.com
photo courtesy of windowfarms.com
Salad lovers rejoice – you can grow greens indoors all year with this handy dandy DIY salad shelf!
Are you are a little more crafty? Then you could make a Woodland Herb Garden for your kitchen wall. This project comes to us from the book Mason Jar Crafts.
If you want some great advice on bringing in your herbs to overwinter, Lynne from Sensible Gardening and Living shares her tips.
Melissa, the Empress of Dirt, shows you how to grow peas indoors. Peas! Who would have thought? I can almost taste that pea, it looks so fresh!
Growing food from um, food.
Shelley at Sow and Dipity has regrown some common (celery, avocado) and uncommon (lemongrass, taro root) groceries to greens.
The Gardening Cook shows us that growing ginger is a fun DIY gardening project for the kids and also gives great detail on edibles that are cut and come again.
You can even use the parts that you cut to grow a new plant as you can see in How to Propagate Basil from Cuttings.
Did you know you can regrow a pineapple from the top? It will take you a looooooong time and it may be tiny, but it CAN be done. For me, this project is best left for a more patient gardener. But it certainly makes a nice houseplant in the meantime.
Thanks to all of the gardeners out there who are creative enough to find new ways to make food grow indoors, and for all the rest you do. Who else grows indoor edibles in a unique way? Please share!
A city girl who learned to garden and it changed everything. Author, artist, Master Gardener. Better living through plants.
Awesome post! I know you posted this last winter, but as it’s already snowed almost 2 feet where I live and gotten extremely cold, I’m turning to indoor gardening ideas here already.
Growing over the cold season is important for a lot of reasons for me, and not just because I want tasty food that’s good for me and fun to grow. I also keep chickens, ducks and a rabbit, and while they do eat a formulated and completely nutritionally balanced feed, I still like to offer them fresh things whenever I can- it’s good for them but mostly during the cold, blowy, and snowy months here in Minnesota, these fresh foods are a morale booster.
You can make a lot of neat things that will help you grow indoors, but there are lots of systems you can purchase outright, set up and be done with it too. Hydroponics on a small scale has really taken off and gotten popular. Makes it easy!
Thank you again for this awesome and timely (for me!) post!
-Anna