Growing Food: Grow Lights

Ellen asked me in the comments of the last post if I use grow lights. Little did she know a whole long post was coming on just that very topic! Lucky Ellen. And lucky you.

The short answer is: Yes, I use grow lights. Although I am as minimalist in gardening as I am in everything else, I do consider lights for my sprouted seeds to be an essential. The reason for that is just what Ellen mentioned in her comment. That is, the seedlings tend to grow too leggy and spindly trying to reach the light from just a window, and they're just not as healthy.

Healthy plants make for healthy tomatoes! That can then be used to make freaky faces. Yes, my idea of entertainment.

If I lived somewhere that was more conducive to starting seeds right in the ground outside, I would absolutely do that. Unfortunately, after a few years of trial and error (and dead plants), I have found that here, many of the things I really want to grow do better started inside and then transplanted. The sun+wind here makes quick work of any tiny sprouts that appear above the protective covering of the soil.

So I start indoors when I can, and I use grow lights.

I did not, however, buy these lights. I inherited them from Dale.

Dale is the guy we bought our house from. He lived alone, and was a man, and thus, had flourescent lights in the house. Like, right in the kitchen, casting their horrible glare upon all who entered that cozy heart of the home. 

I lost no time in removing those awful lights from my living space when we moved in, but of course I didn't throw them away. Instead I stashed them in the shop, which is where I rescued them from when I started seeds the very next year and needed some lights for the seedlings.

The lights were pretty small, but they were exactly the right width to span the wooden drawers of the bunk bed my grandpa made for my cousin Michael forty years ago.

Are you sensing a theme of hoarding and re-purposing?

That photo, by the way, shows an improvement A. made over the original set-up in which I had just balanced the lights over the top of the box. He screwed them into those boards to they wouldn't fall in the box all the time.

Fancy.

Eventually I got tired of having that big box in the corner of my dining room for five months and decided to instead put the box in the kids' bathroom. There's a space there under some cabinets that used to house the washer and dryer, so it's out of the way, warm because of the heating vent and small space, and right next to a water source for convenient watering of seeds.

And THEN, since there was this bigger space with a cabinet hanging right over it, A. had the idea to suspend some of the shop lights there to create a bigger area of light. The shop lights were also left by Dale. Because they were in the, um, shop, I didn't really notice that they were flourescents as well. But A. did, and he borrowed them from the shop and hung them in the bathroom last winter*.

Ever the innovator, that A. 

This works very well particularly because the lights (there will be another put up when we have more seedlings in here) are suspended on chains. This means the height of the lights can be adjusted. It's best to have the lights just above--like two inches above--the seedlings so they don't stretch to get to the light and get all spindly and weak. And of course, since plants grow (I know! the things you learn here), the lights need to be raised as they get bigger. Yay, chains!

This set-up is exactly what you're getting when you buy a seed-starting tower or something: Lights suspended above shelves for the seedlings. The great benefit of a purchased tower is that you can get something more contained that can sit in a corner of your house without taking up space.

The great drawback to a purchased tower is that they can cost hundreds of dollars. That might be worth it to you, depending on your situation. I myself avoid that sort of thing, as it quickly leads to a 64-dollar-tomato situation.

If you don't want to buy a purpose-built tower, you can probably construct something with flourescent lights from a hardware store. Depends on the space you have available, how handy you are, and how much you want to spend.

Now that the seeds are happily luxuriating in their flourescent sun, we can start to think about what happens when they go out into the wide world to be planted in the ground. And that means our next topic is . . . soil! 

Get excited, and see you next week for that.

* He also put them back in the shop in the spring when I didn't need them anymore, so the children could once again have a laundry basket in there for their dirty clothes.