3 Indoor Setups for Herbs & Veggies

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The first four issues were about various aspects of indoor gardening. Now, I’m going to offer some example setups for growing herbs and veggies across a span of prices. Setting up to garden indoors can be pretty expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have suitable natural light, you can save on lighting. Almost anything that can hold soil and allow drainage can be a planter (but we want to take care what materials we use for things we plan to consume).

I’m doing my shopping online, too, so there is going to be a markup. If you go to your local garden center, you’ll likely save.

I’m putting these setups together as though I were setting them up myself from scratch. They by no means include everything you could possibly use, nor do they necessarily reflect the least expensive, or necessarily best possible option for each item included.

I could spend ten times longer on this blog post and agonize over every single choice, but min-maxing isn’t the goal here; this is to show you how to approach putting together a setup, and to include items that I know would work for purpose.

None of these setups include the price of seeds, which are typically your most nominal expense.

While I’ve provided links to buy products, you may find yourself at a garden center looking for supplies and either can’t remember what I recommended, or they just don’t carry it. That’s okay! These are easy recommendations, and if you ask someone who works in that department for a suggestion, they will steer you correctly. At this stage, you can also rely on packaging. If something is labeled “potting soil for vegetables”, it’s probably going to work as a substrate for vegetables. Don’t sweat getting the exact things too much. Even the wrong things would probably still work.

🌿 Budget Countertop Herb Garden

$85 - $110

The first setup we’ll look at is a minimal countertop grow for 2-3 herbs. Individual herbs might have individual needs, so be sure to research them before buying supplies, but this should be an acceptable starter setup for most medicinal and culinary herbs.

Being minimal, this setup puts most of the active work (besides watering) on light management.

The light I’ve chosen for this project is a GE BR30 Grow Bulb, which is a standard bulb type, and because your light will need to be about 6” away from most herbs at all life stages, we really need adjustability.

Lighting

GE BR30 Grow Bulb — A solid, full-spectrum choice for herbs and flowering plants. The price is definitely right for a budget a countertop light that will still power plant growth, but the trade off is that this light will need to be right on top of the plants (close to 6” at every stage) and is only going to power a small area (approximately 2’ x 2’).

Pros: Affordable, adequate spectrum, white light won’t be obnoxious in living areas.

Cons: Single bulb doesn’t have a lot of power, requires frequent adjustment relative to plant.

Approximate Cost: $15 (On sale for 35% off at the time of publishing)

Soil

Miracle Gro Potting Mix — This is a solid budget option for a starting setup to “see how it goes”. This soil should get you through at least one grow season (6 months) without requiring fertilizing (and likely more). If you’re using 6” pots, you’ll need about a quart (32 oz) of soil per pot, so shop accordingly!

Approximate Cost: $1.50/quart ($24)

Accessories

Gooseneck Lamp — This generic gooseneck architect lamp will allow you to make the kind of adjustments you need for growing plants while maintaining a consistent height in relation to the plants (~6” for the bulb we’re using here). I have not used this specific lamp and bulb combination, but the GE BR30 bulb should fit most standard outlets. This lamp also requires a place to mount a C-clamp which might require some creativity for countertops. But this is just to give you an idea; any lamp that will allow this kind of adjustment should do.

Approximate Cost: $30

Pots — Generic plastic growing pots should work just fine for your purposes. They’re durable, reusable, and cheap, and they come in large count packs, so you’ll probably only ever buy them once per size. I’ve gone with 6” here because it will accommodate smaller plants. If you have an herb that gets big and successful, you may eventually repot to 8”, but 6” should cover you from seedlings to adult plants in most cases.

Approximate Cost: $14 (60 count)

Seedling Pots (Optional) — This setup doesn’t account for starting seeds (the next issue will cover the many ways of doing this), and you can sow your seeds directly into the pots above, keep them damp, and then turn the light on when you see sprouts. Open air sowing just requires a little more in the way of moisture management (seeds don’t usually need light until they sprout), so if you’d like to spend a little more to help tend your fragile seedlings until they’re bigger and hardier, you can get these optional domed seedling pots that maintain a helpful internal high humidity and trap heat (from grow lights or indirect sunlight) to help keep the soil warm. A good way to use these is to sow as many as you can fit into your grow light’s area (approx 2’) and nurture all of your sprouts until they’re ready to outgrow their container, and then winnow them down as they get big enough to fill up your light area until you just have your top 2 healthiest looking specimens.

Approximate Cost: $25 (15 pack)

Budget

You might see the budget of $85-110 and think “This is the budget option!?” For indoor growing, it is. Most of the things you need to grow plants exist outside, and it takes a bit of upfront cost to bring those conditions into your kitchen. While none of these options are “Cadillac” options, they represent informed frugality and comparison shopping.

One reason that this budget might feel a little high is because the options I’ve presented here all account for far more than you need in most cases. Tons of pots. 4 or 5 times more potting soil than you’re going to need at first. I’ve set you up for a long time, and once you’ve purchased this setup, you are good to grow for a lot of seasons, and most of your future expense will be on upgrades and expansion, if you choose to do that.

That said, can you go to your garden center and spend less than this? Oh, yes. You can buy a single quart of potting soil. You can buy a 4 pack of plastic pots. About half of this budget is your light and probably won’t go down from here, but you can easily do better by buying less soil and fewer pots in person.

🍅Budget Indoor Veggies

$180 - $200

I’m going to make this build around the idea of raising one vegetable plant to a fully productive adult stage that will provide an abundance of food. Vegetables are quite diverse in needs and productivity, so for our purposes here I’m going to choose a common indoor plant that will produce more fruit than you are likely to use, making it ideal for eating, sharing, or even canning for storage: the humble tomato.

Burpee’s Giant Dwarf Tomato — Approximately 2’ x 2’ fully grown.

Approximate Cost: $3.50 (25 seeds)

Lighting

Mars Hydro T2600 — I’m not cutting corners on my lighting here because vegetables require significant energy to produce, and because we aren’t using a grow tent, I want to make sure our lone plant is going to get enough juice to grow to its full size. A 2’ x 2’ plant will just about fill the growing zone of this light. This light will have to be hung and will still need to be adjusted as your plant grows. Don’t commit to this setup until you know how you want to manage that.

Pros: Powerful enough to fuel a productive indoor veggie plant.

Cons: A little expensive relative to viable growing area (this tier of light becomes much more cost effective in a grow tent). Has to be hung above plants and adjusted, requiring some creative rigging.

Approximate Cost: $80

Soil

Fox Farm Happy Frog Soil — We need a good draining soil optimized for vegetables, and we’re going to need a lot of it. As opposed to our modest little herb pots, we are going to use a single 5-gallon grow bag for our dwarf tomatoes. Fox Farm makes my favorite soils, and at 2 cubic feet, this bag will give you all you need and some left over to amend soil or top it off at soil settles.

Approximate Cost: $35

Accessories

60” Adjustable Hanging Stand — Our Mars Hydro light is 12” x 14”, and this stand looks to me like it could probably accommodate our hanging light while leaving decent room for a 5 gallon grow bag below. If your light fits here without canting to an angle, it could nicely accomodate larger plants, and while your dwarf tomato shouldn’t require support, the stand itself could provide support for bigger plants in bigger pots. It might take some experimenting and ordering/returning, but this should give you an idea of the types of solutions you could look for.

Approximate Cost: $50

VivoSun 5 gallon grow bag(s) — I prefer grow bags over buckets or pots once we go over about 10” of size requirement. They’re light, portable, breathable and reusable. They cut down waste, they store out of the way, and they’re good for water retention and drainage. A dwarf tomato should do well in a 5 gallon bag. A full sized tomato plant would need 10 or even 20 gallons to really thrive indoors. Tomatoes require a lot of space both above and below but can produce quite a lot of fruit.

Approximate Cost: $16 (5 count)

Happy Frog Tomato Fertilizer (Optional) — Your base soil should get you through one or more growing seasons, but tomatoes famously suck up a lot of nutrients (think about the material needed to produce pounds and pounds of fruit), and if you’ve invested in this setup and made a lot of tomatoes, you’re going to want to fertilize (as long as you keep fertilizing, you can just keep producing with this setup without additional costs). When that time comes, Fox Farms makes a fertilizer specific to tomatoes and replenishing Happy Frog soil.

Approximate Cost: $19 (4 lbs)

Budget

As you can see, opposed to herbs, veggies require more of everyhing. Light, space, soil, and even though it isn’t mentioned here, water. Tomatoes in particular require a lot of nutrients and water (giving them a reputation as bad neighbors in the garden, without careful planning). But they grow fast, produce generously, and are a very satisfying starter plant. If you’re successful, you’ll eat all the tomatoes you want, and you’ll have leftovers to donate to foodbanks, give to friends, or can for later.

Again, our lighting takes up about half of our budget and isn’t likely to move much, but can you spend less on soil and a container at a garden center? You bet. The shopping I’ve done here is for convenience, and setting yourself up to keep going and even expand your growing without having to spend much more than is listed here.

Figuring out how to hang and adjust your lighting is likely to be the most limiting factor here, and the fact is that you’re probably only going to support one really healthy, productive plant at a time with this setup. But even one healthy, productive plant matters.

Obviously $200 would buy a lot of tomatoes at the grocery store. But we aren’t doing this to save money on tomatoes (though once you see how much it can produce, it wouldn’t take very long to beat the buffet when tomatoes cost $1.50 each). We’re doing this to give ourselves a little autonomy over our food, and to help ourselves and others. And that is worth doing, even if it’s only a few pounds of tomatoes at a time.

10 people making 10 surplus lbs of food each are making 100 lbs collectively each season. If you’re swapping and giving, you’ll quickly end up with a huge variety of vegetables all season long, and while vegetable prices are climbing (and you’d better believe they’re going to get worse), your veggies are ostensibly free once you’ve got your setup.

Don’t be a person who goes into this to “save money on tomatoes”. That’s idiot math.

Be a person who goes into this to remove levers of control over your spending and nutrition. Be a person who goes into this with a mind to offset travesty, to provide security, and to be a part of something resilient and bigger than yourself, your apartment, and your one 2 foot tomato bush.

💕 The Mutual Aid Grow

~$3,000

This setup is likely outside of your capacity of budget, space, and effort (and maybe skill if you’re a beginner, since juggling multiple productive plants indoors is a challenge). This setup is mostly limited by space first (you could set it up wherever you have floor space and an outlet) and then budget (this setup involves a grow tent and airflow management, not to mention our lighting).

Your most reasonable expectations are going to be growing several herbs or one or two vegetable plants if you’re wholly reliant on artificial lighting and working with limited space. That’s okay! That’s great! As mentioned above, those are meaningful contributions to larger networks and individually good for you in so many ways.

The Mutual Aid grow is made more to show you what is possible indoors, and might be designed by someone with the space, money, and experience to set it up as part of community support and giving back. Maybe it’s a project started and tended by a collective.

Indoor growing isn’t your most efficient or cost effective means for community food production, and you aren’t likely to support anyone’s total caloric input (not even one person) using just what you can grow indoors. But as we’ve discussed, all effort is valid, and a large indoor grow using a grow tent begins to thwart our greatest enemy (light dissipation), offers greater environmental control, and allows us to start growing on a scale that, while not enough to float many people, begins to contribute seriously to a bigger independent network.

Layout

If you’re going to have a grow tent this size, you want to maximize your space efficiency, and that means carefully planning your plants for variety, growth, and light needs (tall guys to the outside, shorties in the middle) while allowing yourself room to work.

For our plan, I have come up with the following basic layout:

Perimiter (U-shaped): Tall plants, vining crops, and trellised vegetables

Central Aisle: A 3 feet wide walkway

Middle Beds: Shorter, high yield plants that benefit from more intense light

Perimiter — the outer 2 feet of the interior perimiter go to climbing plants and bushes. We will set up trellises on two walls and the other two walls will be for tall bushy plants that don’t need trellising. Tomatoes (cherry & dwarf), cucumbers, peppers, pole beans, broccoli, dwarf corn, carrots.

Middle Beds — 4 feet wide along the central zones are grow bags for shorter high yield plants, stackable containers for herbs and smaller plants, and hanging baskets to maximize vertical space. Leafy greens (lettuce, kale, spinach), garlic & onions, potatoes, strawberries (hanging baskets), herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley) in pots, microgreens in trays.

Grow Tent

VivoSun S108 10 x 10 Grow Tent — Grow tents come in a wide variety of sizes, and you could absolutely go with a tent half, or even a quarter this size and have a productive grow. But we are going big for our project, and this means the biggest grow tent you’re likely to have indoor space for. At 10 feet by 10 feet by 6.8 feet, congratulations. You have just converted a spare bedroom into a grow.

Pros: Fully contained. Internal structure supports airflow and temperature management equipment, room for watering support systems. Little additional space needed outside the tent itself.

Cons: Huge. This size tent would easily take up most of an average bedroom, which is a significant commitment of living space. If you have access to a basement or garage, this becomes much more reasonable. Expensive; it’s a big thing with a big price tag.

Approximate Cost: $400

Lighting

Spider Farmer SF7000 (x2) — To cover a 10 x 10 grow tent, you need light and lots of it. What a grow tent does best is use its reflective interior to maximize light efficiency and reach every part of the plant. Light isn’t escaping your tent - it’s bouncing all around inside, reflecting off of walls. Light diffusion is our biggest enemy indoors and the grow tent is your greatest weapon. I’ve chosen an extremely versatile light designed to cover a 5’ x 5’ grow tent, and doubled it. Mounting is less of an issue here than out in your house because grow tents have an internal structure spefically for hanging and mounting lights and equipment.

Pros: Sufficient for a sizable indoor grow.

Cons: Expensive, but any suitable light is going to be at his level.

Approximate Cost: $1,000 ($500 x 2 lights)

Soil

Fox Farm Happy Frog Soil — You’re growing crops now, friend, and that means a lot of soil. According to my estimation, roughly 21 bags of soil at 2 cubic ft. per bag. We’re using Happy Frog because we aren’t going to this expense just to cheap out on our soil. You can buy soil by the cubic yard at this scale (you need about 1.5) but good luck getting it up to your apartment.

Approximate Cost: $735 ($35 x 21 bags)

Accessories

72” x 71” trellises (2) — Two walls of our tent’s perimiter will be for short bush vegetables and climbing plants like cucumbers and beans. Plants will share trellises, which can be mounted in the grow bags or on the floor. Leftover space will go to short bush plants like tomatoes and peppers.

Approximate Cost: $100 ($50 x 2)

VivoSun 5 gallon grow bags (8) — We’ll need about 8 5-gallon bags for our middle planting zone.

Approximate Cost: $32 (10 count)

VivoSun 10 gallon grow bags (12) — We need about a dozen 10-15 gallon grow bags for our perimiter plants.

Approximate Cost: $57 (15 count)

2 gallon hanging baskets (12) — for our strawberries and other hanging plants, we’ll need suitable baskets. 2 gallons is a good bet for plants you expect to produce fruit. 1 gallon might work fine for herbs.

Approximate Cost: $132 (4 packs of 3)

10” x 20” microgreen trays (6) — These shallow 1” trays are perfect for growing micogreens on tiered shelves.

Approximate Cost: $23 (10 pack)

Happy Frog Tomato Fertilizer (Optional) — At this scale we are just going to plan to need fertilizer. 4lbs will last awhile and cover a lot of plants.

Approximate Cost: $19 (4 lbs)

Shelving — We want some tiered shelves that are very customizable and will allow us to place both perimiter and middle plants where we need them. These are great for multiple pots of herbs and trays of microgreens. I went with steel to maximize reflectivity (we don’t want black shelving soaking up all our light).

Approximate Cost: $100

VivoSun 6 Inch Inline Fan (x2) — Even LED lights get hot, and with this kind of coverage and power, in an enclosed system designed to trap light and energy, your tent is going to get hot fast. Airflow is non-negotiable, and you’re going to need two fans - one for intake and one for exhaust. One is going to pull cool air from the room, and the other is going to vent hot air somewhere else. While you aren’t dealing with a lot of dangerous exhaust, it isn’t very helpful to pump hot air into a room that is trying to intake cool air, so I recommend getting a window vent for his purpose. I love these inline fans, they offer a ton of speed control and can even let you create positive pressure by setting them at slightly different speeds.

Approximate Cost: $160 ($80 x 2)

6 inch aluminum ducting — You’re going to need something to conduct that air somewhere. 25 feet of aluminum ducting should be more than enough to get from your exhaust fan to a window.

Approximate Cost: $24

6 inch window dryer vent — You’re going to need a way to safely attach that ducting to your window to vent the hot air out.

Approximate Cost: $30

Budget

This build was fun to plan and is kind of a daydream in terms of budget and space for most of us, but who doesn’t love the idea of a substantial indoor food harvest for yourself and people you care about?

This budget reflects the bare minimum of what I could think of as I went. You can be sure there are many more expenses I didn’t cover - you’re going to need safe electrical to run all of this stuff. I didn’t include temperature monitoring or a watering system. I didn’t account for stools or knee pads. Seeds weren’t included.

The budget for a project of this scale just kind of starts here and goes up. But it’s possible! It is very possible to do this. So for this kind of trouble and expense, what can we expect?

Well, part of the reason we’d set this up in the first place is because we’re trying to make a pretty serious amount of food. At a very rough estimate, using the plants I imagined as I went, and going off of averages per plant, indoors, you could be producing 100 lbs each of vegetables and produce per season, and another 30 or 40 pounds of strawberries and herbs.

If you did a year long cyclical rotation (and why not, if you have a setup like this), you are producing hundreds of pounds of fresh, clean food per year. I’d estimate between 600lbs and 900lbs of food. Per year. Indoors.

Granted, that’s assuming you’re really on top of things, everyhing is going well, your space is efficient and your systems are working for you. But yeah, what do you think 900 lbs of food looks like? What kind of difference could that make for you, your family, the local food bank?

Plus, you’re growing corn in your apartment. That’s pretty cool.

👍 You can do it.

Growing your own stuff is worth it. Even a single little plant can provide emotional and physical benefits, help clean your air, and damn it, help you have a sense of control in a world that is commited to being a nonstop trash fire.

Can you do it for less than I’ve recommended here? Oh, yeah. There are a lot of ways to do any of this. I mostly just wanted to show you what planning these things looks like, to help manage your expectations.

It’s okay to start really small! If you spend $3,000 on a mutual aid tent having never grown a plant to fruition, you are going to curse my name before your first sprout comes up.

Don’t get in over your head! Start with one or two plants, learn them, experience them, and then go from there. Share your produce with friends, or maybe you don’t get a plant to flower your first time! That’s okay! Compost the little guy and use him to feed the next one.

You’re growing indoors. It’s a challenge. It requires learning and experience and a bit of inventiveness and expense to get going, but if you take nothing else away from this, I want it to be this:

Participating matters. If you’re talking to 2 or 3 or 20 other local people about sharing food and pooling resources, and you’re trying, that matters. You’re going to get advice. You’re going to get help. You are participating in - wait for it - mutual aid.

If you are in my gardening circle, I’m going to give you food even if you aren’t contributing the same amount. Even if you aren’t contributing at all! Because you care enough to try, and I am going to gas you up and go absolutely bonkers when you coax that first fruit off of that skinny tomato plant you’ve kept alive longer than any others.

We have to start somewhere. We have to be encouraging. We have to be kind.

You can do it.