Indoor Food Production – the Organic Way

Looking to grow vegetables indoors? Try this ingenious new idea. It makes organic gardening in your own home cheaper than ever because it uses recyclable materials. This clever system is called GrowFlutes. An indoor GrowFlute will grow you almost any small plant, edible or otherwise, decoratively and conveniently.

Your first step is to slice the base from a big squash or cola bottle, about three inches from the bottom. Keep this little tub. It makes a nice growing pot. The rest of the bottle is your GrowFlute. Take the cap off.

Now you have a clear ‘flute’ around nine inches high. It will grow almost any salad, herb or small vegetable plant. Let’s start with a foolproof example of indoor vegetable gardening. Dandelions.

Why dandelions? They’re both edible and beautiful!

Remove a dandelion from the garden, making sure its long root is intact. Cut off its larger leaves and push the root into the neck. Turn the flute upside down. Now put a capillary cord into the flute. This can be any non-degradable fibre like a shoe lace, or a strip cut from nylon socks or stockings and twisted together. Wind it around the taproot. Now add damp compost to the bottle and tamp it down firmly.

Put your GrowFlute on a tray, such as the plastic packs used by supermarkets for perishable foods.

Rest the GrowFlute in the saucer on a base of corks, gravel, hydroleca or any inert thing that will raise it above the bottom of the tray. The emerging roots will need some drainage and air but they will soon be trimmed by the air and will not ramble too far.

Fill the saucer with water and make sure your capillary cord is well steeped too. Now expose your flute to good light, such as a south-facing window. In a week or so you’ll be rewarded with fresh lush leafy, and edible, growth. Tomato growers call this ‘ring culture’, but a GrowFlute is more decorative.

You don’t need a garden to raise delicious food

You can cut the leaves two or three times a week and gain fresh-food vitamins without even needing to leave your house. Eventually, they may flower into a beautiful blossom. (Just don’t let them go to seed or you’ll be cropping fresh dandelions from your curtains.)

For long-term food production, the GrowFlute will need feeding after a few weeks. The ideal organic feeds are nettle or comfrey infusions but do be careful about using them indoors. They have a powerful smell.

Of course, dandelions are just one possible candidate for your GrowFlute. Any small plant can be grown in a GrowFlute, either from a seedling or the seed itself. Provided your capillary wick is set well in place, you can water the GrowFlute thereafter from the saucer.

Grow salad plants in the depths of winter

Good crops of common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and broad beans can be grown successfully in GrowFlutes, indoors on a south-facing window sill, even in December. Legumes need very little root space, if well fed and watered.

A great indoor gardening idea is to put tinfoil or metallic ‘holographic’ gift wrap paper under, and ideally behind, any plants you grow on your windowsill to throw back the light.

Such methods were no novelty for Victorian gardeners. They ‘forced’ peas, dwarf beans, strawberries, rhubarb and every type of unseasonable plant, indoors in winter, and thought little of it. The GrowFlute lets us replace a hothouse with our own living rooms. Another virtue of the GrowFlute is that, if we fill the trays with water, they’ll look after themselves for a week or more.

GrowFlutes can also be ornamental. We need merely paint them or clothe them in a suitable fabric.

A wicked idea for a dinner party is to place a GrowFlute beside each guest and let them cut their own fresh salads. It will make a memorable conversation starter.