Indoor Vertical Gardens: Essential Tips for Starting Your Own

Plants breathe life into a home. They make any space unique, lush, and fragrant. For those with limited living spaces, an indoor vertical garden offers a space-efficient solution. This approach maximizes your available area and opens up a world of creativity and ingenuity.

Inside your home are areas where plants can potentially thrive using various cultivation techniques. The savory Shiitake mushrooms are a prime example. They can be grown in logs or indoors through fruiting blocks.

The options for what to grow in your vertical garden are diverse and delicious. This quick guide aims to answer your important questions when it comes to starting an indoor vertical garden.  

What Is an Indoor Vertical Garden?

A vertical garden involves growing plants in a vertical space, as opposed to the usual gardening that takes up horizontal space. This space-saving system utilizes walls, trellises, fences, ladders, stands, shelves, or other support structures for growing plants vertically in residential and commercial buildings. It also leverages innovative and automated systems for maximum efficiency.  

An indoor vertical garden follows the same principle with configurations adapted to a home interior. You can use a free wall to mount planters on or hang a living portrait of greens. Suspend containers from the ceiling, line them up on shelves, create plant dividers, or completely cover a wall with greenery, also known as a vertical wall garden.

What’s in It for You?

Looking for reasons to cultivate a vertical garden indoors? Consider the following:

• It enhances the beauty of the space.
• It adds color and personality to the room.
• It takes up little space.
• It requires little money to get started.
• It allows you to grow anything — edible or ornamental.

Ideas to Get Started On Your Indoor Vertical Garden

Vertical gardening is a smart and stylish way to grow your herbs and veggies, even in limited spaces. Here's a simple guide to choosing plants that thrive vertically, perfect for your kitchen garden. Save money and enjoy fresh, home-grown flavors right from your wall!

What Plants to Grow for Your Indoor Vertical Garden?

Growing food is one of the best reasons for an indoor vertical garden. Save money and reduce waste by growing your fresh produce. Here are easy picks for your indoor kitchen vertical garden:

• Herbs such as basil, cilantro, mint, oregano, and rosemary
• Mushrooms like lion’s mane and golden oysters designed to be grown indoors
• Vegetables such as tomatoes, onions, and leafy greens (lettuce, kale, and those that can be grown hydroponically)  

Decorative houseplants are also hard to miss. They can be crawling, climbing, trailing, jutting out, or standing upright. Pick those that require nominal maintenance

The top ornamental indoor plants to include in your to-grow list are philodendron and its many varieties, spider plant, and ZZ plant. Flowering indoor plants are also a colorful addition.     

What Are Examples of Indoor Vertical Gardens?

Indoor vertical gardens can be simple or as sophisticated as those seen in commercial installations. Take a look at these examples for your reference:

• A shoe organizer with pockets of herbs
• A vertical wall planter for herbs
• A picture frame full of succulents
• A hydroponic tower garden for DIY
• A living plant wall inside an urban home

What Does Your Indoor Vertical Garden Need?

Cultivating an indoor vertical garden has its fair share of challenges. Take these into consideration before building one of your own:

• Space: Consider the potential height or root system when choosing plants to grow indoors or in containers, as in the case of corn, carrots, fennel, and other herbs.

Because you’ll be maximizing vertical space, go for plants that grow in standard containers that you can manage and prune. Look into tiered and stackable planters.  

Always give your plants enough space to grow.

• Natural Light: While they are generally adapted to thrive indoors, some indoor plants grow better with direct sunlight. Tomatoes and peppers are among those deemed to be high-light plants.

Part of finding the perfect location/s for your indoor garden is the amount of sunlight that goes into that area. You can use grow lights to help meet or supplement your plants’ lighting requirements. It also helps to group plants by their lighting or watering needs.

• Soil (Or None): Plants need nutrients, which they traditionally get from the soil. For your indoor plants, you can use a potting mix that contains no dirt and pathogens. Still, you have to fertilize your plants accordingly to ensure their proper growth.

Hydroponics uses a water-based nutrient solution. The soilless system also uses less water and works indoors. That’s why vertical gardens and hydroponics tend to go together.

Aeroponics is another soilless system that requires minimal water. It instead relies on mist that supplies oxygen and other nutrients. Like hydroponics systems, aeroponic kits are available.

• Water: Plants have unique watering requirements. Underwater them, and their leaves will wilt. Overwater plants and they’ll be susceptible to root rot.

Determine the right amount of water and frequency of watering for your indoor plants based on their species and variables like temperature and humidity. This you can achieve through hand or automatic watering.

• Temperature and Humidity: Houseplants thrive in optimal temperatures. Foliage plants thrive in daytime temperatures of 70 degrees to 80 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures of 60 degrees to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Look into tools or systems that let you control the climate of your indoor space and protect plants from damaging temperature fluctuations. You can also increase humidity, especially during the winter, by grouping plants together.  

Additional Tips for the Indoor Gardener

Protect your home first. Install a barrier or sheet to keep water from damaging the wall in the case of a vertical wall garden. Place saucers underneath pots to contain excess water and dirt. Regularly monitor plants for pests and use homemade pesticides.    

Build your system or buy it as a kit, and garden at your own pace. Add plants gradually, so you can provide for their unique needs effectively.

Automate the upkeep of your indoor vertical garden where possible. It’s also for your peace of mind when you go on vacation.

Final Thoughts

If you are short on space for gardening, try an indoor vertical garden. Grow plants for food, aesthetics, or both in tiers, layers, stacks, etc.

Increase the likelihood of your indoor plants thriving by meeting their needs for lighting, water, space, and temperature. Lastly, give yourself space and time to learn how to go about making your indoor vertical garden. Learn as you tend to this garden, and scale it up or down as your resources permit.

Indoor vertical gardening is an art and a science, after all. Check out more home improvement ideas here.