How To Grow An Apartment Garden [Beginner’s Guide]
Living in the city doesn’t mean you have to be surrounded by concrete and metal all day long. In fact, inside your apartment is one of the best places to grow a garden.
Bringing color and life into your home, an apartment garden looks great and also comes along with benefits for your health and cooking.
Why Grow an Apartment Garden?
There are many reasons to grow an apartment garden, and not just because plants look fantastic.
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Air Purification
One of the unfortunate realities of living in a city is air pollution. That doesn’t have to be bad news, however, as an apartment garden can help to purify the air that you breathe. Studies, including one by NASA, confirm that houseplants filter toxins from the air. Planting an apartment garden is one of the best ways that you can clarify the air in your apartment while complementing your decor style.
Wellbeing
Studies have shown that the presence of indoor plants can improve your general well-being, including your physical and mental health. Having plants around can help to improve your mood while lowering blood pressure levels and stress levels. Planting your apartment garden might just be the key to feeling healthier and happier.
Productivity
In addition to helping you feel better, growing an apartment garden is also likely to make you more productive. Studies have shown that people surrounded by plants are likely to be significantly more productive than those in sparse environments. It’s been suggested that being surrounded by plants can also help to improve memory, creativity, and self-esteem.
Grow Your Own Food and Herbs
Another added benefit of an apartment garden is that you get to eat it! Adding fruit, vegetables, and herbs to your apartment garden will provide you with a constant supply of fresh greens for salads, tomatoes for a pasta dinner, or herbs to take your cooking to the next level.
Planning an Apartment Garden
If those benefits all sound good to you, then the next step is planning your apartment garden, and there’s a lot to consider.
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Indoors or Outdoors
Firstly, do you want to have your garden indoors or outdoors? There’s no right answer here, and it will depend on your apartment and the climate of the city you live in. If you have a terrace, that’s a great place to put bigger, hardier plants. Some plants need constant protection from rain or wind, so these more delicate ones should stay indoors. If you’re putting plants indoors, they can go all through your house, on windowsills, shelves, tables, or directly on the floor.
Sunlight
Plants need sunlight, so no matter where you put your apartment garden, you need to consider how much sunlight your plants will get. Look around your house for warm, sunny spots. While your instinct might be to put your salad greens in your kitchen, if your kitchen doesn’t get natural sunlight, then you should look to a different room.
Space
The space that you have available will help you to decide which plants you can grow. While most plants start small, a lot of them will start to grow very quickly, and it’s no good having a giant lemon tree take over your whole living room. Herbs, for example, can be grown in small pots directly on the kitchen counter or placed on a windowsill. If you’ve got space on your bookshelves, bathroom cabinet, or coffee table, think about which plants might fit there.
Maintenance
All plants need love and attention, but some need more than others. When you’re planning your apartment garden, think about how much time you have. If you have time for regular pruning, watering, and fertilizing, then you can choose high-maintenance plants. If you’re often traveling, or you don’t have spare time for weekend gardening, then find plants that will suit your lifestyle. Nobody wants to come home to a house full of dead plants!
Best Things To Grow in an Apartment Garden
There are many plants out there, and choosing the ones to start with can be overwhelming. Here are some of the best plants to think about growing in your apartment garden.
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Herbs
Fresh herbs are great to have on hand because they can provide a wonderful depth of flavor to your cooking without the expense. Parsley, Mint, Basil, and Oregano are all easy to grow and regularly used for recipes. Even the controversial Cilantro plant is a good herb to grow, as it’s great to be used in curries or as a garnish.
Fresh herbs can be bought from a garden center and re-potted in your apartment garden, or you can start from seed. They thrive in warm, sunny, and sheltered locations, so they are perfect for growing on a counter or windowsill.
Air-Purifying Plants
Many different plants purify the air, although the toxins that are filtered out will depend on the type of plant you choose. Starting big, an Areca Palm is a beautiful plant to consider. It can grow up to shoulder height and has been shown to filter toxins from the air while providing you with oxygen.
Aloe Vera is another excellent choice, working to clear the air of chemicals that come out of household cleaners. Because of this, it’s great in a bathroom or kitchen. For your bedroom, think about the Mother-in-Law’s Tongue or the Variegated Snake plant. This funky plant takes in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen overnight while looking great.
Flowering Plants
The Peace Lily and the Chrysanthemum are two flowering plants that look beautiful and also provide air purification. While a Peace Lily produces sleek, white flowers, if you’re looking for bright, the Chrysanthemum has yellow, pink, or orange flowers sitting atop a bush of dark green leaves.
An orchid is another simple and gorgeous flowering plant. Orchid flowers grow along a single stem, stretching out of large green leaves. They’re striking and come in a range of sizes depending on the variety and pot they’re in. If you’re looking for something small for a shelf or a table, the flowering African Violet is easy to care for and flowers continuously in bright purples or blues.
Salad Greens
Salad greens are a must for your apartment garden, especially if you like eating fresh. Think about mesclun, arugula, and baby spinach. Lettuce grows best in a warm, sunny area, and these loose-leaf varieties don’t need much space, making this another great option for your windowsill.
Eggplants, Peppers, and Tomatoes
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For more substantial fresh vegetables, you can’t go past eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes. All of these vegetables grow on vines above the ground. This means that you don’t have to worry about deep buckets of soil like you would for potatoes or carrots. Because the vines will grow upwards, you’re able to maximize your use of space and grow hearty, healthy vegetables.
Strawberries and Citrus Fruit
Your apartment garden wouldn’t be complete without something sweet. Strawberries are perfect for growing indoors because they produce a lot of fresh fruit without needing much space. Strawberries can be grown in pots of any size, and you can either germinate the seeds yourself or buy a young plant.
Lemon Trees are one of the easiest citrus fruits to grow indoors, and there is a wide range of dwarf varieties available. The dwarf trees still produce full-size fruit but don’t grow as big as a standard lemon tree. This makes them perfect for growing indoors in a pot. As well as looking beautiful, lemons are such a versatile fruit that you can use in deserts, salads, and of course, when life gives you lemons, you can make lemonade!
Caring For Your Apartment Garden
Planting
When you’ve planned your apartment garden, the next step is to begin planting it. Depending on how you’ve bought your plants, you’ll either be starting with seeds that need to be germinated, or you’ll have a small plant that just needs repotting.
First, choose a pot that will suit your plant as it grows, giving the roots space to spread out. Also, consider what you’re going to fill the pot with. Potting mix can be bought at any garden center, and this will provide a good foundation for your plants to begin growing.
Watering
To keep your plants healthy, you need to provide them with the right amount of water. This will differ from plant to plant, so make sure that you learn how much water each needs. Just as you can kill a plant by not watering it enough, unfortunately, you can drown a plant by giving it too much. Cacti and succulents, for example, need very little water, while air plants or palms drink a lot more.
When you’re watering your apartment garden, you should water the plants frequently in small doses rather than one big pour occasionally. It’s also best to water the soil instead of pouring water over the leaves.
Feeding
Plants growing outside source their nutrients naturally, but the plants in your apartment garden can’t stretch their roots as far. They need help in the form of fertilizer.
Liquid fertilizer is common and can be poured into the soil around your plant. Dry fertilizer is also easy to use, although this needs to be mixed into the potting mix, which can be messier.
Nutrients to help your plant to grow can be found in your home kitchen too. Coffee grounds can be sprinkled onto the soil to help manage its acidity level, as can eggshells. Better still is homemade compost so that your food scraps can be turned into a nutrition-rich meal for your plants.
Protecting
Even a well-cared-for apartment garden is likely to face disease or a pest infestation one day. This can happen at any time, although it is most likely in winter when your plants will be growing slower and absorbing fewer nutrients.
Common pests include aphids, fungus gnats, mealy bugs, and spider mites. Look regularly at your plants, keeping an eye out for any unusual bumps, changes to the leaf, or insects crawling around. Once you’ve spotted a pest, the treatment will vary depending on the type of problem that your plant is facing.
Ensuring that your plants are healthy, well-fed, and well-watered is a good preventative action, as this will make them stronger. You can also regularly wipe down the leaves of your plants to prevent any dust from gathering and give your plants good air circulation.
Harvesting
After putting in the work to grow your apartment garden, one of the rewards you get to reap is harvesting! The tasty fruit, vegetable, or herb plants that you’ve grown will eventually mature and be ready for eating.
When harvesting herbs, you should just gently snip away from the top of the plant. It’s best that you only take the leaves you need to use so that the rest can remain growing on the plant. If you do overharvest, don’t worry – you can keep herbs in the fridge for up to a week or dry them to use later.
If you planted tomatoes, eggplants, or peppers, then you’ll see when they’re ready to be harvested. You’ll know that tomatoes and peppers are ready to harvest by their color and eggplant by its size. When they are ready, simply snip them from the plant.
Lettuces and salad greens are easy to harvest too. When your plant is at least 4 inches tall, and the leaves are looking big enough to eat, simply trim them with a clean cut. No matter how tasty they look, don’t take all the leaves. Leaving at least ⅔ of the plant to continue growing and absorbing sunlight will help your plant to continue producing.
Final Thoughts on Growing An Apartment Garden
Growing an apartment garden isn’t always easy, but we promise that it’s worth it. The benefits that plants can provide are numerous, giving us delicious food, an increased mood, and cleaner air to breathe, as well as looking beautiful and adding life to your apartment.
As you develop your green fingers, you can enjoy all these benefits from your apartment garden and more. As a hobby, gardening helps to connect you with the earth and provides a reminder of the beauty and complexity of the world around us. So, what are you waiting for?
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