The Grow Lights

Earlier this month I got a crazy idea. Why not try growing plants from seed indoors this winter? Lettuce likes cold weather and not too much sunlight anyway, so it seems like a good crop to start with. Sometime I want to try tomatoes, but I think lettuce will be enough of a challenge for right now.

I bought some heirloom lettuce seeds online since they were reasonably cheap and just sound good. Here is a not-so-good picture of jar # 1 of lettuce sprouts. Sorry for the blurriness of the picture; I definitely haven't mastered taking close-ups inside an oversized jar.

This is after about a week or so - plants are 3-4" tall

The grow light apparatus

I found some grow light bulbs on Amazon, thinking they could work with lamps we already had, but Jason came up with a much better idea. We got shop lights at the hardware store (the kind with clips) and he made a wooden upside-down T to clip them on. We run the the grow lights for a couple hours in the morning and the evening -- only when we're home, because those suckers get hot -- and so far our plants seem to be doing well with them. We've also got some basil and pineapple sage from Rita that we're trying to get through the winter. And cilantro, but that hasn't come up yet. It didn't when I planted it in Norfolk either, though, so the seeds might just be duds.

Anyway, that is how you make a fairly economical growing light system. MUCH cheaper than the other options I looked at, but I think it'll work just as well.