If you live in an apartment or condo and don't have space for a garden, you might be looking at ways to grow vegetables indoors in containers. Many plants can be grown indoors since you can use grow lights if there isn't enough natural light, but using soil and pots indoors can be messy. Consider growing your indoor garden hydroponically instead. An easy way to start is by growing microgreens using hydroponic mats. Here's why.
You Can Harvest Food Fast
If you want to grow a garden to add more organic produce to your diet or even go on a raw food diet, you'll have to wait for months for most vegetables to be ready to harvest. You can grow microgreens on hydroponic mats and harvest salad greens in just days. Stagger planting the seeds, and you'll have a continuous harvest of many kinds of lettuce and greens all year since you can plant all year long inside your house.
Hydroponics Equipment Is Affordable
The equipment you need for growing microgreens indoors is not expensive, so it's easy to get started. You'll need plastic growing trays with no holes in the bottom and hydroponic sheets. Both of these are affordable and leave you with more money to spend on buying seeds.
You'll need at least two trays for each crop so you can use one for planting and the other for a dome to hold in moisture until the seeds take root. Depending on how much light your growing room receives, you might need to buy an LED grow light, but a grow light isn't always necessary.
Growing Microgreens Is Easy
When you grow microgreens hydroponically, it's important to use pure water that's been filtered. You pour the water in a growing tray and then put down a growing mat so it can soak up all the water. Then you sprinkle the seeds on top and mist them with water. The moisture is held in by the tray that's kept on top of the seeds until the roots are strong, and then the seeds can be exposed to light until they are ready to harvest.
Harvesting microgreens is easy, too. You can snip the greens near the mat and not worry about messy soil. The mat can be tossed in your compost pile since they are only used one time. Wash and dry the greens in a salad spinner, and they're ready to enjoy. You might want to sample the greens each day as they're growing so you track how the flavor changes. This helps you identify the perfect day for harvesting the next time you plant.
Seeds for growing microgreens hydroponically are usually the small seeds, while the larger seeds do better in soil. Before you start growing your seeds, read the instructions so you know the right growing method to use and how to plant and harvest the seeds.
To learn more, contact a place that carries hydroponics equipment.
