Seedlings Seedlings Everywhere

by FrugalBabe on April 19, 2010

We have seedlings coming out our ears right now.  Here’s a picture of our hydroponic area in the basement:

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There are so many seedlings that they don’t even come close to fitting into the actual hydroponic trays.  A lot of them are just sitting around the edges, getting the benefit of the grow light (plus the window that is right behind them), but being watered manually.  In addition to this, we have four more trays of seedlings that are hanging out on top of the washing machine, getting light from a window in the laundry room.  We literally have hundreds of seedlings, and the ones in the hydroponic tray are getting dramatically bigger ever since we added ladybugs to the mix.  We have to wait until the second week in May before we can plant most of this stuff outside.  Hopefully there won’t be any plagues of locusts or huge hailstorms after that!

It is so rewarding to see our little seedlings growing.  We have quite a few things planted outside too, and are starting to see spinach and onion sprouts out there.  Nothing showing yet in the pea, potato, and asparagus beds, but I’m patiently waiting.  We have rhubarb that we transplanted from my parents’ house, and it’s adapting nicely to our yard.  We also have buds and/or tiny leaves on a lot of our fruit trees and berry bushes.  After so many months of seeing nothing but brown, grey, and white when we looked out at our backyard, it’s awesome to look out and see green – and it’s getting greener by the day.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful Monday!

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  • Tee

    Is that a custom welded grow light set up in the pic? What a useful hobby! What are you all growing? I was pretty ambitious for a first timer. I’m growing 4 types of tomatoes &I hope to dehydrate and make fermented salsa in addition to eating them fresh. Also, spinach, kale, collards, chard, eggplant (looking forward to dehydrated eggplant “bacon”), okra, radish, cukes, zucchini, squash, snap peas, asparagus beans, cauliflower, lettuce, watermelon, red bell peppers, beets, carrots, and a few herbs. I have already eaten lettuce since I started it indoors and it was the best/simplest salad ever. Can’t wait to see how much I am able to grow!

  • FrugalBabe

    Tee,
    Yep, he welded a stand to hold the grow light above the plants. He’s pretty handy :)
    Your garden sounds awesome! Best of luck – I hope everything grows really well for you. We have several kinds of tomatoes, a few kinds of peppers, watermelon, zucchini, cucumbers, cilantro, parsley, basil, peas, potatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, spinach, kale, collards, swiss chard, lettuce, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, radishes – all of those are planted already, most are still indoors. The greens are outside, in cold frames – we go through a lot of greens, so we’ll have a couple more beds full of them by this time next month. We have a few things that we’ll start outside in the next week or two: beets, carrots, squash, corn, and a few others that I’m forgetting. We also have strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, grapes, and blackberries that will hopefully produce some fruit this summer. We’re going to pluck the buds off of our fruit trees and not let them fruit this summer, so that they can focus on building strong roots for this year (we just planted them last fall). But hopefully next year we’ll have more fruit. We planted apricot, cherry, apple, peach, and plum trees. We also have a few “exotic” trees: orange, lemon, lime, and banana. They will be growing in pots, outdoors in the summer and indoors in the winter. We’ll see how that goes (fingers crossed!) Eventually we’re hoping that our kitchen and pantry will resemble the produce section at our co-op!

  • http://www.simplelifeinfrance.com/ Simple in France

    This is my first year trying seedlings inside–tomatoes and oranges (weird, I know). I let them get by on low light at first and am now setting them outside during the day. . .

    Does your indoor lighting cost a lot electricity-wise? I’m considering trying something similar, but I’m just not sure what route to go.

  • FrugalBabe

    Simple in France – we’re currently just running one grow light. It’s 400 watts, and we run it for 12 hours a day (1pm to 1am, plus the plants get additional light from the window during the daytime hours. If we didn’t have the window, we’d have to run the light a bit more). We switched all of our lightbulbs for CFLs when we moved in, and we work hard to minimize our use of electricity in general. So our bill even with the grow light is very reasonable (and it’s lower than our bill was when we first moved here, before we switched our light bulbs). If a person sets up a huge garden with lots of lights, the electricity bill would definitely go up by a noticeable amount. But our single light isn’t making too much of a dent.

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