With the seasons changing soon and winter on the way, it is time to start setting up the grow room. That way I can get a jump on growing for next year starting some seeds early. In the next few months my many pine seeds will be ready for sprouting. And they will be under these lights until I can move them outside next spring.
Other seeds will be started around January to get ready for a early spring planting, and other seeds will be started closer to February or March depending on how long it takes for plants to grow.
I have a bunch of florescent tubes I hung up under shelves. I can grow seedlings up to around a foot tall before they touch the lights, usually just big enough to be ready to go outside in the spring.
These lights are not the best way to do this, I could buy some nice LED grow lights. But I am using what I had laying around instead. When these burn out I will probably do that.
It is so nice having a spot to do all this in, where I lived previously I took over the food pantry to start seeds. With more space now I can do this in the basement in the utility room without taking up important kitchen space.
Soon we will be filling trays with seeds and probably all of the space will be filled with seedlings.
With so many kinds of lights, some the mogul base CFLs other are tube types. Just things I had left over.
Hopefully all of this will be running on solar, so its just free energy to me to run all these lights indoors. During the winter we should be using less power so I think its possible. But my grow tent uses a lot of power, so we shall see.. I am sure it wont cost that much to run them even if we dip into a grid a little.