Plants immediately add life and vitality to an office desk. We love the idea of displaying more than ornamentals though. What if you grew your lunch and snacks at work in and on an office desk garden?!
It’s inspiring and gratifying to see so many creative ideas and a burgeoning market of new products that help people garden, even when they don’t have space. Today there are all kinds of plant towers, pyramid garden planters, vertical wall hangers, and other creative ways to grow plants and food even in limited space.
PHOTO CREDIT: Feature image by Studio SyBrandy
Desk Top Gardens
There are so many lovely options these days for adding beautiful plants and planters arrayed as desktop gardens. Plant lovers have to be careful in such places as it’s easy to get carried away with all the many cool options. We’ll cover some of these and then move onto desk gardens.
Salad Bowl Gardens and Desk Top Herb Gardens
One of the most popular selling items at our local Farmer’s Market these days are the Salad Bowl Planters. They’re lovely, have you seen them? These are so called because they’re container gardens of different salad mixes. When you want a salad, you clip from the largest outer leaves straight to your bowl for the freshest salads possible.
A couple of these can work great for someone living alone or a couple who are very light salad eaters. They can also become a garden desk for your work or home office. Imagine cubicles all around the country with greenery growing all around and on desktops.
Even better, imagine planters of vibrant greens and herbs to snip and nibble instead of candy! You can easily grow
Whenever I visit our garden, I pinch clusters of fresh herbs to nibble. We’re growing lavender and extraordinarily healthy and beneficial rosemary, and those are my year-round daily vitamin nibbles. The other 3/4 of the year it includes the various mint we’re growing like lemon balm and catmint, basil and longevity spinach leaves.
Zen Desk Gardens, Succulents and Air Plants
Popular options include Zen Desk Gardens that are not only visually attractive, but provide a relaxing meditative break that helps relieve stress and stoke creative inspiration. You can add small succulents and airplants to your zen gardens as well.
Regrowing Vegetables
You can even grow vegetables as desktop plants. There’s nothing better for your health than organic garden fresh food. Imagine the difference in food value, taste and nutrients, when you can pluck fresh greens for a salad, straight from the plant.
Indoor gardening takes the “Farm to Table” of “Farm to Fork” phrase to a new level, where it becomes “Planter to plate“!
It’s exciting to see so many more people getting involved in gardening and growing their own food. A simple way to get into growing food indoors is to regrow some of the vegetable heads of the organic produce we buy from the store.
Vegetables Easy to Regrow
Regrowing works especially well with foods like spring onions, celery, lettuce and leeks.
They’ll start growing in water and then you can plant them in a little pot and keep snipping them every other day or so to add to salads, soups and such.Add some herbs and microgreens and there you have salad fixings! We snip the young leaves as needed for toppings to salads.
Place a celery core into a bowl of water and watch it grow – great fun for children too!
A celery base looks like a lovely flower. When you consider it’s a plant that’s been chopped from its root, transported, stored, refrigerated and yet even then, that root base still grows!
The base of celery looks like a flower.
Growing Food Indoors
When you can’t be out in the garden, bring the garden indoors!
Year round in our kitchen window now, there are always those disposable plastic “clamshell” containers of salad fixings or microgreens growing. And sure… this isn’t as efficient for feeding a family of four as a full-on garden, but there’s just something really gratifying about growing something that was just going to be trashed or composted, into something more. So we regrow plants mostly in winter to help stave off the winter gardening blues.
There’s just something really gratifying about growing something that was just going to be trashed.
Okay, so celery takes a little longer, but it does grow, and we’ve begun clipping the green tips of the growing celery—microgreens style—and adding them to salads. Same thing with lettuce. Buy a few heads of your favorite organic lettuce from the grocer. Separate out the bottom stem and place the base in a bowl of water. In just days, fresh green leaves are growing.
In winter, we keep these things growing in kitchen greenhouse window and clip the larger leaves for salads.
It’s fun and practical to grow edible plants and herbs wherever you can.
Bringing Nature Inside, Nurtures Us and Our Environment
If growing a desk garden isn’t practical for you because you just don’t have enough space, then at least get a plant or some flowers to bring life, beauty and vitality to your home and workspace. These days with so much more digital storage, some of that desktop and drawer space can be freed up to for more than papers and chocolates! 😉
It’s Like Growing Vitamins and Supplements
Grow some mint, basil or longevity spinach and nibble on a snippet each day for an amazing burst of flavor and nutrition. These kinds of natural foods and herbs actually reduce cravings for junk food. Whether I’m in the garden or inside around our plants, every day I take snippets of herbs as natural vitamins and a bite of immunity boosters.
Vibrantly healthy foods reduce cravings for junk food.
In fact, we start some of our spring seedlings under an extra desk in our office. We know many of you gardeners without greenhouses can relate… seedlings growing everywhere!
So while our setup doesn’t look as elegant as the desk in this cover photo… it’s still making use of available space to GROW! You can read more about our DIY grow-light stand in the article., and also our updated indoor greenhouse system.
Exercise Your Right to Grow and Be Healthier!
Now you may be thinking that you need that storage space for your papers and filing, and of course that would be the norm. But… here’s a tip that—like garden veggies—is good for you inside and out:
It’s healthier to get up and move as much as possible.
Make it Inconvenient!
So, while most people have created a cubby of convenience out of their desk space, to have to stand up and walk a few paces, then squat to sit back down each time we need to file something, is actually a healthier way to work if our job has us desk-bound most days.
Whether we grow at our desk, kitchen counter, garden or greenhouse, the important concept to remember is to:
Include edible plants into the rooms of our lives and not just in the garden.
We love the concept of multi-purposed lighting too. I.e., if you need a desk lamp anyway, why not make it a grow light? We’re slowly replacing some our home light bulbs—especially in our office space—with grow lights.
Plants bring beauty and freshness, inside and out.
This is such an interesting and intriguing concept! The idea of replacing paper storage with plant storage… although I’m not so sure I have less paper these days. Maybe it’s time to clear it out!
Obviously someone who spends a lot of time at the office developed the idea of a desk garden. While it may not seem practical, in fact, it’s not only practical, it can actually keep you healthier.
Plants Improve Air Quality But Plants Do Decrease Stress
While it’s been proven that plants do NOT measurably improve indoor air quality, other studies prove that plants in your environment can help diminish stress and anxiety. Apparently the air quality myth was from a