Beginners Gardening

Cheer Up Your Window This Winter With A Garden To Grace It!

When winter sets in soon and nips at your toes, dont let the blues get to your love for gardening outdoors…simply bring it in indoors!

Yes, we recommend an indoor window garden to boost your spirits and keep the gloomy winter feel out in the cold with sensibly chosen winter plants – some fragrant and colorful, others edible and flavorful for enhancing your winter menus. Try this wonderful winter gardening remedy today:

Your windowsill is the perfect place for starting a seasonal indoor garden that will sustain your wintry gardeners soul and warm your heart with perfect seasonings for tasty, nutritious and wholesome soups, broths and stews if you plant timely, healthful herb when ushering out autumn.

Along with the versatile herbs like basil, compact dill and Greek Oregano, you can also consider thyme and parsley besides coriander that readily take to windowsill gardening and are likely to fill your winters with fragrance, greenery and soothing, medicinal value when added to soups!

These only require regular watering and a few hours of sunlight to grow and so are easy to grow even for those not blessed at birth with a green thumb.

Perhaps, some eye candy – in the form of fresh flowers that are regarded as winter blooms – can be your daily delight with just a snip of a seed packet, pre-prepared potting soil that has been treated for fertilizer mix and contains the necessary peat moss etc. for helping indoor plants nasturtiums, pansies and calendulas.

Sure to bring a smile to your face and color to the room, flowering indoor plants in your window garden, when tended with a little bit of sunshine, water and right soil-mixture, are the best bet for beating winter blues!

It is a difficult task to keep your indoor plants healthy. Therefore it will make a big difference if you chose those plants that could easily adapt to the indoor environment such as lesser light, heat and water.

It is not uncommon for plants to grow much slower indoors than they would outdoors. Many plants are known to stop growing or showing sign of development or change from fall to winter.

Indoor plants have different needs compared to outdoor plants and this means that they should not be “killed with kindness” either.

It is necessary to control the temperature indoors for the plants to thrive. It is recommended to keep the temperature between 60 degrees to 70 degrees F during the daytime and 55 to 65 degrees during the night.

It is advisable to keep the plants away from a drafty location as this could lead to the plants drying. Instead of keeping your plants in direct sunlight, it will do them good to keep them in a place that gets adequate light but not directly from the sun.

The varying changes in the day and night temperature will only damage the plants.

In the winter, the indoor environment gets a lot drier than the summer. This adversely affects the plants. Therefore it is advised to spray bathe the plants twice a week to keep them healthy.

Finally, a word about watering the plants: Tap water from your home is not good for your plants. You should store the water in a container and use it for watering the plants after keeping it for a day or two. This will help dissipate the Chlorine which damages the plant.

While all plants are quite apt to prosper indoors, they do need more or less the same conditions to grow as outdoor plants do. These conditions are a good supply of fresh air, proper sunlight, water and nutrients such as plant food commonly known as fertilizer.

We will include here a few tips that are sure to make your indoor plants grow healthier and add beauty to your surroundings.

Ever notice how plants will face the source of sunlight? This is because the sun is the main source of their nutrition. Plant leaves change water and nutrition from the soil to food through a process called photosynthesis.

A couple of hours of sunlight is a must for your indoor plants. If you do not have a place where you can have adequate sunlight, and cannot move the plants you should consider purchasing a couple of indoor gardening lights.

Ordinary lights will not do. Indoor gardening lights provide enough of ultraviolet light to nourish the plants.

Provide adequate water to your plants. Your indoor plants need room temperature water to survive. Do not over water the plants, most plants die due to a lack of water or a surplus of it than they do of any other reason.

Follow a rule of thumb, like you test a cake you should pierce a knitting needle into a plant container. If the needle goes in with ease the soil is just the right dampness, if not increase the quantity of water a bit.

Fertilizers are also important, once a fortnight add a scoop of indoor plant fertilizer to your plant pot. Used tealeaves are also a very good supply of nutrition to your plant.

Follow these simple tricks and you will see your indoor garden prospering very soon.