Reader Question: Growing Tomatoes and More Indoors
By Vanessa Richins
From Patt, Oregon:
“I have a quick question. I haven’t heard of anyone doing this, so there must be a reason. But maybe I don’t know.
We have a daylight basement with lots of southern-facing windows. I would like to grow fresh “garden” food down there in the winter. We live in eastern Oregon (the dry side of the state.) Winter daylight is as little as 8-10 hours in the dead of winter
Does anyone know if one can be successful growing tomatoes in this kind of an inside garden in the winter? If this is possible, are there other fresh-type fruits or vegetables that would be successful for winter indoor-gardening as well?
Thanks!”
Hi Patt! Growing vegetables like you describe can be done…though you would likely need to add in some additional grow lights to the room, as well as make sure the room was kept warm enough.
To understand why, we need to first look at the amount of light inside a house versus outdoors. Light intensity is measured in footcandles. In the outdoor garden on a sunny day, the average amount is 10,000 footcandles of light. However, once you go inside, this can drop drastically.
As the University of Kentucky explains, you may be able to get up to 1000 foodcandles right next to your south-sacing windows. Move the plants 10 feet away from the window, and it can drop down to 100 footcandles.
Tomatoes require about 500-1000 footcandles of light for proper flowering and fruit set. However, the problem of winter needs to be considered. Tomatoes are also warm season plants. It could certainly get too cold for them in winter if they were near the windows, as required for their full amount of light.
I would suggest setting up some additional grow lights in the room to make up the difference in footcandles. I would also suggest making sure to heat the room to at least 60 degrees + for your warm season vegetables. With these conditions, you should be able to still enjoy your own garden food in your basement. Read the article from the University of Kentucky for more details about plant lighting.
Good luck!
July 1st, 2009 at 1:26 pm
[...] contest X Cannabis Indoor herb garden kits Indoor herb garden kits is also a nice resource.website More infos are available here: websiteGrowing Garden of Wishes Bliss Seeds [...]