General Discussion & Chat: My Winter Basement Garden, 1 by joeswife

joeswife wrote:
tammy, i wish my lap top had not crashed. you could have seen the progress of my basement garden over the last few years. what did it for me was one brug that led me to dg to see what i was supposed to do with it. in zone 5 tropicals must come in. some annuals i keep from year to year because i don't like buying new ones, AND i like the challenge of keeping one going all winter.

let me get you started with this information.. the first year my basement had a few blasting heater vents. that drys out the tropicals quickly, so the plastic was bought at dollar tree for a dollar and were clear plastic table liners. the second winter i covered up the vents, ( they won't close they are stuck and broke like everything else in this house) and so I covered up all the vents that were putting out all that heat. good thing is , it sent the extra heat upstairs, where we actually live. the next thing i did was figure out what needed what kind of light. so i started with clamp lights. since my basement has i beams all over the walls, i just used those to clamp the lights on. some stuff goes dormant no matter what. i dumped a bunch of pots that looked like stuff was dead, into a tub and reused that dirt the following spring and had ees and caladiums popping up everywhere from it. I had no clue.

house plants most generally are tropicals, the kinds you see in offices and stuff. they require little light. hibiscus and brugs and other things that require light to stay growing was what i was after. how big is your growing area? I started on my basement garden plans in the mid of last spring, and worked on acquiring the things i would need down there all summer to ready it for this year. bugs could be a problem. one year i had fungus gnats so bad, and aphids too, so i ordered lady bugs, about 5000 of them to eat the aphids,but they didn't eat the gnats. so I bought hanging fly paper rolls and put them by the lights. they were covered with so many gnats they were black at end of winter. ugh. this year i used mosquito tablets in the watering tub.( a DG'r suggested that), which also was different, since i had been making 30 trips up and down with water jugs to water with. keeps you in shape but i hurt my back last year so i had to re-think my thinking. this year i also acquired some shelves with wire racks. that was good. and tables. even better. i had been using anything that was flat to sit on anything that was tall. LOL..
any hoo.. what is your space, where is it, and what do you want to grow outside this year that will not survive a winter in your zone?