Indoor & Container Gardening

You'll encounter a lot of gardeners who believe "directly in the ground" is the only way to grow and that containers are only for seed starting.  However, I am not one of those gardeners!  I began gardening while living in a flat without ANY outdoor space available to me, not even a balcony or external windowsill large enough for a pot.  Luckily I did have very deep internal windowsills, and I still managed tomatoes I had to move to the floor because in the window they were already caressing the ceiling.  If you too have very limited space, regardless of whether its indoors or out, you don't have to deny yourself a garden.

MY POSTS ON INDOOR AND CONTAINER GARDENING

Links to come.


MY TIPS FOR INDOOR AND CONTAINER GARDENING

Firstly, take every bit of advice everyone tells you with a pinch of salt!  Indoor gardening IS completely different from outdoor gardening because you're dealing with a lot of different situations.  In my experience there are a lot of pros to indoor gardening:

• Virtually no pests unless you are moving the plants from outside to inside
• You have much greater control over temperature
• Less daylight in winter doesn't affect your watering schedule
• You can in fact give them more daylight hours than outside by using artificial lights
• I've not seen indoors have a negative effect on yield providing you self-pollinate
• You can actually grow off-season if you have the correct equipment, giving you a all-year-round supply of food/flowers
• Some varieties of fruit/veg/flowers grow better in pots due to their size

However there are also some cons:

• It can be expensive to set up the artificial lights, which means you may have issues lack of light
• If you do get some pest issues it can be very difficult to get rid of them
• Pollination must be done by hand as there are no other pollinators about for you, and if you don't pay enough attention to your plants or are away for a few days you can miss the pollination window
• It can be messier if you accidentally overwater or re-pot indoors
• Unfortunately indoors is a good environment for Fungus Gnats to breed in

I recommend watching this video if you're new to gardening.  The same guy has a separate YouTube channel VoodooGarden specifically for indoor growing.  He shows you how to set up your own lights in your growroom (if you're lucky enough to have an entire growroom) but YouTube really is a wealth of knowledge on indoor growing.  This particular person I've linked to does everything completely differently from every other book and gardener I know with reference to pruning techniques but honestly, I think his are better for indoor growth/limited outdoor space.  He's also pretty quirky, which makes watching his videos interesting!