An Expert's Guide To Indoor Windowsill Gardening / Grow Fresh Veggies And Herbs All Year Round

Six Ideas for Easy Indoor Veg Gardens. This is Kim Stoddart, an award-winning environmental journalist from the UK, here with you for Gardening Know-How. I am so excited by the possibilities of growing food and even flowers during the colder months of the year and just because the outside garden has started to slow down and slumber, it doesn't mean that the indoor growing opportunities have to stop. Quite the opposite, in fact. So why create indoor veg gardens? Well, there are so, so many reasons for doing so. For one, the sheer joy and enjoyment of taking seed and germinating the seed into plants, into food that you can bring to the table is, as we all know as keen gardeners, absolutely fantastic thing to do. It feels so incredibly good and that doesn't have to stop. There are lots of opportunities to make the best use of windowsills, tables, vases, items that you might have lying around, old seed packets, and turn them into food that you can still enjoy and bring to the table. So there are lots and lots of different ways to go about it and I'm going to share some ideas with you in this video. First of all, let's look at lovely, lovely lettuce. What a taste of summer, the ability to pick lovely fresh leaves from plant to bring to the table as well. It doesn't really get much better than that and the great news is that in a very, very small indoor space, in a small pot container, you can grow an awful lot of pick and come again lettuce. So the key is to go for lettuce varieties such as this, which is a loose leaf lettuce variety, which lends itself really well to repeat pickings and the key is to just keep picking, just keep allowing space and then the more you pick, the more you cut and come again, the more that you have the opportunity to tap into this fantastic homegrown delight over winter. Secondly, we have cilantro, which is such an amazing taste of summer. I have to say beautiful, beautiful, zesty, lovely fresh leaves and again this is perfectly feasible to grow indoors. The key with this is to keep plants quite young, again for the cut and come again opportunities. Ideally, the plant itself can grow in colder conditions but if you're growing inside, you're more inclined to have a lot more opportunity to enjoy this lovely zesty leaf. I mix plants, which I'll talk about in a bit, but this leaf lends itself incredibly well mixing with other different types of edible produce and you can just brush the leaves as well to release the lovely zesty scent, even if you're not actually picking it to eat, which is fantastic. Argula is another fantastic, very resilient, reliable type of leaf to grow also and with this, you can grow this in most different sizes of container. It does grow quite quickly indoors as well in this way, so as I'll show you in a minute, you just need to keep an eye on the plant itself and as soon as things like the leaves start yellowing, then you know that it's time to plant it on, maybe give it some more compost, give it a bigger space in which to grow and come the following spring, it can also be planted outside as well because it will carry on growing. It's a lovely, very, very resilient leaf and I think an important part of a salad mix as well because it tastes so delicious. Parsley is another indoor herb that I would highly recommend growing. It can grow still outside, but it will put on very slow growth, so if you have some growing inside, then it will keep on producing and the leaves are absolutely packed full of vitamin C. It's so incredibly good for you and can be added to a range of really, exciting dishes. There's different ways to get started with the growing of parsley. You might want to try one of the supermarket herb pots and just plant it out into a bowl with a lot more multi-purpose compost as well, so the plant has room to spread or you might want to take one of your plants from outside and bring it in or alternatively, you could have a look at germinating some of the seed as well for small pickings to begin with that can then grow on and then be planted outside. Do know also that parsley is very, very easy to save seed from, so if you are working with a plant over winter, I highly recommend them planting it out as a biennial. In its second year, it will then flower and set seed and you get lots of lovely plants for free, which is absolutely brilliant. Another great plant for windowsill growing has to be the beautiful pea, pea shoots, so peas for pea shoots, so also very, very easy to grow. It's the type of seed that you might well have lying around anyway. You might have some dried peas in your store cupboard and these can all be used germinated to create these absolutely fantastic baby plants that can then be picked. Picked when they're a couple of inches tall as well, so they can carry on growing for repeat pickings and they are amazing added to dishes. You can add them to salads, you can also add them to decorate food as well to create a meal to really impress. Microgreens are also incredibly easy to do and you can work with seed that you might already have left over from earlier on in the year. So with the microgreens, as the name suggests, these are very, very small leaves, so you just sow seed quite thickly in a small container. You only need a very shallow amount of compost and then when they produce their first two leaves, true two leaves, they're ready to pick. What I would also recommend as well is growing some of your greens in a way that enables you to pick the larger leaves as well. Now this is a Swiss chard plant here as you can see and it lends itself very, very well to larger container planting. You can mix plant in a container, you can take all your favourite types of leaves, your herbs and you can plant them quite densely together as well to make the best use of space. As your plant continues to grow, if you see the leaves starting to yellow, if it doesn't look healthy, then what you then want to do is actually have a look as well. So you can see here that the roots are starting to grow through which is a surefire indicator that this plant needs a bigger container in which to grow. If they get too big, you could always plant them outside for next year, they will grow on, they will still produce come spring. It's a really good way of getting extra edibles come the quieter months of the year on the vegetable garden outside. And you can also, other ideas, you can also look at some baby roots. So the likes of carrot lend themselves very, very well actually to indoor planters, sown quite thickly. You won't get full-sized carrots obviously, but you will get in a deep container baby carrots which are an absolute joy to harvest over the winter months. Very exciting thing to do. Let's take some of the carrot here. Now carrot roots are very delicate, so you do have to be careful when planting these out. So I'm not going to separate them, I'm going to plant them all together. And you can see there's some roots there at the bottom, so I'm going to be very careful and plant these together in a clump, which will be absolutely fine and that will minimize any root disturbance which will enable the delicious baby carrots to grow. They don't take up a lot of space. Also you can look at flowers. So this is an old cup that was broken, you can see it was dropped and broken, so this then became a impromptu planter. And you can get really creative with different types of planter which is a really good way of taking a waste item and turning it into something new. So recycling, upcycling, it feels really good to turn an item that would otherwise go into landfill to something you can grow food in. And flowers work really well, they can bring a smile to the face over winter. And have a look, have a look in your cupboard, see what materials you can find to potentially plant in. It could be an old vase, it could be an old Wellington boot, there's all sorts of different ways that you can create planters. Another creative growing project idea as well is if you have any tomato plants still going, you can take some of the side shoots and you can grow them as houseplants over winter. You won't obviously get to pick tomatoes but certainly you can release the lovely smell, lovely scent of the tomato which is such a joyful thing to do over the cold months of the year. And come the following year as well your plant can then grow on and produce. It's just a nice way of bringing the outside in over the winter months. Over winter your plants won't need as much watering as they would do during the cooler months of the year. So the best way of checking if they need water is to actually use your fingers and to put them say an inch down into the compost just to check whether the moisture levels are too much or too little because if your plants are too dry that's going to cause an issue. If they're too wet then the roots can actually rot so you need to be careful with the balance. By looking at the plants that's also a really good indicator of how they are, if the leaves are looking lush and healthy. As soon as they start to yellow or if you can see there's any issues with the quality of the leaf then that's time to actually have a look. If the plant is looking too big, if roots are coming out, you can then take that and plant it on. In terms of where to place your planter as well, make use of available space. By a window could be a bit drafty but also it can maximize light. You could use if you're planting in a vase or in this case an old cup you could always use that as a table display. There's all sorts of ways of doing it, work to your home, work to your personal preferences and turn this into a fun nurturing indoor project over winter. If you have any issues with flies which can be a challenge sometimes with indoor planters, there are various ways to go about this organically but arguably the best thing to do is to remove the top roughly two inches of compost, put your plants outside, remove the two inches of compost, replace fresh multi-purpose compost and then that should be absolutely fine. Mixed planting also helps as well anyway because it helps to avoid any build-up of pest or disease as well and it makes it harder for that to spread. But there are many many different ways to create these indoor gardens and it's incredibly fun doing so. It brings warmth to the gardener in the home to have these amazing lovely pick and come again leaves and produce fresh to hand, it's absolutely magic.