Ginger Booth - Indoor Salad: How to Grow Vegetables Indoors

To Bruce Boatman, fellow online indoor gardening addict, and friend.

Rest in peace, BB.

To Beth, Peat, Jessi,

and all my online gardening friends.

And first, last, and always, to Adrian,

who had to compete with a garden for Moms attention.

Its been 5 years now since Indoor Salad was released. Things have changed!

The key change is in lighting technologies. When I wrote the first edition, CFL lightbulbs were everywhere. LED lights were expensive, unreliable, and hard to buy. My experiments growing with LEDs were abysmal failures. But LEDs have come a long way! Now its CFL lights that are getting harder to buy.

I also expanded the topic of Indoor-Outdoor growing. This includes seed starting as well as bringing crops indoors at the end of the season. I removed the links appendix in favoring of moving that information to my website , where I can maintain it better.

And of course, I keep learning tricks along the way. And in online forums, I continue to learn more about what trips up or confuses the novice.

So this edition has important updates to two topics, and a light dusting of new perspectives throughout. I hope you enjoy!

Its my sisters fault. Back in 2007, she wanted to go in on a present for our mom for Christmas. Id seen this Really Cool Device on Amazon an Aerogarden. The sleek little contraption combined grow lights with a hydroponic base, all in a plug-and-play format to cleanly grow herbs and greens on the kitchen counter.

So I bought one for myself, too. I had an Excuse, you see. I justified this $175 tech toy because Id eat all the lettuce I grew with it. Just think how much thinner Id be!

I didnt lose much weight.

But I gained one of the most absorbing hobbies ever. Those baby lettuces enchanted me. Growing by my kitchen sink, at chest height, I could watch them develop every step of the way. I took digital pictures for a time-elapsed view. I was hooked.

Before long, I hunted online for a community of fellow devotees. I found an Aerogarden community, but they werent talking enough. So I haunted the forums, talking to everyone to swell the traffic. I wanted to know what else I could grow in my nifty cool device. Rather than buy 10 of them, I wanted to egg others into trying things, so we could all experiment in parallel. I was delighted when others joined who were going beyond simply using Aerogardens modifying them, doing other hydroponics, building their own systems. Eventually I left that forum and founded another, aerogardenmastery.com, with some fellow hard-core garden techies.

Its not that Id never gardened before. Far from it. I cant remember the first time I planted a bean because I was too small. My gardens werent much as a kid, because our beach-front yard was too salty and sandy. (Yes, this is a high end problem. Growing up in a beach house was a blast. But plants dont grow well there.) Then I lived in cities, apartments and condos. But in whatever little space I had, I grew flowers every spring.

Then I lived for a half year in Tokyo. In a hotel room the size of a generous walk-in closet. No, I didnt garden there. But I fell in love with Japanese cucumbers. When I got back home, I couldnt buy Japanese cucumbers. Those green waxed torpedo cucumbers in the supermarket, with big seeds and squash guts texture, just werent good enough any more. So I started container vegetable gardening on my tiny balcony, 30 years ago, because I love cucumbers.

I still grow cucumbers every year. Now I grow them indoors and outdoors. The outdoor cukes last a couple months before succumbing to powdery mildew and cucumber beetles and squash bugs. The indoor cuke vines last up to a year, producing a few cukes a week.

The economic downturn in 2008 caught me freelancing. In the giant game of musical chairs for a good job, I was caught without a seat. With freelance contracts hard to come by, and pay for them plummeting, like so many people, I sought other ways to make a living. Since growing vegetables indoors was a passion, naturally I looked there to develop a product, and even more earnest experimentation began. But I wasnt 100% committed. Im a web developer, and generally speaking, thats still a safer bet for income than the risk of creating a new business. But Ive always wanted to create my own business, beyond the simple work-for-hire freelance life.

Then one evening I went to a networking event one minute elevator pitches of your business idea. I had four different business concepts mapped out I tend to over-prepare! I wasnt really sure Id pitch any of them. But I got up and told them about my system for growing good tomatoes indoors, and how this was a huge demand and product niche not really satisfied by the products already on the market. I won the pitch contest that night, which astonished me.

I was even more surprised by the number of people who said they couldnt help build the business, but theyd sure like to beta test the product. As a consumer product business, this never got off the ground. But the designs for two of those products are included in this book.

With some know-how and ingenuity, you can build your own indoor growing solutions. And deliver them to yourself far more cheaply than I can manufacture and distribute them to you.

Is this information freely available on the web? Most of it. Along with an avalanche of misleading and conflicting information and sales hype. This book also contains solutions Ive come up with myself, based on seeing hundreds of my own and other peoples experiments. When a fellow entrepreneur in the indoor-crop arena asked me to point him to a single source that explained all this, I couldnt find one.

So this book collects what you need to know to successfully grow crops indoors. With some do-it-yourself projects to get you growing vegetables in your own living room, as cheaply and simply as possible.

Im in the gardening forums online, by the way. If you see me around, please say hi!

Why grow vegetables indoors?

• Better tasting varieties than the sturdy supermarket standards
• Fresh winter vegetables, not trucked 3,000 miles
• Fresh now vegetables lose vitamins and flavor within hours of picking
• Could save money, especially if you buy fresh herbs pricey!
• Indoor grow lights combat seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
• Gardening is deeply satisfying
• Connect with nature as an antidote to urban stress
• Reconnect with your ecosystem because the environment matters to you
• Freshen indoor air and liven up the dcor literally
• Enjoy making things and crafting projects

There are lots of reasons. Or possibly excuses, if youre trying to justify expensive technical and decorating outlays. But probably the most compelling reason to grow food in your home, is because you think thats cool!

People who keep pet dogs dont defend their choice. Why should gardeners?