Growing Food Indoors

[SeaSlugUFO]

Me and my husband live in an apartment with no outdoor space. Does anyone have any experience with gardening indoors? What's your setup like? What kind of things are you growing? Do you deal with a lot of bugs indoors? Share your knowledge 

I've seen some information about microgreens and focusing more on leafy greens and herbs indoors, but what about tomatoes and other veggies?

[BlackMageGaming]

Over a decade ago , my father was obsessed with end of world scenarios and living in fallout shelter-esque situations. Thus, in our basement was a little grow rack of vegetables he would grow, connected to about 8 car batteries, and those car batteries were connected to 2 different solar panels. He would grow a lot of spinach peppers, carrots, things you put in salads. He would pickle them and store them in the same room, then grow some more.

From what I remember, he always wanted to find a way to grow potatoes, but he could never get it to work. Maybe he didn't water them enough? Or maybe the temperature was wrong?

What he would grow was good enough for us, I didn't get to eat too much because he would pickle so much.

I made a mental note of his setup when we unfortunately had to take it all down when we moved away from our home. And they went unused for a long time.

I'd say your best bet would be herbs, they're pretty low maintenance from what I remember.
    

[Tuffy!]

You can grow vegetables indoor just fine. Some need to be pollinated by hand though. But tomatos are self-pollinating for example, peppers, chilis and eggplant will work fine as well. As long as you have a big fan blowing air around in your grow room or grow chamber and you regularly touch your plants at all the right places, a lot of plants will start to produce food for you even when there are no insects around. Manual pollination isn't rocket science as well, you just need a small paint brush or a cotton swab and touch and stroke each flower of the plant gently, you just have to hit the right time window.

Besides that, all you need is a good artificial light source because a lot of these plants need high intensity lighting. A 100w led is fine to start IMHO. Getting a bigger one doesn't hurt though. It all depends on the amount of space you have and the type of plants that you are gooing to plant. You could as well start with a 100w light source and buy another one or two afterwards as an add-on. This way you can start to grow on a much bigger space in terms of ft²

Some plants may need a specific temperature range but mostly all vegetables grow well when room temperature is reached and the temp within the grow space is below 86°F, around 78 to 79 °F is ideal for most vegetables that I know of.

Btw. did you know that a lot of the plants that are commonly classified to produce vegetables do produce fruits instead?

Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins and eggplants are considered to be fruits from a botanical standpoint, because they contain seeds and emerge from the flower after it has been pollinated.