Food you can grow indoors?

Well, I had a cherry tomato plant in my dorm room that did quite well, although this might not be what you're asking... just sayin.

Did you speak kind words to it everyday?

Tomato flowers need to be pollinated to produce fruit, the good news is they can be self pollinated. You can use something that vibrates like an electric razor (or whatever you have in your nightstand drawer )and put it on the flowers, this should pollinate them. As far as the two tomatoes that never ripened, if they are full sized pick them and wrap them in newspaper, they'll ripen then. Tomatoes do need a lot of sun.

Edit to add, if your house is too cold in the winter months you might try risking a wall o water (though I wouldn't do it if I had pets in the house).

lol, I learned the pollinating trick from a wise old gentleman who was teaching organic gardening at an adult ed class about 20 years ago. Guy was a font of information.

You should do it. I used to have a calamondin tree indoors that bore lots of fruit. (It's a cross between an orange and a kumquat, I think?) When I was a kid, we had a Meyer lime tree in a pot that did well, and a friend of mine has a really pretty dwarf banana tree inside. Citrus will want several good sun hours and chilly nights. http://www.guide-to-houseplants.com/calamondin.html

Eta: my mom was a master gardener with our state cooperative extension, and she used to pollinate our vegetable garden with a paintbrush. Lol.

I was going to suggest tomato- the indeterminate(?) types are perennial; but you've already tried that. Bell pepper plants are also perennial and actually quite ornamental (I think), but if your cherry tomato didn't ripen I don't know if you'd have any better luck with a pepper. I mentioned elsewhere that I took two cuttings of my tomato plants last fall and they're still alive; they have small tomatoes in stasis on them, not doing anything, but that could be because the pots are too small- I was going to plant them outside again this spring.

I would like an indoor citrus bush/tree, but don't know how one would do- I've never grown one (unless you count the citrus fruit seeds I planted which sprouted, grew a few inches, and died). Lots of people have miniature indoor bananas and they make great-looking, lush, jungley house plants, but they almost never bloom or set fruit. Ditto for pineapple plants.

Figs and passionflowers are often grown indoors, but I don't know how big they have to get before you get fruit. The edible passion fruit vine doesn't have flowers as pretty as some other passion vines.

The problem might be giving indoor fruiting plants enough light. The fruit takes lots of energy for the plant to make.

Whoa! Those small tomatoes in stasis I mentioned have suddenly turned orange-red. It took a long time, and they're not nearly as big as beefsteak tomatoes normally get. I think I would have had better luck if I had transplanted them to larger pots over the winter, but I've always heard that transplanting plants into larger containers is a bad idea in winter because they're generally dormant. The plants are blooming and definitely alive, but there are a lot of dead leaves on them... of course plants in the outdoors garden get dead leaves too, so maybe I just noticed these because they're inside and I can examine them more carefully.

Imagineaa, from your description of your indoor growing area, I think your plants weren't getting enough direct sunlight to produce. The window I have my tomato plants in is a triple-casement window maybe 6' by 7', with an unobstructed southern exposure. It's HUGE- I installed it primarily to help heat my house in the winter, which it does, but plants really go for it too.

Truthfully, it's a kind of funky setup. This is the second floor of my house, and the only place to install the window was over the stairs. The plants are on a plank in front of the window; one end of the plank rests on a ladder, and the other end rests on the top stair. On top of all this, I tape a few little bits of dark paper on the inside of the glass here and there so that birds won't think it's an unobstructed opening, try to fly through the glass, and get injured.

Like I said: funky.

But I like it- it's a temporary greenhouse! Not the sort of thing Martha Stewart would approve of, most likely, but it's fun to be sitting in the hall near my indoor jungle, looking out on the cold neighborhood on a sunny winter day. I no longer have cats, but when I did, they liked it too. I just had to be careful not to put any plants that might have made them sick in that area.

Have you considered growing mushrooms? There are many types that can be grown indoors, and for the most part, light is not much of an issue since they don't photosynthesize. You could convert a closet into a year-round mushroom factory! Or you could just buy a small, pre-made, easy to use mushroom grow-kit.

I just ate my two homegrown mini-beefsteak tomatoes this morning. VERY nice flavor, even if they were cherry-tomato-size and took forever to ripen. There weren't any seeds in them that I could see... maybe the flowers weren't pollinated... but then how would they have produced any tomato at all?...

Imagineaa, have you consulted any other sources? My copy of Rodale's Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Farming has a chapter about growing fruit indoors, but that thing is HEAVY and I don't have it with me. But if it's in direct sunlight almost all day I would think it;s getting enough light. I know mine are cramped for space in their pots, but I wasn;t planning on keeping them indoors past this coming Spring. As tomato plants being sold in stores go, they're quite large.

Nah, you don't have to keep buying spores. All you really have to do to perpetuate them is add more substrate (the medium in which the mushrooms grow) occasionally, which is often something as simple as sawdust. If you wanted to regrow frome spores though (which is much more time consuming), you could always just collect them from the mushrooms you grew the first time, anyway.