I grew up in Colorado on a cattle ranch with a one acre vegetable garden. We even grew tomatoes in that short growing season at 8000 feet. It was all hilled rows and irrigated off the same ditch as our alfalfa fields and pastures. We grew all our own plants, mostly from our own seeds save from the years before. Some of our seeds were from the grandparents and from varieties they had keep going from their parents.
We started our own plants in our living room that my father built. It had the south wall 40 feet long with a waist high raised bed made from decorative blocks and rocks under a wall with all windows across it. It had insulated blinds for the cold winter nights. All winter, that long bed had kitchen scraps buried in it. I had a compost system set up in the barn for processing chicken manure into house usable. It was ready by early March and that rich plant food was buried in the long bed. Then we planted all the plants that needed an early start, mainly tomatoes, squash, and cantaloupe, in that indoor bed. The front door to the house was one side of that bed.
Friends and cousins would joke I lived in a greenhouse. It was way to much work and certainly not the way a teenagers wants to spend their summer. I learned to do all the field work, including equipment maintenance, and haying. It was hard work and long hours, but sure beat hoeing row after row of weeds in the ditches and hand pulling weeds from the row hills. Haying was more fun than snapping green beans, shelling peas, and shucking corn. Also welding a broken implement was to more fun than canning or blanching and freezing.
My folks were master gardeners and experts on food preservation and storage. I am not a master gardener, never have been, or ever will be. I did do a large garden, about half an acre, when I lived in the mountains and also had an outdoor greenhouse. I did have a few plants in a south bay window, but no major indoor farm like I grew up with. I also grew my own grain for bread, triticale. It was easiest to harvest.
If I did it again I know to use food grade, diatomaceous earth. I can harvest millet now and use it mostly for chicken feed. It grows wild if we don't pull it.
