Mission Endure 83: Indoor Garden Update

I haven’t written an indoor garden update since September and a lot has happened since then, so I thought it was time to do another update. I think I am going to stop calling our garden an indoor garden and start referring to our garden as an experimental garden. We have begun growing different types of produce that are new to us and using different styles of growing in an effort to find the perfect infrastructure and plants to grow indoors in our growing areas. We have been growing our own lettuce for a year and a half now and have found a system that works well for us. We haven’t bought commercial lettuce since September 2021. Here’s an overview of where we are at with our experimental garden

Our Lettuce is still producing well. We have tried planting in smaller 4”, 6”, and 3 gallon growing pots and we have decided that the 6” pots work best for our lettuce. We plant 4 Parris Island Cos seeds in each pot and it provides us with enough lettuce to harvest a bag full twice per week. We have tried a couple of other types of lettuce, but we always come back to Parris Island Cos. We do sequential planting. It takes us about a month from the time we plant our lettuce until it is ready to start harvesting. We can harvest the lettuce for about a month if we only harvest the biggest, most mature leaves twice per week. When we start harvesting our newest pots of lettuce we plant the successor plants, so there is a continual harvest of fresh lettuce that goes from our growing pot to our kitchen in about 30 seconds. Here are some photos of our current harvesting pots and the new plants growing to be their successors.

Our current mature Parris Island Cos Lettuce that we have been harvesting for about a month. Planted 11/3/22

This is our area of successor planting Parris Island Cos. We planted these on 12/15/22

We have been using successor planting for Jalapeno’s also. We are very happy with Craig’s Grande Jalapeno. It seems to grow well indoors, the peppers are hot, and it grows a large amount of peppers. We planted the one below on 9/22/22 and we are about ready to begin harvesting in the next two weeks. It has about 20-25 blossoms and 6 peppers currently on it. When we start harvesting we will plant another one. This one looks incredible.

Our Craig’s Grande Jalapeno from Baker Creek. We planted it two and a half months ago and it is growing peppers like crazy. First harvest should be in about 2 weeks

We love Jalapenos, but we also love sweet peppers. We have grown the California Wonder Pepper outdoors for the last two years and weren’t impressed. They stayed small and hardly grew any fruit. We decided to try it indoors and planted 2 plants in 2 gallon pots. We planted them on 9/22/22 and they are growing beyond our expectations. There are sweet peppers maturing on them blossoms everywhere. We are looking forward to the tasty peppers we see growing on them. Growing outside they were not thriving, but indoors they are also very lush and green.

Our California Wonder Sweet Pepper we planted on 9/22/22. We should be able to start harvesting in about a month. Lots of fruit and blossoms already

One of the other plants we have been over wintering indoors the last 2 years is a very young Meyer Lemon Tree. We purchased this one from Home Depot in the summer of 2021. We over wintered it last year and it grew well, but didn’t have any blooms on it. This year it has done amazingly well. Blooms are everywhere and we expect to harvest a few lemons this year. It looks incredible.

Our young Meyer Lemon Tree

We have had mixed results growing our tomatoes indoors. We have been primarily growing Martino’s Roma Tomatoes. Our tomatoes grow quickly and as they get bigger they lose their vigor. Because of the small growing area we chose a determinate variety that doesn’t grow too large. We have been growing Martinos outdoors with decent results for several years. After 2 years of growing indoors we finally had our first harvest of 3 small tomatoes earlier today. As you can see in the photo, there are a few more left to harvest and a few blossoms, but they have not been as vigorous as I thought they would be. I think we will move to another variety or even to cherry or grape tomatoes to see how they do. We have chosen not to use a growing tent, and I have seen others have great results with growing tents. The second photo is of an indeterminate tomato plant that the Illinois Landsdown Up organization has been growing this year in the Illinois Agricultural Extension Greenhouse in East St Louis. I guess I need to get some of their seeds to see what we can do here, although it would quickly outgrow our basement.

Older Martino Roma Tomatoes with a few fruit on them

Younger Martino Roma Tomatoes without much fruit. The two on the left were planted on 12/15/22 and the two on the right were grown from cuttings taken on 9/25/22

1 Indeterminate Tomato grown by Landsdowne Up at the Illinois Agricultural Extension Greenhouse in East St Louis, IL 12/21/22

That is an overview of what out traditional plants have been doing since our last update 3 months ago. But, we have also been experimenting with a few new items.

In August I took some Peach Pits and Cherry Pits and broke the seeds out of them and placed them in the refrigerator in zip lock bags for them to stratify. Stratification is the exposure to cold weather process that some seeds need to germinate. Both Peach and Cherry trees need stratification to germinate. In December they began to sprout and I planted them individually in 2 gallon grow pots. I have had mixed results. Here is a photo from today of how our Peach tree is growing. It seems to be growing quickly and should be ready for transplant sometime this spring. We don’t know what type of peach it is. We planted the seed from a store bought Peach that we ate. We will most likely need to graft scion wood onto it to produce good peaches from this rootstock.

Peach tree grown from seed planted on 9/20/22

The Cherry trees are taking a bit longer. We took the pits from store bought Cherries, cracked them open and stratified the seeds. We planted the seeds on 12/19/22 and here is what our first Cherry tree looks like today

Our Cherry tree planted from seed on 12/19/22

We have several more Cherry and Peach seeds going through the stratification process right now. It would be awesome to have our own little orchard of Cherry and Peach trees in our back yard

Other plants we have been experimenting with are Garlic, Potatoes, and Sweet Potatoes. The Garlic are growing well, much better than those we planted outside. It will be exciting to see how they do in the spring compared with their outside neighbors,

Indoor Garlic planted on 12/27/22

All the growth must be underground at this point for our Potatoes planted on 1/6/23

Waiting for our Sweet Potatoes to produce slips that we can plant. Started these on 1/6/23