About how to plants indoor

Welcome jeremy954,

I'm hoping to grow lettuce over the winter this year because of an accidental crop I grew in the spring.

First, light is very important! However I use a combination of regular T8 fluorescent and LED shop light fixtures with good results though I'm usually only growing under light for 6-8 weeks. This year I grew lettuce transplants and one variety of old seed didn't come up very well. So I planted those 6 or eight seedlings in a plastic mixed greens container from the grocery store and kept them watered. Because the other seedling germinated better they were transplanted first while the ones in the container were passed over repeatedly. I harvested a few of the leaves and then a few more and was averaging a salad a week. I did a demonstration on gardening for a group I belong to and took the lettuce along as an example. Somehow the lettuce ended up at my mom's house and I told her to put it under the lights and keep it watered and she harvested from it for at least another month.

While I'd love to try hydroponics in the future, right now I don't have the time or space to dedicate to something new. However I'm going to experiment with a few different varieties of lettuce, spinach and possibly radishes in soil under lights this winter. I did end up with two 5000 lumen LED lights whereas my others are around 3000. I noticed my transplants grown under the 5000 lumens lights took less time to get acclimated to being outside than the others and will probably choose those for my winter growing.

I'm not saying the way I do it is the right way, just that it's what has worked for me and what I plan to experiment further.

emmsmommy,It seems that we are thinking of going together. I also plan to start growing vegetables indoors before winter comes, although it is still a bit early.

Welcome to the forum, jeremy954!

So what kinds of vegetables are you considering growing indoors? In the off-season, I grow herbs and greens indoors, in hydroponics. I never tried tomatoes or other fruiting vegetables, partly because they are going to need even more light, plus, if I started it from seed, it would take about 3 months for the fastest ripe ones, while greens I start harvesting in a month! And many of the "cut and come again" varieties keep growing back indefinitely. As for the herbs, I grow basil, but small, bushy varieties, so they don't grow into the lights as fast - Gecofure and Serrata are my favorites, along with Siam Queen, for Thai basil. Also parsley, red epazote, peppermint, plus a number of herbs I tried only once, due to being attractive to aphids or spider mites.

For greens I grow leaf lettuce and green mizuna. The two red mizunas that I tried bolted quickly, while the green grows almost indefinitely, and keeps growing back, after cutting back.

The size of the plants, and speed of growth in the hydroponics made it only necessary to have one of most of these plants - I'd have one each of two leaf lettuces, and three mizuna,in a larger pot, and I couldn't use them fast enough! Here's a thread, showing some of our success:
organicgroup.freeforums.net/thread/4439/hydroponics

The hydroponics I do is deepwater, and I put a small aquarium powerhead in each one, with a sponge attached. The nutrients I use are not organic - when I started, the organics were not something you'd want to smell, and the smell would get worse, like a dirty aquarium! There are better ones now, but I don't need them, as they last just about forever, so I haven't had to buy any, since I got some deals from a place going out of business.

I grew some of these things indoors in soil mix, before doing this, and they did well, but I needed more plants, and the pots would get rootbound fairly quickly, unless fairly large.
And something that I do with my plants in soil, to prevent fungus gnats, is water with a solution of Microbelift - something made with B. israelensis - used to prevent mosquito larvae in ponds. This is the same thing used in mosquito "dunks", which I break off bits of to put in the hydroponics every couple of months. Either method you are using for indoor growing, you have to prevent those fungus gnats!

For the lights, the herbs and greens don't need quite as much as fruiting plants, and the daylight and blue bulbs - 5,000k & 6,500k - are good for these, as well as seedlings. For fruiting plants, lower k bulbs help the flowering.