“Sunny” Seedling Shelves
My wife and I have both loved gardening for a long time. As kids both of our families had huge gardens, and our parents preserved much of their own food.
When we got married and moved into a small basement apartment in Atlanta one of the first things we did was ask our landlady upstairs if we could plant a garden in the corner of the yard.
Every winter we take the time to think about what we’d like to grow. We consider the successes and failures of the previous year, flip through seed catalogues and online seed vendors’ sites, and make our plan.
This year we decided to try the Ontario Seed Company (OSC), whose headquarters are one block from our son’s school! Since we haven’t eaten anything yet I’m going to hold off on reviewing the quality of their seeds. However, I can say that we are happy with the germination rates we’ve had so far.
The other perk of buying these seeds is that they are available locally at Home Hardware, with a huge selection available at the Uptown Waterloo Home Hardware , which happens to be owned by OSC!
This year we are growing the following things, some of which are from seeds we harvested from our own garden in previous years. These are in no particular order:
- Old German Tomatoes
- Brandywine Tomatoes
- Roma Tomatoes
- Tiny Tim Cherry Tomatoes
- Sweetie Cherry Tomatoes
- Cubanelle Peppers
- California Wonder Peppers
- Jalapeño Peppers (from our saved seeds)
- Red Hot Peppers (we don’t know the variety, the seeds are from some peppers at the market. They are small round balls, and quite hot)
- Red Russian Kale
- Lacinato Kale
- 3 Varieties of lettuce from saved seed (romaine, red, green leafy)
- Spanish Onions
- Cooking Onions
- Garlic (assuming it pops up where we put it last fall)
- Cilantro
- Parsley
- Oregano
- Basil
- Flowers (a few varieties, but we always include marigolds)
Still to come are more of the Col family veggies, like broccoli and cauliflower, as well as all the direct-seeded root vegetables, like carrots, beets, radishes, green onions, etc.
To start our seeds indoors we prefer using 200 cell seed containers that we bought online a few years ago. I rarely see these sold in stores but they are very useful, and last a long time. Strangely, they are not easy to find in Canada, if you know where to get them please let me know!
We’ve already discussed seed starting here, two years ago in fact. Have a look: Seed Starting .
You can also have a look at our plans for a Hoop House Cold Frame .
This year we added a seed-starting shelf to the mix, complete with grow lights!
We loosely followed these plans , but one big alteration was holding everything together with bolts instead of screws. This way we can disassemble the whole thing and store it for the part of the year when we’re not using it. Being able to take it apart also makes it much easier to move the shelf upstairs to our sunniest location so our plants can enjoy both fake light from the fluorescents and real light from the south-facing window.
Because we used scrap wood that we already had the total cost of materials for the seedlings shelves was around $120 for the 2 shop light fixtures , the bulbs, and bolts. We put two types of lights in each fixture, one standard and one “grow” light. Grow lights are much more expensive thus I decided to use them in combination with the cheaper fluorescents. So far the plants seem happy!
March 29, 2015 @ 12:10 pm
Do you know the science behind grow lights? Are they really necessary? We’re starting seeds right now too and I have a bunch of old fluorescent lights, but not grow lights.
March 29, 2015 @ 4:48 pm
Hey Chris, I’m not totally sure about the science but it seems to have to do with varying levels of light intensity: http://www.bhg.com/gardening/houseplants/care/choosing-plant-grow-lights/ . That said, my guess is your lights are a good place to start, and just see how they work. If the plants are also next to a window and seem to prefer the sunlight coming in the window (as indicated by their reaching for it) then you’ll know that your bulbs aren’t their preferred choice and you can can try swapping them for fancier ones.
What seeds are you starting?
October 1, 2016 @ 6:02 pm
If you have enough sunlight, grow lights aren’t necessary , but they do help. And for seedlings, fluorescent lights are actually better than full on grow lights, since they don’t emit too much heat, which can damage the delicate plants. And they put out plenty of light for seedlings.
October 11, 2016 @ 11:47 am
You can use regular fluorescent lights. They work just fine. The color temperature makes a bit of a difference. Ideally, you want cooler light (around 6000K) for growing and warmer light (around 2700K) for flowering. But really, any bulb will work for any purpose. Having the ideal color temperature is simply a bit more efficient.