Red State Green

Yes, today. In November.

If you have never started a garden ever, or even if you have your outdoors garden under a foot of snow right now (like they do in northern Indiana, according to the news), and you didn’t set up to do a winter garden, you can still start growing food.

I’m sure right now you’re saying, “Prove it.” Well, it’s easy.

Do you  have a window that gets some light? Look around your house. Bathroom, garage, kids’ rooms, you can set up a garden anywhere. It doesn’t matter where in the house it is, it just has to have reasonably strong light so the plants will grow. If you’re not sure try it anyway, worst case is you’ll get pale lettuce.

Get some sort of dirt, water, and something to hold it in. Disposable pie tins, plastic containers for vegetable trays, the clamshells that hold cookies or fruit, anything will do. I’ve used ice cream cartons, old cookie sheets and rusty bread pans. It doesn’t matter. This is not rocket science.

Then get some seeds that do well in cooler temperatures with less light. Lettuces, spinach, radishes, and chard are just a few. Google “cold weather plants” for some suggestions. Anything that grows in early spring or late fall will do fine inside. Things like carrots will need a deeper pan (a plastic drawer or Rubbermaid bin would work).

I’ve never tried growing carrots indoors, that just gave me an idea.

If you don’t have a window (really?? you might consider moving!) or it’s a dark, shaded one, you can still garden inside, under lights. Grow lights are not expensive, and you can find commercial kits to grow a few things if you don’t feel like doing it yourself.

Put the dirt in the container. Sprinkle the seeds on top. Sprinkle water on the seeds, enough to get the soil moist but not wash off the seeds. Not gallons of water, just a little bit. Dip your hand in the water and sprinkle the soil. Two or three times as much sprinkling of water as you did sprinkling of seeds.

The first few days you should water like this twice a day or whenever the soil looks dry. Once the seeds sprout (most of these kind take 3 to 7 days) you can water less often.

If you sprinkled a lot of seeds, you might notice after a month or so that the plants are crowded. By this time, they should look like whatever you planted: lettuces should look like baby lettuces. There’s a couple ways you can handle this.

Most things you plant in the winter you can eat all of, so you can pull out every other one and make a salad. Or, if it’s all lettuce, you can take a pair of scissors and give this bushy garden a “haircut”, put the greens in your salad and wait until it all grows back. That’s called ‘cut and come again’ lettuce, and it can be fun if you have a long tray of salad growing.

Here’s a short video that shows both methods of salad harvesting. Granted, they’re outside, but you can do the same thing indoors.

People pay big bucks for baby lettuce salads! And you can have one right in your home.

The other thing you can do is start seeds for planting outdoors later, which we talked about earlier. If you have a really sunny window, this would work well. Just remember, summer plants like a LOT of sun, so a south-facing window is best for this. I get it to work okay with my east-facing window, as it’s flat here in OK and there’s not anything blocking off the sun for much of the day.

Anyways, if you’ve never tried growing inside, give it a shot. And enjoy the Christmas salad you grew yourself!