If you live in a small apartment, dorm room, van, or boat, indoor gardening might sound like a pipe dream. Thankfully, small space living doesn’t have to mean you give up on your green-fingered dreams.
With a little creativity, you can easily grow a kitchen garden or cultivate the houseplant collection of your dreams. Here’s how.
Use Vertical Space
Having limited floor space doesn’t limit your options with plants in a small living gardening.
By using tiered planters, installing shelves, or even creating a room divider using climbing crops or modular planters, you can easily install a home garden that doesn’t take up too much space. This will take a good degree of planning, as some areas may not get enough sunlight for certain plants or crops.
However, if you’ve got free vertical space opposite or adjacent to a window, this is prime real estate for building a vertical home garden. A little lift can have a large impact.
This is one of our favorite tips because it doesn’t matter how much space you’ve got. For small wall spaces, you can install short floating shelves for small planters, which is ideal for plants like succulents, cacti, or herbs.
If you’ve got more vertical space to work with, you can use tiered planters to grow crops like carrots, peppers, and sprouting broccoli.
Similarly, you can also get raised, slim planters that are perfect for hallways or tighter paths in your home. These also leave floor space underneath free for you to stack shoes or storage baskets beneath.
Having multiple vertical solutions will give you a nice diverse garden, maximizing the limited space you have for the greenest impact.
Grow Compact and Climbing Crops For Your Small Living Gardening
When you’re limited for space, you’ll need to spend more time planning what crops and plants you want to grow. Specifically, we recommend sticking to compact crops that don’t overhang their planters or climbing crops.
While larger plants like monsteras and trailing ivies can look beautiful, they require more space around the plant to flourish. These can be well suited for creating room dividers or privacy screens, but they won’t work as well if you’re using floating shelves or compact planters.
Plants like succulents, air plants, bird of paradise, chives, and cherry tomatoes are great compact plants that don’t take up too much space outside of their planter.
If you’ve got plenty of vertical space to work with, you could also focus on growing climbing plants like cucumbers, peas, beans, and Bleeding Heart for your small living gardening. Most climbing plants thrive indoors and can make for beautiful feature walls or room dividers without taking up too much floor space.
Many plants also have dwarf varieties that take up less space, and they’re typically bred to put more energy into producing fruits and vegetables over climbing or expanding. We highly recommend looking into these so that not only will you have a nice garden, but a delicious one as well.
Add Plants to your Bathroom
Bathrooms can often have a lot of unused space on the walls or floor, so why not add some greenery?
One thing to note with plants in your bathroom is that they need to tolerate humidity well. Plants like succulents and cacti that need very infrequent watering might not fare well in this room, but moisture-loving Pothos or cucumber plants will thrive here. If you aren’t sure on the moisture levels, check out our guides.
You can also turn a disused corner of your bathroom into a propagation station if your bathroom gets plenty of natural light. With the warmth and humidity in this room, it’s a great place to germinate seedlings ready for planting elsewhere in the home.
Consistency is key, so you could make checking on your propagation station part of your morning routine.
Buy a High-Tech Smart Planter
Smart planters are a brilliant investment, particularly if your plant graveyard is far larger than you’d like to admit. These planters have a wonderfully small footprint and usually allow you to grow multiple plant varieties together through a unique pod system.
Smart planters also typically work on hydroponics, so you don’t have to worry about watering them. Simply fill up the water tank when it gets low and the planter takes care of the rest.
We love these planters because they come included with LED lights, so they’re fantastic for growing veg or houseplants wherever you have space. It saves a ton of time hunting around for a well-lit windowsill or shelf, making indoor gardening as easy as possible for your small living gardening.
Use Succession Planting for Frugal Small Living Gardening
If you’re looking to grow fruit or veg in your small space, consider succession planting. There are two main ways you can use this technique:
- Carefully plan your crops so you’ve got a crop ready to sow when the first is ready to harvest, or;
- Plant multiple crops together that mature at different times.
For example, you could grow an early harvest crop like french beans, and immediately after harvest, sow carrots ready for harvesting in the winter.
You could also plant crops that take longer to mature, like sprouting broccoli, in the center of a planter, and sow fast-growing crops like lettuce or microgreens around the border.
Either way, this technique can maximize the “productive time” of each planter. Plus, you can save a ton of space using one planter for multiple crops and harvests.
This does take a little more planning than growing one crop per container, but it’s well worth the effort.
Gardening in Small Spaces: In Summary
Living in a small space doesn’t have to mean giving up your houseplant collection or kitchen garden. Even if you think every nook and cranny of your home is being used, chances are you’ve got a disused wall, corner, or even room on a step that you can use to grow vegetables or ornamental plants for your small living gardening.
It’ll take time, creativity, and a good deal of research into how well different plant varieties grow indoors, but it’ll be completely worth it to stir homegrown chilis into your favorite dish or come home to your houseplants in full bloom.