Updated on Oct. 04, 2024
You've stored your outdoor gardening gear for the season, but that doesn't mean you can't grow some fruits and veggies indoors for special treats.
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You’ll need a good light source for a productive indoor vegetable and fruit garden. If you’re fortunate to have a large south-facing window that light can come through unblocked, you could successfully grow some vegetables with just that light source.
Otherwise, plan on purchasing supplemental lighting like this standalone LED light to shine down on a small group of plants. If you plan to grow lots of different vegetables, you can purchase a shelving unit with LED lights. Keep the lights on for about 12 hours a day and place plants close to them. Use a timer to turn lights off and on automatically.
Clean pots and fresh potting soil help you avoid introducing plant diseases or unwanted pests to your indoor garden.
If you’re re-using a pot, use a stiff brush to remove dirt. Then fill a tub with water, dishwashing soap and about a cup of white vinegar and wash the pots. Allow them to soak for an hour or so, then rinse thoroughly before re-filling with fresh general purpose potting soil.
Many vegetable plants will grow faster than houseplants and quickly deplete nutrients in the soil. So plan to fertilize regularly, in some cases even once a week.
Add a liquid fertilizer to the water you use for the plants. It isn’t necessary to add granular fertilizer to the potting soil, or purchase soil with a fertilizer in it. With repeated watering, those nutrients will quickly leach out of the soil anyway.
Depending on the type of plant and the size of the container, you may need to water vegetables grown indoors more often than houseplants. Most should be kept evenly moist but not sopping wet. Under lights, plants may dry out more quickly.
Allow the water to run through the container into a saucer, but don’t leave the container sitting in standing water after.
Even indoors, vegetable and fruit plants can become infested with pests, including spider mites, mealybugs, and fungus gnats. Inspect your plants regularly for signs of pests. If you find any, move it away from other plants so they aren’t infected as well.
There are several ways to deal with indoor pests. It may be easier to get rid of a heavily infested vegetable plant and start over than dousing the plant with pesticides.
Some vegetable plants grown indoors, like tomatoes and peppers, can grow large quickly. Plan accordingly and give the plants room to grow. You can improve airflow around plants by running a small fan nearby.
Tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers grown indoors will also have thinner stems than those grown outdoors, so provide a small trellis or other support to keep them upright.
The flowers of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries need to be pollinated to produce any fruit. For tomatoes and peppers, which are wind-pollinated outdoors, gently shaking the stems when the plants are flowering. That may be enough. You can also use a small fan to create enough of a breeze to move the leaves slightly.
For fruits and vegetables pollinated by bees, like strawberries or cucumbers, you’ll need to hand-pollinate. For strawberries, catch some of its own pollen on a small artist’s brush and brust it into the center of the flower.
For cucumbers, it’s a bit trickier. You’ll need to swipe some pollen from a male flower attached by a thin stem, then brush the pollen onto a female flower. Female flowers have a little bulge at the base that will become the cucumber.
When growing vegetables indoors, especially tomatoes and peppers, choose varieties that stay smaller. For cherry tomatoes, ‘Red Veranda‘ grows only one foot tall. For jalapeño peppers, ‘Pot-a-Peño‘ does well in hanging baskets.
For some fruits, like strawberries, it’s important to pick a variety that’s day-neutral, meaning it will flower regardless of how many daylight hours there are. One such variety is ‘Seascape.‘
For other vegetables, like lettuces, which are smaller to begin with, many varieties will grow well indoors as long as they have good light and are kept well-watered.
Harvesting vegetables indoors when they’re ripe will often encourage plants like tomatoes and peppers to keep flowering and produce more fruit.
If you harvest lettuce and other indoor greens by cutting off only the outside leaves, the plant will continue to grow and produce more leaves. The same is true for herbs like basil. Cutting off a stem or two will encourage it to branch and produce more leaves.
However, at some point your indoor vegetable plant will stop flowering or growing. Then it’s best to toss the plant, clean the pot, get some new potting soil and start over with a fresh plant or new seeds.
A long list of vegetables and certain fruits will provide some kind of harvest when grown indoors. By trying different vegetables, you can determine their light needs, how long it takes to harvest when grown from seed, and whether or not that vegetable is even worth growing indoors.
