A Kitchen Garden You’ll Love All Year

We love our outdoor garden but in Northern Illinois, we only get to enjoy the harvest for a limited amount of time. Lucky for us, we enjoy beautiful greens, microgreens, and herbs all year round, even in winter when the snow is blowing when we grow with our USA Made LED grow lights!

This beautiful kitchen garden could be growing in your home very soon, any time of the year.

Why Grow An Indoor Kitchen Garden?

Because it:

• won’t take up much space
• is super convenient and easy to take care of
• can be highly productive
• helps you be self-reliant

The reality of always having fresh greens and herbs is truly a game-changer. You’ll wonder why not everyone is doing this.

For your home, we emphasize growing greens, microgreens, and herbs to start with because they are the fastest growing, most renewable, and cost effective crops for a kitchen garden. When we talk about greens, remember that includes arugula, kale, bok choy and all manner of leafy goodness!  We are always having fun trying out new varieties of leafy greens – it’s wondrous how many there are.

If you avoid buying herbs at the store because they are expensive and don’t last long, well, that’s no longer a problem. We grow buckets full of our favorites, like basil and parsley, that last for months, and only cost pennies to grow. See how easy it is!

Here is a quick start guide we put together that explains the basic process we use to start seeds and grow these beautiful plants. 

Kitchen Gardening – Best Veggies To Grow

Spinach Is Not Just For Popeye Anymore!

Spinach is a crop that many people ask about, and we admit it wasn’t working well in the jars for us. After having some fun with experimenting, we now have a really reliable growing method, using coconut coir and vermiculite. This makes it super easy to add it to your kitchen garden. The video with details on growing spinach will be linked to this blog in the very near future and it will be part of the YouTube videos.

Beets – Beets – Beets

There is so much goodness, deliciousness, and a lot of nutrition packed into each square inch of beet so it makes a lot of sense to grow them in your kitchen garden. While they are awesome all around, we are more interested in eating the beautiful, tender beet greens. When grown indoors they’re not half as tough as their outdoor cousins. Another upcoming video is about growing beets and other delicious root vegetables.  

Lettuce Inspire You to Grow Varieties of Greens!

Allow us to introduce you to our friend, Pablo. As a long-time vegetarian, a once-commercial-grower-of-leafy-greens, and an avid home gardener, I have had my fair share of lettuce over the years. But my #1, all-time, most fave one of them all is Pablo. Pablo is beautiful, well-behaved, and tastes AH-MAzing. It also wins awards from me for regenerating super quickly after being harvested. An added bonus is that he has unique inverse-cup-shaped leaves that beg you to make lettuce wraps of them. Grow it.  You’ll love it.  We purchase the seeds from Seed Savers. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog in which we will provide you with several other “faves” in our greens lineup.

Learn from Happy Leaf!

Our YouTube channel has plenty of videos in which we share many details on our methods and on how to get your kitchen garden going. We have lots more videos in the production line as we hone our methods and ramp up production. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on “notifications” (the little bell), so you’ll get notified when we post new videos.

Click here for an in-depth guide for all of your technical grow light questions.

We continue to experiment so that we can help anyone who wants to have an amazing indoor kitchen garden. We started a Facebook group called “Seed Starting and Plant Growth with Happy Leaf LEDs.” If you’re interested, just find the group and ask to join. We’re so impressed with those awesome things people are showing us and we enjoy answering questions as well.  

Please connect with us any way you like. Ask us questions and share your successes. We love hearing from you.

Happy Leaf LED is a proud member of The National Garden Bureau.