Set up a grow-light shelf in your kitchen
Hello and welcome to my small-space gardening experiment! I live in a townhouse in Northern Virginia. As part of my greater plan for personal and community resilience, I am:
1. Learning how to grow my own food while the mistakes are cheap
2. Seeing what can reasonably be grown in a townhouse (on the deck, in the courtyard and in the kitchen)
Here’s what I’ve got going on in my kitchen:
The Setup
Shelves: I purchased mine at CostCo and left off a fifth shelf. In hindsight, I would have made about 3 feet of space between shelves for my veggies. They’re similar to the Seville Classics Shelving System with Wheels, Chrome
Lights: If I had to do it over again, I would buy one or two of the Hydrofarm 4′ Light Fixtures
Light Bulbs: I use AgroBrite lights (Agrobrite Lights 48
) but I’ve heard that you can use regular flourescent lights as well.
You could also just skip putting together the light fixtures and buy this kit: Hydrofarm Jump Start T5 Grow Light System
Seedling Heat Mat: Gotta have heat. This heat mat looks like it would span the entire shelf: Large Hydrofarm Seedling Heat Mat
Seed starter kit: I found the Jiffy Greenhouse
Peat pots: I planted some seeds directly into Jiffy Peat Pot Strips
The Seeds
I’m growing the following varieties of tomatoes. I was given most of these seeds in a seed swap with a gifted gardener friend at work. (Thanks, Julie, for teaching me everything about tomatoes!):
From Seeds of Change
-Red Calabash
-Amish Paste
From Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
-Large Red Tomato
-Brandywine Tomato
From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
-Cherokee Purple
From The Cook’s Garden
- Red and Yellow Pear Mix
Crazy tomatoes my mother-in-law planted (12 of them!). I’ll try to grow them upside-down from the balcony.
- Climbing Trip-l-crop
Other veggies and herbs under the grow lights right now:
from The Cook’s Garden
- Parsley Catalogno
- Basil Marseille
- Stevia
From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
-Lemon Pickling Cucumber
How to grow:
1. Consult the calendar for your zone to see when you can start most vegetables.
2. Start your seedlings in their little Jiffy greenhouses. Put about 3 seeds in each jiffy pod or peat pot. No lights needed yet. But keep the heat mat on!
3. Set up your lights – hang them from the shelf using a hooks or carabiner
attached to chains.
4. When the seedlings appear, remove the greenhouse cover and turn on the lights for about 14 hours per day. (My times varied and sometimes I forgot to turn on the light. They were fine.)
5. Keep the lights as close to the leaves as possible by lowering them on a a chain. Raise the lights as the plants grow.
6. When the second set of leaves appear, thin the plants to one plant per pellet or pot.
7. Watch them grow! Consult the calendar for your zone to see when it’s safe to plant outside. Don’t forget to harden them off!
Right now, it’s too late to start most summer vegetables indoors. Start herbs and lettuce indoors anytime then pluck what you need while you cook.
Lessons learned the hard way:
I would have had more (much more!) growing, but I didn’t water my seedlings enough before heading out of town for a week and forgot to remind my husband to do it. Almost everything that I had planted in a shallow seed tray wilted and died after a few days of no water. Heartbreaking, but a lesson learned.
Next step for me: plant everything outside!
Some of the items I used:
