Do you want to provide fresh vegetables for your family but don’t have the funds to purchase an indoor growing station kit? Maybe you worry about pesticides or even the E. coli outbreaks that have spread across our country in recent years. I am always concerned about providing good food to my family, and one of the ways we are working toward better health is using our indoor vegetable growing station.

One of the biggest challenges I face is providing healthy food to our family year-round. We don’t live in a food desert. I’d classify it more like a food plain with not a huge amount of options really close by. You know the old computer game you played in middle school called Oregon Trail? Sometimes I make some great finds in the food world near us. Other times, the wheel falls off the wagon and I have to forge across the river pulling my stubborn oxen behind me and one gets swept downstream. Have I lost you here?

Creating an Indoor Growing Station…

I have wanted an indoor greenhouse space for like, ever. But they are expensive. I didn’t want to spend $300 or more on something when it could be cobbled together with items I already had. Enter Macgyver. No, not Richard Dean Anderson (who is totally cute even though he’s A LOT older!), but my sweet husband who calmly fixes or creates many things for me. Note: he does carry a Swiss army knife in his pocket most days.

To begin the process of making our own indoor greenhouse, we started looking through our junk… I mean, treasures. Our main structure is an  unused old metal shelving. My husband used a small drill bit to place a hole at either end of the shelves for a suspended growing light. He did this again two shelves down so that we could hang a growth light over two separate shelves. You can find the lights and fixtures at your local home improvement center. We purchased our growing lights from Menard’s and the light fixtures were a gift a few years ago. However, the same bulbs are available from Amazon.com, too.

The end result? A perfectly usable indoor greenhouse for less than $30. I’m totally excited! We’re using a timer on the lights, too, so we don’t have to worry about turning the lights off and on each day. My family will (hopefully) have year-round access to healthy food choices like spinach and microgreens.  I won’t have to worry about losing anyone to yellow fever or a rattlesnake bite. (more Oregon Trail references) Seriously, though, I am concerned about the outbreaks of E. coli on our food supply. I want to limit my family’s exposure to those harmful little beasties. My indoor greenhouse on the cheap makes me feel a lot better about providing my family food outside-of-the-box.

If you’d like instructions and a supply list to make your own greenhouse, just click here for a free printable! Good luck on growing healthy food in your little piece of the world! 🙂 Every little bit helps!