“Beware the ides of March!” So said the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2. I think we took that play in grade nine English class. The teacher, a Welshman, was thrilled. Us, not so much. But the Ides of March (March 15th) is how I used to remember when to start my tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage family, seeded into pots to go under my grow lights.
My first grow lights and their adjustable stand started close to 40 years ago. The stand was built on a budget – mostly scrounged plywood, ripped 2 by 4’s, drywall nails and screws, bits of chain and such and I still use most parts of it today. It usually sits on an old coffee table in front of the dining room window when in use.
The plan is to make a simple stand that has an adjustable set of chains on hooks so the grow light fixture can be raised incrementally as the plants grow taller. The secret to a good stand is to make something that is taken apart and stored easily. The trick is to assemble a base that is accessible from most directions, to two uprights and a cross piece that holds stiffly together without any wobbling, bending, or sagging.
My second stand is a taller one that stacks two platforms and grow lights one above the other. This one takes longer to assemble. For stability I incorporated metal shelf angle supports into its design but that only partially solved the wobbles.
My third one that I built recently, finally solved the stability verses easy to assemble and disassemble problem and is designed to sit on the floor. That one is made from a piece of three-quarter inch think plywood sitting on a frame of 2 by 3’s. These 2 by 3’s give the uprights the stability they need. Each of the two 2 by 2 uprights has a diagonal brace and are screwed onto the sides of the base’s 2 by 3 framing. The top cross piece is only 1 by 1.5 inches thick since it doesn’t hold much weight – the 86 watt LED fixture is quite light.
Until last year my grow lights fixtures were the standard fluorescent tube kind. The original article I followed four decades ago mentioned that each fluorescent tube lost its brightness / efficiency in the tube’s ends up to a foot so a successful grow tube should be at least four feet long.
The instruction back then was to install one cool white tube and one warm white tube in each paired fixture for a better balance of wavelengths and rotate the plants under the tubes every other day. Today I head towards ‘Full Daylight Spectrum’ tubes whenever I can. I believe the need for expensive ‘Grow tubes’ is totally unnecessary.
So, if I were to build a new fluorescent-tube grow light I would use two fixtures in parallel, side by side, with four tubes to cover a growing space of 16 inches by four feet. Today many lumber supply stores carry a finished ‘workshop’ four-foot tube fixture which often includes a cord, plug and switch. There is also the option for very new LED ‘tubes’ in a four foot fixture but one would have to weigh the tradeoffs of price, lumens, etc.
Last spring, I bit the bullet and got myself a true LED (pot grower’s) grow light (now legal here in Canada, thank you Justine). My research showed that there were different choices for pot growing LED lights. Some emphasized a higher percentage of blue bulbs for better ‘Bud’ formation. I chose the less blue and mostly red, orange and yellow? -- 'Full Spectrum' mix for more overall green growth. My best LED selection was found at the local Home Depot.
These many years growing with fluorescents have had a tendency towards leggyness in my tomatoes -- they tended to grow taller too fast rather than stocky plants. I always tried to compensate for that problem by repotting into progressively larger, deeper pots, placing the root ball at the bottom of the new pot and backfilling / burying the stem. It helped a bit but wasn’t the true solution.
I figured the plants were either too warm or didn’t get enough light. My son TOG had his grow lights in a nearly windowless room so I tried moving my plants away from the warmer dining room window to an empty, less heated room and I placed my biggest and most important transplants under the new brighter LED grow light. I also installed a small 6 inch fan to blow casually across the plants to encourage stockiness, just like TOG does.
I noticed that some beginner’s kits for pot growers came with a reflectorized tent that reflected the stray light back to the plants. So I taped aluminum foil onto some used plastic sign board and leaned those around the perimeter of the grow stands to reflect more light back to the plants.
My growth was better than before but there were still some tomato varieties that tended to grow wildly up.
I’m still learning how close / far away the brighter LED’s must be from the leaves to avoid ‘burning’. The old rule for fluorescents was to try to be about one inch from the canopy, plus the maxim: the younger the plants the closer the lights. With the new LED’s this is an ongoing skill I’m learning.
Timing is important with growing transplants. If the tomatoes are too big for the grow lights too soon and must go outside, then a frost can hit them if one isn’t attentive enough. Start some seeds too early and you can get pot bound, stunted transplants waiting for the soil to warm before transplanting into the garden.
Most plants transplant easiest when they’ve just filled the container with their roots -- enough to keep the root ball intact and not crumbling when lifted for transplanting. Determining when and what size container to grow in takes some experience.
I keep my grow lights on an automatic timer. Old school recommended 16 hours per day. TOG is a bit looser on that issue and uses about 14 hours. More research could be pursued. I wonder what the potheads recommend.
With my vegetable transplants and my Lovely Wife’s flowers, we easily grow $200 worth of bedding plants each spring. But it’s not just cost savings that’s the issue but the freedom of knowing how and doing it yourself and not being stuck relying on another supplier. What happens in the nursery when Everyone wants bedding plants / vegetable transplants?
With my own transplants I get to choose the exact varieties, health and optimum timing of my home-grown plants. We also get to give away some large, healthy plants to family, friends and neighbours. I’d be really stuck without my grow lights on the Ides of March.
No comments:
Post a Comment