Indoor Seed Starts

Indoor Seed Starts

I started peppers and onions in late February and now it’s time to move them out from under the grow lights and into the sunroom.  I need the grow lights for tomatoes, eggplant, cabbages, and other stuff. I’ll re-pot the peppers into individual cups.  They’ll go into a hoop tunnel, soon and then be planted directly in a garden at the end of May. The onions will also go into a hoop tunnel until they are transplanted into a garden bed in late...
Go! Go! Grow Lights!

Go! Go! Grow Lights!

Starting seeds is critical to my vegetable garden. Buying live plants is cost-prohibitive and only by starting seeds can I grow exactly what I want. The flats above are bottom heated with a heat mat. A sheet of plywood between the mat and the flats mitigates and spreads the otherwise too intense heat of the mat. The mat is connected to a timer, 15 minutes heat on, 60 minutes off. The unit doesn’t have a thermostat so this works reasonably well.  The lights...

More on Heat Mats

Geoff posted last week about the heat mat set up he is using to start some pepper plants, here.  I use a heat mat and grow-lights as well to start peppers, tomatoes, and other vegetable seedlings that need a jump start, and I’ve also found the set up useful to give some bottom heat to my sweet potato starts well ahead of the time I need to get my peppers started.  Since I don’t need very much space for the sweet potatoes, I use the mat and lights to...

Grow Lights Grow!

Less than three weeks ago I posted about my new grow light setup.  I’m happy to report that things are working out well.  We picked our first small salad today.  The top picture shows thinnings and cuttings of a salad mix that germinated profusely.  The mix can be seen in the second flat from the right in the second picture. On the far right I’ve got a flat of lettuce mix which did not have spectacular germination, but is still putting out some nice...

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