How to Grow a Kitchen Garden

You don’t need a farm to grow your own food. In fact, as writer and gardener Alice Vincent enthuses, you don’t even need any outdoor space. For our Planting series, she explains how to sow and grow an indoor kitchen garden.

Perhaps you nurture ambitions of recreating The Good Life. Perhaps you’ve made good friends with your house plants and fancy a new challenge. Whatever the reason to give growing your own food indoors a try, it’s increasingly popular with those who won't let their lack of a garden stop them from getting green-fingered.

You're not aiming for self-sufficiency, nor will you necessarily grow enough to avoid the supermarket altogether. But if you’re keen to supplement your usual groceries with some home-grown goodies, then there are plenty of interesting and unusual varieties to play with as well as those that appear on the shopping list more regularly. Before you start sowing, it’s important to assess what kind of growing space you’ve got. A warm spot near a sunny window, for instance, will make an easier indoor salad bar than a gloomy bathroom. Be realistic about your space: your crops, no matter how large, will need water and probably soil, so balancing your seed trays near bookshelves or a workspace might not be the best idea. Similarly, you may think keeping your growing herbs or tomato plants in the kitchen makes most sense, but if you get more sunshine in your bedroom, then you’ll have more luck growing them there. Growing indoors limits the scale of what you can grow, so look to smaller crops that will be more tolerant of lower light conditions and don’t rely on pollinating insects to flower and fruit. I’m a huge fan of growing salads and microgreens indoors. Microgreens are really young crops of more familiar, larger vegetables and leaves. Broccoli, kale, peas, radishes and rocket are just some examples. Growing them couldn’t be simpler - or more fun: simply generously sow your seeds into a shallow tray of potting compost, water well and put somewhere light. When the shoots and leaves are a few centimetres tall, you can snip them at the base of the plant and use them as a salad green or garnish for whatever you’re eating. Some crops will even sprout again, giving you two bites at the cherry. You can plant microgreens in most shallow containers you may have to hand, but a planting bowl can transform them into a table centrepiece.

I also love growing herbs and certain salad leaves indoors. Some, such as rocket and mizuna, can thrive quite happily for most of the year on a bright windowsill, and taste infinitely better than anything trapped in a shop-bought plastic bag. Parsley, mint and coriander can be kept going for most of the year indoors, and taken outside for a summer holiday if you do have a window ledge to grow on. Many of my herbs started out as living plants from the supermarket, which I’ve potted on in better quality soil and a larger pot to keep growing. Never harvest more than 50% of what’s growing to keep your plant alive. But you can also grow parsley and coriander from seed quite readily indoors, and cut mint from a shop will root easily in a cup of water. Once it has, you can pot that on and watch it grow. A dose, according to packet instructions, of organic seaweed fertiliser once a fortnight during spring and summer will keep them growing well. If you’re averse to having soil in the house, you could look into hydroponics. This increasingly popular way of growing plants sees them thrive in just water, with fertiliser and grow lights to encourage growth. Again, you’ll only grow just enough for what you need, but there’s as much pleasure to be had in the gardening as in the eating.

Written by Alice Vincent