Choosing a Pot For Indoor Growing & Greenhouse Farming

I’m an avid vegetable gardener and have been growing food for over 50-years.  I’ve tried a lot of methods from traditional outdoor gardening to hydroponics and I’ve had mixed results with each.

I started with traditional raised beds and built a number of outdoor 12-foot x 4-foot cedar plank beds.  Each bed was leveled and the ground below was dug out to make room for commercially-created organic compost.  We grow all organically so that lead to the choice of cedar planks over pressure-treated lumber or concrete-based solutions.  I also added in a simple drip irrigation system to each bed to make the maintenance and watering of each bed much easier.

Irrigation can be accomplish simply with hose timers and readily available drip irrigation lines or even traditional garden hoses with soaker hoses on the end.  I chose a buried 1/2-inch line running from a hose timer and simple drip irrigation lines.

These beds worked well, however the outdoor beds quickly became the target of our neighborhood groundhogs and racoons.  After an entire season’s worth of sweet corn was wiped out in one night, I modified two of the beds to add hardware cloth screening and cedar support for heavy heirloom tomatoes.  While this blocked out the predators, it also blocked out the sunlight and made the beds less effective overall.

This lead us to begin seriously considering indoor growing, however the mess a tomato plant can make indoors and our hesitation to add the artificial lighting electrical expense all pushed us toward a greenhouse.  Eleven years ago we added a small home-attached greenhouse.  Our wish to keep it clean dictated concrete floors with drains and that lead to the need to choose pots to grow in.

While we started with simple 5-gallon pails, we quickly realized they had their limitations with depth, durability and drainage.  After some extensive investigation  we landed on the Octopot from https://www.octopot.com/grow-room.html.

These pots provided two root zones, optimal and consistent moisture and faster growth.  These pots came out of the cannabis-growing industry where you’ll need the best custom rolling trays but they worked really well for tomatoes.  We found the tomatoes really liked the two root zone setup and the fruit really ripened in a more abundant and consistent manner.  The mix of roots developing in growing media and roots growing directly in water really accelerated the rooting and growing process and even help prevent root rot and various tomato fruit diseases.

Best of all these pots self irrigate without the need for electrical connections and complex pumping systems.  This allows us to go on vacation without the need for risky irrigation systems or hiring a plant baby sitter.

We also added some traditional grow bags to grow potatoes and even some sweet corn.  These also worked well for beets and even pickling cucumbers.  It is a little more challenging with insect pests in the greenhouse (and pollination), however it continues to be much easier than fighting with racoons and ground hogs.  Depending on your location, you may need to add shade cloth for specific plants that don’t love full sun, and be sure to add fans for air movement and vents to help balance extreme temperatures on a sunny day.

Overall we think indoor and greenhouse farming is the way to go and we plan to add more space in the future.  Greenhouse farming offers a lot of advantages over traditional outdoor farming, and even in a small greenhouse you can produce a large crop.