Whether you’re on the path to full-blown food independence or just looking for an occasional source of fresh herbs and veggies, gardening is an incredibly empowering pursuit. Of course, for many of us, a large outdoor garden is impractical or straight-up impossible. But that doesn’t mean your dream of fresh veggies has to die on the vine! Enter indoor gardening to the rescue. Growing vegetables inside instead of outside actually carries a host of major benefits like accessibility to everyone with a window, convenience (no excuse not to tend the garden when it’s five feet away), minimal physical labor, and super low costs....

We all love an incredible summer-picked beefsteak tomato and a delicious pie pumpkin ready in time for Fall holidays. But ultimately, our goal on the urban homestead is to maximize food production, so it’s incredibly important that we also have a go-to list of fast-growing crops to leverage in addition to those slow-growing favorites. They may not be the flashiest garden plants out there, but I sincerely love these options for the sheer flexibility they inject into any gardening calendar....

In my (much) younger years, I lived in a rural japanese farming town surrounded by rice fields and ubiquitous backyard gardens. During that time, and in travels across the country, I grew to deeply appreciate Japanese cuisine’s treatment of vegetables. A sentiment I think a lot of people can agree with considering the food’s international popularity. In our new urban homestead, we are doing our best to begin incorporating some favorites from that time into our garden....

For the first 27 years of my life, I hated the taste of tomatoes. More than hated, I actively couldn’t understand why anyone would eat these pungent, round monstrosities. I admit it and accept the shame of my poor palette. Of course, that all changed when a friend introduced me to his homegrown, organic cherry tomatoes with high sugar content - I was hooked from then on. In fact, I started gardening more seriously soon after and cherry tomatoes planted in fabric grow bags were my first seriously successful crop....

Malabar spinach is a criminally underutilized garden vegetable. Consider some of the attributes used to describe this vining spinach alternative and I think you’ll understand what I mean: heat-tolerant, highly productive, provides continuous harvests, vigorous vines, beautiful, hardy, and readily self-starting. And of course, delicious. A delicious, vining leafy green. In many ways, it’s a perfect fit for our goals at Nextdoor Homestead: lowering the food bill in a meaningful way on small plots....