How to Maintain Your Vegetable Gardening when Downsizing Your Home
If you have found yourself displaced from your home for any reason, be it foreclosure, cost-cutting, or empty nesting, you may be thinking that you have to give up your organic garden along with the extra square footage of living space. Rest assured that you can continue to enjoy the benefits of saving. Here are some tips to help you make the transition a smooth one for your vegetables.
Change the type of tomatoes you grow to an indoor-friendly variety.
Tomatoes are the most commonly grown food in a vegetable garden, even though they’re not actually a vegetable. Still, you’ll need to choose a determinate tomato plant. Determinate simply means they only grow to a predetermined length, but the plant will be more fruit-dense as compared to an indeterminate variety.
Choose a large pot for the tomato plant and give it plenty of water.
The most important thing you’ll need to grow great tomatoes indoors is water. Not perfect soil or perfect sunlight, but water. Here are some determinate varieties of tomato plants that do well indoors: Roma, Celebrity, Rutgers, and Marglobe.
Determinate tomato plants will ripen quickly (two weeks) which is good news for you. Once you move to your new place, you will be able to grow, ripen, and harvest your tomatoes quickly all year long.
Make your own organic compost.
If you’re used to buying manure for your outdoor vegetable garden, you’ll need to switch to something less smelly for indoors. You can purchase organic soil amendment material, but remember you moved to save money. Start your own compost pile with scraps left from slicing strawberries, peeling bananas and potatoes, and cracking eggs (use the shell). You can even recycle your newspaper and use it in your compost pile but be sure to shred the paper. Don’t put any fat, oil, meat, cheese or any similar materials or you’ll attract some new creepy, crawly roommates to your new place.
Keep your compost pile in the corner on your patio or at your back door.
Some apartment complexes are strict about what containers/items can be left outside your front or back door. You may have to be creative about what container you choose by buying an approved flower pot and using a lid.
Follow these simple tips and you’ll be able to maintain your organic tomato plants indoors year-round. Learn how to recycle your trash into free organic compost, fertilizer, and mulch here.
