The Garden Works - Day One

Last year's garden was a great success, so this year I decided to chronicle the adventure, blog style. We bought all of our plants last Spring, and this year I wanted to try growing some of my own plants from seed.

Here in the Rochester NY area we are fortunate to have a local and knowledgeable supplier, the Harris Seed Company. They don't have a store front you can purchase the seeds from; I used their website to pick from the wide variety of vegetable and flower seeds. You'll also find a lot of useful material on how to grow plants indoors, lighting, and plant nutrition.

I also did some general googling of "starting vegetable seeds indoors" to get a sense for what was needed, and what could happen to sabotage the effort.

I decided to use peat pots to grow the plants in. You can transfer then directly to the garden and they are relatively cheap. I shopped around the big box stores and found Walmart to have the cheapest ones. I got 3" round peat pots for about 10 cents each. I also bought seed starter mix. It's important that the seed starter mix be sterile (so now weeds or grasses will start growing) and also that it not be infused with a lot of fertilizer, which may damage the young seedlings.

I already have a large shallow plastic storage container, which I will use to arrange the peat pots. Next, I needed to set up a lighting source. I checked the local craigslist, and was able to find used fluorescent light fixtures. The fixtures held (4) 4-foot long fluorescent bulbs, and were recently pulled out of a office space. All I needed to do was clean off the dust and wire a power cord. Wiring a power cord is fairly straightforward, but if you have never done it before or feel uncomfortable around electricity, consult an electrician.

I checked the big box stores for the grow lights, they were cheapest at Walmart, at $6 each.

Next I constructed a simple wood shelf, where the seedlings would have the lights suspended above the peat pots. It's important to plan for moving the lights increasingly away from the pots, as the seedlings grow into plants.

The lights are on a timer. Most sources I researched recommended 14-16 hours of light per day.


And here with the light in place: