Grow Your Own Food On Your Window-Sill
By: Jakov Zauzolkov
Tags: Lifestyle, Gardening, Life, Nature, Plants

P reparation

Before you grab your shovel, pots, seeds, and soil, we’ve to prepare some things:

At first, the position of your garden. Your crops need as much sunlight as they can get. The more sunlight, the better your harvest will be. Look around in your flat or house: A window which is directed to south/ southwest would be ideal for your crops (on the northern hemisphere). Especially in winter, the location has to be as sunny as possible because the strength of the sun is a lot weaker than in summer. If you have no window with enough sunlight, you can use grow lights.

The second step, seeds, and soil. Because of the weaker power of the sun, not every plant will produce food. The best you can plant are probably leafy greens and herbs. Both of them can grow without problems, even in lower light conditions. That doesn’t mean you can’t grow, for example, tomatoes on your sill, but the plants won’t be as big and strong as tomato plants growing in the summer months. Also, you’ve to take over the role of bees by either carefully shake your plants to let polls free, or take a brush and carefully transfer the polls of one plant to the other. Besides the seeds, make sure to use soil with a high amount of nutrients, your plants will need them. Furthermore, you can use fertilizers to supply your plants with nutrients when you use soil with not enough nutrients in it.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

Planting

Is everything prepared? If yes, perfect! That means we can finally start planting!

Take your seeds and look at the backside of the package, often there are some tips on how to plant and grow your plant. So, take your pots, fill them with soil, put the seeds in, water everything, and… you’re done! Wait, what?! Yes, much more you can’t do at this point. A tip I can give you on your way now is to put a transparent foil over your pots. The foil will prevent a loss of warmth and humidity, so your plants will appear faster and stretch their leaves out of the soil. Just make sure the soil doesn’t get too dry.

Harvesting

After lots of weeks of watering and looking for the plants, it’s time to harvest! The big advantage of herbs and leafy greens is that they won’t stop growing, even if you’ve cut off some leaves. That means indirectly that if you won’t kill your plant, water it regularly, and maybe fertilize the soil after some time, it’ll produce infinite fresh, homegrown food for you.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

And in total, this is it! You see, growing your own food indoors is no magic, just a thing of preparation and the right knowledge. To be honest, what could be better than harvest your own freshly grown salad in the middle of the winter. An indoor garden is a perfect opportunity to grow food if the weather outside is deadly for plants or if you just have no place to grow plants. I’ve already grown food inside of my house, later one part left my house and found their place outside, tho other stayed in the kitchen and delivered herbs for every dish. If you want to start your indoor garden, but you’re not the best with plants, try it anyway! As long as you don’t start with something like a pineapple, it’ll be fine.