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The first issue of Strange Roots went out to 12 people and this issue is going out to 44, so thank you so much to everyone who shared this around. This is clearly resonating with a lot of people right now and I strongly believe that the more people who are learning together and supporting each other, the better. Stable food networks require people, so reaching people is the best thing we can do.
I will address food production at every level, but my early focus is going to be on helping new people get started, and especially people who might live in apartments or indoor spaces with poor lighting who don’t have access to growing space outside. I would say easily half of the people who have asked for gardening advice fall into this category.
The theme of the first issue was Managing Expectations, so I’d like to do that again here. A lot of people discovered during the 2020 quarantine that you can indeed maintain houseplants. Unfortunately, a lot of people got in over their heads, and when the demands of their lives returned, their number of living plants plummeted.
Caring for plants isn’t necessarily hard work, but it can be a lot of work. The more diversity you have, the more there is to keep up with. There is a lot to monitor; moisture needs and levels, when and if it’s time to add supplements based on growing stages. Yellow spots on leaves. Brown edges. Spider mites.
Don’t be intimidated! These are all things you can, and will learn how to manage, and the more you do it, the easier and more intuitive it becomes. That’s why I suggest, if you’re just starting out, try to learn on no more than one or two plants at a time. It is much easier to figure out the care and feeding of one plant than it is ten plants all with different needs, different cycles, and different disease symptoms.
Give yourself at least a growing cycle or two to learn the vagaries of your new plant, and at the point where you feel like taking care of it isn’t really a lot of work anymore, add a new plant! What you learned from the first one will help inform how you think of the next one, and over time you will develop the systems you need to work plant care into your routines.
While it is unlikely that you can grow your entire caloric needs in a normal indoor living space (and if you do, you’re going to be drawing a lot of power and generating a lot of heat), but you can easily maintain some vegetables, herbs, or medicinal plants that help give you a sense of control, add value to your living space, and provide enough for you to share.
In this issue, I’m going to give an overview of plant needs and how they apply to indoor spaces to help you start thinking about what you can support, where you might set up, and what kinds of plants you might want to try first.
Future issues will cover each of these topics individually as we walk through different types of lighting, watering systems, and growing substrates.
Plants need three things to survive, fruit, and reproduce: Nutrients, light, and substrate. All three of these things are abundant outside. All three can be reproduced indoors, but you should understand that growing indoor plants takes more of everything: money, time, and resources. Here, we will go over the basic needs and in future issues explore options for each one.
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Plants need material building blocks to grow, and this comes in the form of chemical nutrients found in the soil. The soil itself is not necessarily the nutrients, but contains the organic matter that contains the nutrients. In living soil, this is a perpetual cycle of plants, animals and insects, and microorganisms living, dying, and returning to plants in a bioavailable form. You probably learned about this in elementary school.
Most indoor plant soil is not living, in the sense that it is not populated by a diversity of insects, springtails, isopods, and other animalia that do a lot of our natural clean up and facilitate the nutrient cycle.
Potting soil arrives loaded with nutrients, having benefited from compost and other amendments, fresh and ready for some growing cycles without worry. Some plants can go a very long time using the nutrients provided in potting soil, but eventually any growing thing is going to deplete its soil of nutrients, and according to its specific needs.
For example, broccoli contains a lot of potassium, which means it needs potassium to grow. It is literally drawing potassium from the soil and incorporating it into its cells, therefore it is going to deplete potassium from the soil at a faster rate than other nutrients. And it will tell you when it’s running low!
Most nutrient deficiencies manifest visibly in plants. In the case of our potassium-starved broccoli, this is going to appear as scorched or curling leaves, stunted growth, and discoloration. Every plant has tells for its deficiencies, and honestly learning these by plant is most of what you’re going to learn about that plant. Unfortunately, they aren’t universal, and plants with multiple problems can be hard to read: too much water, too little light, and too little nutrients can all present similar symptoms on the same plant, so you really have to do a holistic assessment of the plant.
Nutrient management is approaching the more advanced end of gardening, but shouldn’t scare you off. These are things you can learn by plant, and as you face them you will gain experience in diagnosing and treating them, and most of the time nutrients aren’t going to be a problem you have to worry about too much, especially early on. They’re more of a long term concern, and lucky for you a huge body of knowledge and products exist for just that.
Adding nutrients to your indoor plants might look like adding crushed up eggshells to your soil, adding a spoonful of coffee grounds here or there, burying banana peels, or adding some liquid fertilizer to your water.
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Ah, the Old Enemy. Appropriate light is the hardest and most expensive part of successfully growing indoor plants. They always need more than you think, it has to be an appropriate distance, and there is a bit of sticker shock on the kinds of lighting you “should have” versus the ones that are “good enough”.
Furthermore, lighting that is conducive to plant growth isn’t necessarily light you want to sit around in all day. While most indoor grow lights are relatively safe for human exposure (and some are safer than others), if you have a visible UV light, you might not want your waking hours to be bathed in magenta Suspiria lighting.
Lighting is likely to define your indoor grow. Placement and budget will be your main limiting factors. Don’t worry too much about the particulars yet, because next issue, we are going to cover lighting, and will learn:
- what kinds of options there are for indoor growing
- what to budget for your lighting
- how to figure out what kind of lighting you need for specific plants
For now, just think about where you might want to set up your lights with the following considerations:
- most lighting hangs from a hook; this is good, because it gives you a lot of control over distance to your plants (if hanging a light isn’t an option, grow bulbs for traditional light sockets do exist and we will cover those as well, they’re just going to be further from your plants)
- obviously you’ll need a convenient place to plug them in
- the area will also need to have space for your plants to grow to their full sizes
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If insufficient lighting is what keeps most plants from growing, improper watering is what kills most otherwise healthy plants. It’s either too much or not enough.
Either you’re too worried about not watering enough and you drown your poor plant (and drowning looks a lot like dehydration - helpful!), or it slips your mind once too often and you have a plant that hasn’t been watered in four months (some plants are fine with this!).
The lesson here as a new gardener is simply not to listen to your instincts. You know plants need water, but you have no idea when or how much, and this is going to be different for nearly every plant.
You’re going to learn everything you can about your individual plants, including their light exposure, temperature needs, nutrient usage, and when and how much to water.
Then you are going to set up a reminder, alarm, journal or whatever task tracking mechanism you use to check the plant’s watering (note, not watering it automatically - not yet). For most of the plants I’ve tended, that has meant sticking my finger into the substrate to a certain depth (usually one knuckle or the other depending on the plant) and whether or not I sense moisture.
There are other ways to check moisture. There are soil moisture meters that you can stick right in the soil and get a direct reading. Other times, you can feel by the weight of your plant if it’s time for a top off.
The reason you aren’t going to begin by automatically watering is that a lot of factors affect your plants’ rate of moisture loss, including temperature, humidity, and airflow. Plus, I want you to learn to assess plants for watering needs rather than just relying on a schedule from the outset.
Eventually you will establish a consistent pattern - my plant needs a deep watering every two weeks - and then you can implement either a manual or automated watering process.
The main thing is that if you’re here to learn how to grow food or medicine, we don’t guess. We assess. Assessment takes time, knowledge, and practice.
As for water delivery, you have options ranging from the trusty watering can to automated, timer-based watering systems. I have, and continue to use everything in different situations, and will cover them all in the indoor watering issue.
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