Setting Up the Shop Lights

The shop lights are set up on the bottom shelf. I haven't bought lights for the other shelf yet. I want to experiment first. Didn't get around to planting a tray... that's what tomorrow is for, right?

Shining away on Disaster Tray.

Disaster Tray is a story for another day. Maybe tomorrow.

Those skinny mini lights... not sure how they are going to work. When I first arranged them I had them evenly spaced out and there were shadows at each end of the tray. The Fiance sorted me out by pulling the lights apart more and now they seem to be giving fairly even coverage.

See?

Up close and personal with Disaster Tray.

But who knows, maybe I'll have to arrange them like this.

Coulda taken that chunk of cardboard out.

However they get arranged, I can still fit FOUR trays per shelf. Magical fantasticness! And if I really can't stand not knowing how evenly the light is falling I can always take out my lovely light meter, that barely sees the light of day, and take a few readings. I have a feeling future microgreens are going to tell me exactly what is happening.

I'm Back

That was a longer vacation from blogging than intended. Oops. 

We're still doing GAPS. I'm still experiencing healing. It's become part of who we are and less... novelty. Though friends and family still think we're nuts :-)

But it's spring, so enough of that. I've been itching to share my "crazy". Microgreens! Growing food indoors! Fun-ness amplified!!

We live in an apartment and there is (was) a window seat in our living room. It's been appropriated, by me, to become our new indoor garden.

See?

That's a BIG shelf you have there.

The shelf was this one from Walmart. It's huge. It needed to be 4 feet wide, so I could use standard shop-light fluorescents. 

I'm going to light the bottom two shelves with these shop-lights from Rona. In the description it says they are 48" x12". Liars! They must be including the hanging chain or something. These guys are teeny weeny, maybe 3" x 3". Maybe. So, it's going to take two of them per shelf to light things up.

I'll be alternating regular warm & cool T8 fluorescent bulbs to get most of the colour spectrum happening.

The beauty of microgreens is that they don't grow until maturity, they only grow (in most cases) until their true leaves come in. The point is that they don't need massive amounts of light. They will be overjoyed with what the fluorescents provide.

The top two shelves will be used for germination and the bottom two for the last week or so of growth, to green em up.

I thought I'd only be able to fit two trays per shelf, but I was wrong. I can fit FOUR!!! That means I can have 16 trays at various stages going at once. Holy cow! That will be a lot of greens! Did I mention that was one big shelf?

I'm a BIG shelf.

See the tray? That tiny little black thing in the bottom right corner. It's 11" x 21". A standard gardening tray. I'll be able to fit 16 of them on that thing. Crazy. Haven't quite gotten over it :-)

We have a deck so I garden outdoors in containers all summer. I'll write more about that soon, as stuff is sprouting up all over the place. The indoor "grow" is going to be about winter food, mostly. Next year it will also be about starting seeds to get a head start on the season. And I'm sure I will find time for an experiment. Or two. Or more.

I'll eventually start a resource page for gardening as well. There is a lot of good info out there on indoor gardening and much of it is free.