How to build an indoor vegetable garden?

Aerogarden
Allyssa asked:


My grandfather used to love to work in the garden, but because of mobility reasons he cant do that anymore. I would like to build him an indoor vegetable garden. I would love to get him one of those Aerogarden herb gardens but they are too pricey for me : ( I think something simple with 2-3 plants that doesn’t take up a lot of room would be perfect. He loves tomatoes. His house is old and the windows are hard to open so a windowsill garden would not work for him. What kind of lighting (flourescent or something? because he doesn’t have any windows that get good lighting from outside), soil, vegetables would I need or could he grow? Any ideas or input would be greatly appreciated.

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2 Responses to “How to build an indoor vegetable garden?”

  1. The simplest indoor garden for limited mobility is an elevated planter box. To start I would make it 4 feet wide, two feet deep and 8″ high. Then put it up on legs or sawhorses so that he doesn’t have to bend to tend the garden. If constructed of a rot-resistant wood it will last for many years.

    Eight inches deep will be plenty for small vegetables. Fill it with a mix of peat moss, vermiculite, a little perlite, and good compost. Eight inches of growing mix will support lettuce and other leaf crops, short core carrots, standard radish and beets, green onions, small herbs, small flowers, and other shallow-rooted crops.

    He could also grow dwarf tomatoes this way–one of my favorite dwarfs is the Red Robin. It gets only 6-8″ tall.

    For light, fluorescent shop lights are easy, inexpensive, and effective. For a 4′ wide 2′ deep area I would use 4′ shop lamps with a total of at least 8 40 watt tubes. Suspend them on chains with S hooks so they can be adjusted to get as close to the plants as possible without touching the leaves. Light follows the inverse square law of radiation, so distance means a lot for usable light for the plants.

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