Why are these the best Indoor vegetable garden setups?

How do I set up an indoor vegetable garden?

Hello everyone I hope it is not too cold where you live but if it is, why not start a little indoor vegetable garden setup. 

Setup indoor vegetable gardens or any garden will require some preparations which are mainly about the layout of your garden, the lighting (if you don’t have any access to sun) and the kinds of plants you want to grow indoors. 

Let’s dive into each on how to prepare a proper indoor vegetable garden setup. 

Choosing the artificial light for your indoor vegetable garden setup. 

The thing about growing indoors it’s going to be slightly more expensive  than growing outdoors because you have to provide the number one input that a plant needs which would be of course the sun. You have to fake the sun. 

But I’ve been getting a lot of questions especially in winter about what are the best options for growing indoors whether that be in a more extreme way or a high budget I suppose or just something nice and simple. 

Now of course the simplest thing to do is to grow on your window sill with whatever light that you can muster. I would say a south facing windowsill with as much light as you can possibly get. I mean that will do okay not great especially in the winter as light is low but if that’s all you want to do or all you can afford to do then certainly that’s better than nothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, now if you want to upgrade a little bit then what you can do is get some kind of grow light and there are a lot of different methods to grow with lights. 

There’s a lot of different technology out there to support your indoor vegetable garden setup with grow light. It can be overwhelming and that’s probably why I get so many questions about affordable indoor grow lights. The first thing to know is are you going for aesthetics or are you going for function, that’s the first question to ask yourself. If you’re going for aesthetics you’re probably gonna sacrifice performance or your cost is going to go way up so that quote unquote looks good. 

If you’re going for performance at a low budget and your growing things that aren’t very energy intensive let’s say herbs, leafy greens, microgreens things like that you can actually just get away with going to a big box store and buying some shop lights and hanging them over the area where your plants are like on a little table or something and that’s perfectly fine. 

Now if you’re growing something a little bit more energy intensive or you want to invest in what I would call a proper grow light or light built specifically to grow plants then you may want to go for what are called quantum board LEDs.  There’s a lot of different ones out there. The people that came up with that terminology are the folks at horticulture lighting group HLG. They make some fantastic boards. They’re actually quite affordable these days although they are one of the more premium manufacturers but quality is quality you get what you pay for. 

You can even grow stuff like fruits or flowers. You can even grow indoor flowers if you want to. they put out enough light to get that done and they run quite cool in the sense that they don’t put out a lot of heat. I would say budget wise budget around $100 or so minimum for one of those. it can certainly get very extreme but again it all depends on your goals now.  

Choosing the indoor garden layout/system.

the next thing to think about is what kind of system we are growing in. well really you can just grow in soil containers indoors no one saying that you can’t do that . if you wanted to experiment with different methods of course you could go with something like a hydroponic system. 

Here are the details indoor garden layout or system which you can consider:

• The square vegetable garden

It is the best known and most used form of a vegetable garden. You’re not going to grow tons of vegetables, of course, but it may be enough to have some fresh produce! Pot’M offers its solution here with the vegetable garden box that can be delivered monthly or quarterly.

• As the name suggests, it is a square. It is divided into several boxes or compartments. With a square vegetable garden you can grow different crops and even experiment to discover new flavors.

• Culture table

This is the same principle as the square vegetable garden. However, here you fill a table with separate compartments. A true Pot’M collector can easily realize this after 2 months. This way you get a more extensive culture table every month. All gardening packages can be combined in this, whether it concerns the garden box, plant box, flower box or the vegetable garden box, everything can be combined on the culture table.

• The hydroponic vegetable garden

Behind this barbaric name hides a type of crop that is increasingly used by individuals to grow vegetables as well as plants. So your vegetables grow on a substrate such as clay balls.

• This substrate is irrigated by a mixture of water, mineral salts and essential nutrients for your vegetables. The advantages of a hydroponic vegetable garden? Low water consumption, less pest infestation as your vegetables do not grow on the ground and automation of the cultivation (lighting, temperature, humidity, etc.).

• The pots or trays

Nothing prevents you from growing your aromatic herbs in an earthen pot or your tomatoes in a planter, quite the contrary! Most importantly, the container has a hole in the bottom for good drainage.

Some extra ideas here:

You could get a proper grow tent which is nice because it contains all the light reflects it down into the area that you’re growing so you’re getting the most value for the money you spent on the light and the money you’re spending every second that light is on. in the form of your electricity costs, that’s really the nice thing that I also like about it. 

For me having a grow tent that’s enclosed also makes that a growing area and it’s nice and tidy. it doesn’t really feel like I’m living in some sort of science experiment which I wouldn’t even mind, just the lighting aspect that bothers me a little bit. you also get to control the environment a lot more. if you want to you can throw an exhaust fan in there you can throw an oscillating fan and they’re just picking up the stocks and making it a little bit stronger. you can manage pest control. I mean the benefits of growing in a controlled environment is just that you get to control the exact specifications of what’s going on inside of your grow area. 

Choosing the plants you want to grow indoors.

Now as far as things that you could or should think about growing I would say really your favorite things you like to eat that are possible with the set up that you have. 

for a beginner you should probably get some kind of shelving system or you can put some shop lights on it and you can grow small leafy greens.

You might want to check our details best indoor plants we recommend on this article: Indoor Vegetable Garden complete guide.