We greatly expanded our outdoor garden last year with plans to do more in the spring so we have been adding shelves and lights for starting our seedlings. It seemed like a waste not to use them over the winter so we found a few self-watering planters for tomatoes, cucumbers, peas and beans, added peppers, lettuce and cabbage to some standard planters and have been giving indoor gardening a shot. We have also been doing a lot of microgreens which has been a pleasant surprise. Not only are they easy but they basically go with everything.

The indoor gardening has come with some unique problems though. Mold has been an issue. We tried a vinegar solution which worked alright, and bought a bottle of grapefruit seed extract which seems to work better. Before starting this process my wife and I had never heard of fungus gnats but they seem to be popping up so we plan to try traps as well as a hydrogen peroxide mixture to see if that controls them. Our biggest pest has been a cat that thinks we put out pots of soil for her to play in. So far nothing has worked to control that problem. Forks she digs out, cayenne pepper she doesn’t seem to notice and death threats she laughs at. Not sure what do there. The project is a little bigger than the pictures suggest but the upstairs is a cluttered mess at the moment and my wife would murder me if I put pictures of it on the internet. Obnoxious cats she is tolerant of but husbands don’t seem to get the same treatment.

One thing we haven’t started yet, because they haven’t sprouted enough, is potatoes. The plan is to try them in the tent, in fabric grow bags with extra large trays underneath. We used a similar method outdoors this year and I’m excited to try in indoors.