Gardening in an apartment without a balcony - how to garden indoors
Preserving + storing food in an apartment
Sourcing meat, dairy, and eggs as an apartment homesteader
Buying pantry items in bulk for your apartment homestead
While you may be one of the lucky ones with a balcony - if so, click here to scroll to that section of this guide - you might not have access to one.
If that’s that case, you can still grow vegetables indoors in an apartment!
If you have access to a sunny window or have the space for some supplementary grow lights, you can have a lush veggie garden indoors, in the comfort of your own home.
If you add on a base or spinner, it will catch any water from dripping out. You’ll just need to be sure to empty the water so that none gets on your floor.
you can also purchase a metal storage rack from a big online store that should give its profits to the biggest rainforest and therefore will not be named…but it’s a heavy duty rack and inexpensive. You can attach LED grow lights to it and grow plants in pots there. Remove one of the shelves to get more vertical growing space. I learned how to do this from this video:
Balcony gardening can yield a surprising amount of food, especially if you work with your vertical space. The average balcony size is around 25 square feet (source), which doesn’t seem like that much, but when you think about the footprint of a Greenstalk (just under 1.5 square feet), you can start to see how your balcony space can be utilized efficiently.
Boxes for growing food, flowers, or herbs can be hung on the balcony railings, further maximizing space.
Community gardens might be close by to your apartment or place of work, and you can usually join them for a nominal fee. They also provide the benefit of getting to know other local gardeners, who can offer you tips and tricks for growing in your particular region.
Usually farmers offer produce or even a small plot to garden in as you build a relationship with them, says Heather Jo Flores of permaculturewomen.com. If you’re going to local farmer’s markets, ask if they need volunteers. Or look for local small organic farms in your area and ask them directly about opportunities. Most farms would be happy to have an extra person available to help out with tasks around the farm.
A quick side note here. My personal definition of homesteading, and what drew me to homesteading is:
And yes, for me gardening is a big part of the above. However, while I love gardening, I believe that you can lean in to homesteading in an apartment without access to a garden at all.
The key is finding a local farmer’s market, or even a singular local farm stand, and making a connection with those there. If it’s in your budget, you can also subscribe to a CSA with a local farmer.
Why does this help you to do all of the homesteading things that I mentioned in the bullet points above?
If you connect with a local farmer and let them know what you’re interested in, you might be able to snag some deals on bulk amounts of food. Sometimes farmers will sell “seconds” - perfectly good food with minor blemishes - at a steep discount. At the end of the farmer’s market, farmers would rather go home with an empty truck rather than load food back in, so you could make an offer on clearing them out right before they close up for the day for a flat fee.
If you do these things, you might find yourself with 50 pounds of fresh tomatoes, 25 pounds of funky strawberries, and 7 ginormous heads of cabbage.
And if you do find yourself with those things - well, my friend, you are in luck! You can get preserving, stock things up, and have homemade goodness in your kitchen cabinets.
The skill of learning how to preserve your own food - especially food that is grown locally, helps you to achieve all of the points I outlined above.
You’ll have a sense of being connected to nature with a deep understanding of what’s in season. Zucchini doesn’t grow in April, you won’t find fresh apples in May, and likely all of the tomatoes will be gone by November. You’ll start to get an appreciation for what grows when, and savor those windows of time when your favorite fruits and vegetables are ripening.
You’ll be reducing your environmental impact by supporting a local farmer and reducing the amount of miles that your food traveled before you bought it. While you’ll make an initial investment in glass jars for preserving, those are reusable, so you’ll likely reduce your waste if you were buying things in tins or plastic in the market. If you are able to buy food from an organic or chemical-free farm, then you’re voting with your dollars, supporting someone who values the environment and is stewarding the land.
You’ll experiment with traditional ways through fermenting and canning. While safe canning practices and standards are fairly recent, people have been looking at different ways to store food for millenia. You might research your own ancestry to see what traditional food storage practices those in your lineage might have practiced, and then look for modern and safe methods to implement a similar recipe.
You’ll find more self-sufficiency. It’s especially rewarding to preserve and ferment your own food - there’s a deep sense of pride and satisfaction in seeing a few jars of food that you made that can be stored for several months or more. Storing food in this way allows for you to eat food that was grown seasonally in the off-season. I’ll never get over the delight of opening a jar of homemade tomato sauce in December, long after the tomato harvest has cleared out, or digging into a jar of strawberry jam in March, when spring seems so close yet so far away, and tasting the sweetness of June fruit. Having access to food and having some stored up and on hand will help you to be less reliant on stores and the market, or on food delivery services.
One thing that I find helpful in homesteading is to examine my own spending habits and to pick one thing at a time to learn how to make myself.
In my own experience, I look at what I’m buying and pick one thing that I can make myself, and research what is needed to make that thing myself.
For example, I’m a huge kombucha fan. Buying bottles of kombucha at the store can add up, and the waste of the glass bottles becomes evident if you let those bottles stack up over a month. So I looked at that and learned how to make my own kombucha. While it wasn’t something that I was able to just do in a day (fermenting takes time!), it was one less thing that I was buying from the store and making on my own. You can buy a kombucha starter once and continuously make kombucha from there on out, as new starters (or SCOBYs) will form with each batch that you make.
Next up, distressed by the cost of organic and gluten-free vegetable broth, I decided to learn how to make my own. I saved my onion, garlic, carrot, fennel, and ginger scraps over time in the freezer, and then added those scraps to a pot of water and let that go on the stove or instant pot. You can freeze cans of broth in freezer safe jars for later, or use it over the week in different meals.
The list goes on - jam, bread, yogurt, kefir, pickles, hot sauce…while you might not be able to replace everything that you buy at the market, learning these skills slowly over time will make an impact on your spending, carbon footprint, and help you to be more self-sufficient.
So obviously you can’t keep chickens in your apartment or have a cow out back. But there are some ways that you can support local farmers in sourcing these items without needing to invest in a chest freezer to store a whole butchered pig.
Eggs
Right now, eggs are expensive - the price is going up. You may find that buying eggs from a farmer a the farmer’s market isn’t that much more expensive than buying them in the store. If you live in an area where other people are raising chickens, you might be able to buy a dozen eggs off of them. I’ve seen folks selling farm-fresh eggs on craigslist, sometimes at very inexpensive prices. Most of these people have small operations, with hens that are free-range and well-taken care of.
Dairy
Similarly, you might be able to support a local dairy at the farmer’s market, at your regular market, or by visiting them in person. I’ve seen a lot of local dairies collaborating with farm box delivery services, so you might want to check to see if there’s anything like that in your area.
Meat
You might be able to find meat at your local farmer’s market. If you have access to a local butcher shop, they might sell cuts of meat from local farms.
Another alternative is butcherbox - they have some great deals on local and sustainably sourced meat.
I like Butcherbox because they’re a B Corp, which means that they meet rigorous standards for environmental and social well-being. Their beef is all grass-fed and pasture-raised, their pork is crate-free and vegetarian-fed, and their chicken is free-range and organic.
A six-cut classic box, which costs $169, will get you (as an example):
4 lbs ground pork
2 lbs Italian sausage links
2 lbs of bacon
1 lb scallops
plus, they usually offer 1 free cut that stays the same per box, for example, 3 lbs of chicken thighs.
While this seems like a lot of food, if you have space in your freezer, you can store this food for up to a year there.
I tallied up a quick order of the same quantities of meat from a big-box market, and while butcherbox is about $60 more expensive, the quality of the meat is better and from smaller farms. You can easily find discount codes for your first few butcher boxes as well.
While you may not have a lot of storage space in your apartment kitchen cabinets, look at pantry items that you buy regularly - maybe rice, pasta, oatmeal, cereals, cans of beans, etc. - and see if you can buy those items in bulk.
Buying pantry items in bulk is often less expensive than buying small amounts on a weekly basis. Plus, having some extra food on hand is part of self-sufficiency.
I like to buy food in bulk from Azure Standard - they have great deals on bulk bags of gluten free oatmeal and gluten free all purpose flour, which are items I buy frequently.
Right now, gluten free oatmeal in a 25 lb bag is $28, and and 25 lbs of Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 Gluten Free Flour is $54.
If I were to buy 25 lbs of gluten free oatmeal at a regular market, I’d have to buy 14 bags that are 28oz each (or 1.75lbs). I had to double check my math on that one - it would cost me $130 to buy that much gluten free oatmeal!
Let’s look at flour next. At the market, I the biggest bag I can buy of the same brand is 4lbs, so I’ll get 24lbs instead of 25lbs. Even then, I’d need 6 bags which would cost me $92.
So over time, if I buy these items regularly, I’d spend $220, whereas with Azure, I’d have extra on-hand and spend $82. That’s $132 less expensive to buy in bulk, just with these two items.
You can also buy in bulk from https://bulknaturalfoods.com/, or find a local co-op or buying club near you.
This way of connecting to nature is one that requires either a prior knowledge of edible plant identification, or of finding a local guide to show you the way. Don’t know where to start? Check Meet-up or local primitive skills schools in your area for folks who can show you safe and edible wild foods so that you can harvest with certainty.
Falling Fruit is a lovely resource of where to find local and edible food as well on public land - although you want to check the regulations in your area. Often, public land and state parks allow for foraging for personal use, while other parks might require a permit which is easy to obtain. Of course, don’t pick endangered or at-risk plants!
