While everyone appreciates a nice garden, not everyone has the outdoor space needed to grow vegetables or ornamental plants. Indoor gardens have become a big trend over the last few years, with wall gardens, terrariums, and indoor herb gardens transforming lifeless indoor spaces into beautiful green areas. Whether you're an ornamental cultivator, a gourmet home chef, or simply someone who's mad for veggies, there's a lot you can do in even the tightest of indoor spaces.
Terrariums are the ideal space-saving solution, with these miniature gardens in glass containers taking the world by storm over the last couple of years. From basic tanks shapes through to bottles, fish bowls, or dodecahedrons, terrariums are a great way to brighten up your home or bring your office to life. While they may be small in size, terrarium cultivation can be a fun hobby, with people picking various soil and plant combinations and serious terrarium folk attempting to create sealed microcosmic environments.
If you want to go a big bigger than a terrarium, there are lots of other ways to start an indoor garden. According to Amazon, the sale of indoor allotment kits rose by more than 950 percent in 2015, including windowsill boxes for growing herbs, indoor strawberry growing kits, and ceiling-hanging pots. Dedicated wall gardens are also popular, with people growing flowers, herbs, or even veggies in sunny internal spaces. According to Telegraph garden writer Mark Diacono, “The town or city is perhaps the ideal place to create a kitchen garden. The warmer, more sheltered urban climate gives you a fine edge on those in the country.”
If you're ready to get serious about growing food indoors, hydroponic gardens are a great solution. Commercial products such as the Hyundai Kitchen Nano provide a great off-the-shelf solution, with water filter and lighting products helping people grow all sorts of plants without the need for sunlight or soil. Some hydroponic and soil-based planting systems are even self-watering, meaning there is very little to do except sit back and enjoy your produce.
While most indoor gardens are simplified, smaller versions of outdoor setups, a few innovative products have branched out into new territory. Moss wallpaper is one such idea, with Japanese designers Nendo managing to create a green living wallpaper that turns your home into a forest. While having actual moss growing from your walls is not for everyone, this is a great example of how to add a sense of natural texture to your home. Green walls and room dividers are also available, as are flower chandeliers, plant lights, and indoor garden cabinets.
According to Helen Battersby from Gardenfix in Toronto, “Whether it’s a terrarium, a living wall or an indoor planter, people are becoming more interested in treating a plant pot as a small-scale landscape... Instead of just having a single houseplant in a pot, they’re applying “thriller, spiller, filler” container gardening techniques and other design principles to indoor gardens.” Whether you live in an apartment or simply want to make your house feel greener and more alive, there are more ways to create indoor gardens than ever before.
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