Hi Kathy,

My personal opinion is that grow lights are not worth the money you pay for them. Results are just as good or better
with full spectrum bulbs in my basement over my prop mats.

randy

I just use a fluorescent shop light, as cheap as I can find. I hang them in my planter and they work great.

George

Kathy,

I agree with the guys. I've used all sorts of lights over the years and have found that the cheap grow lights work as well as anything else. I don't see any point in throwing away good money on fancy lights when plain old shop lights work just as well. : )

Every spring I raise a couple of hundred tomato plants, and dozens and dozens of other veggie transplants, and several hundred flower transplants inside from seed to 4" pot size using nothing but grow lights. However, I don't keep plants inside under them all winter...I just use them to raise seedlings.

Good luck,

Dawn

Definitely just the cheapos! I used to grow rare begonias from seed in my basement under many, many light setups I constructed myself. I don't have a basement now, but I have flourescents in my kitchen over sink and under 2 cabinets. I tried the "gro-light", but it didn't do any better than the regular ones, so I'm not going to pay that price again (I think they are about $10 as opposed to $4 for regular or less).

Susan

OK, dumb question: If you use grow lights, do you leave them on all the time or turn them off at night like the sun has gone down? And how far from the plants do they have to be? When you say shop lights, could I just put them on the work bench in the garage & leave the light above it on? The garage isn't heated so maybe that isn't an option. I have absolutely no place in this house to try to grow anything. If I tried to put something in a window, the cats would eat it.

You can get a timer and plug them into it. They aren't expensive. The light should be inches from the plants I think. The shop lights can be found at Wal-Mart and use cheap 40 watt fluorescent bulbs. I have a 4 foot wide shelving unit 72 inches high with adjustable shelves that I attach the shop lights to in my basement. It isn't a pretty setup but it works. Your cats might enjoy eating the plants and using the potting mix for a bathroom.

My cats have never used the soil in pots for a "litter box", but they have eaten the leaves of some plants I've grown, like aroids, which are poisonous. It is not a death wish for them, but one of my cats did get sick from eating one, so I can't bring many plants indoors anymore. Wah!!!!!

Plants do need darkness at night, so I usually ran mine about 12 hours a day in the winter time - a bit longer in the summer if you plan to grow them under lights all year round. Too much light (as in 24/7) does cause some growth issues.

Susan

Alright, so, I can go with a shop light set up and florescent bulbs... I'll talk to the guys in hardware tomorrow and see what we can work up :) I'm setting this up cause when I bring in the stuff I want to overwinter, this house has very few windows, all of them average sized and they all face north or south. It's awful when I want lots of natural light. So, it will have to be a lighting system, especially since most of them are going in the back foyer on shelves. I'm gonna get a timer as well, so that way I don't have to worry about remembering to turn them on and off. I'm thinking since these are for established plants and cuttings, I won't need them to be set as close to the lights as I would for seed starting or seedlings.

I've never needed to worry much about a lighting system before since the house I moved from had lots of windows. Overwintering and seed starting was easy with lots of big windows.

What about those florescent bulb things that you can use to put lighting up anywhere? Would it make a difference to use something like that?

Thanks everyone for all the advice! I'm gonna put it all to good use this next week. Want everything in place and ready well in advance of the first frost.
Kathy

I use two shop lights which simply plug into the wall socket. I think they were $10 apiece.

They are suspended from the ceiling and I keep them around 2 or 3 inches above the plants. If some plants get taller than others I simply adjust one end so the lamp hangs at an angle then put the smaller plants at the low end :-).

I switch them on when I set off for work in the morning and turn them off when I go to bed. Ordinary cheapo tubes and they work a treat. You may be able to rig something similar up in your garage if it doesn't get too cold. I suggest you try sheltering them from any drafts if at all possible.

HTH

Mick.

The lights themselves would provide quite a bit of heat, wouldn't they?

Yes, the strip lighting certainly does throw out some heat. Adding some kind of surround around the plants would help to contain it and eliminate temperature fluctuations.

I'm lucky, my grow table and lighting arrangement is in the house. :-)

Mick.

pattyokie: "I have absolutely no place in this house to grown anything." I was in the same boat until I stumbled into the wintersowing forum. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but it has changed my life in terms of what I can start from seed. Everything is done outside. I was skeptical, but with two years of success under my belt, I have to say I'm a convert. Tomatoes still get started inside, but otherwise, it's all outside.

I've included a link. Take a look at the FAQs and introduce yourself. It's a really friendly place.

Seedmama
Central Oklahoma

Here is a link that might be useful: Winter Sowing Forum

Thanks, seedmama. I have heard of winter sowing several years ago & in fact have been saving all the strawberry containers I've gotten since then thinking they would work but have never gotten the courage to try. I think I will this year tho. Can you do veggies too?

I did wintersowing for the first time last winter.

It's absolutely a great way to start plants that have to be winter stratified. However, it's not a perfect system. I had trouble getting the right soil mix. Too much peat and they dry out too fast. Too little and the soil hardens and makes a crust. It's easy during the cold weather. You just prepare your containers (I used milk jugs), set them out and ignore them. What's hard is when it begins to warm up. You have to ventilate so that the heat of the sun doesn't cook the plant, but then when it gets cold again, which so often happens during Oklahoma springs, you're out there closing everything up again. My soil wasn't deep enough in the jugs and I had problems with that. And it was hard for me to keep the right amount of moisture in the containers once I started ventilating. Successful plants were REALLY successful. I tried potting things up and selling them at a garage sale I had in the spring and I had a lot left over that didn't sell, I ended up throwing lots of things away. Getting things into the ground was labor intensive and then it rained and rained and rained so lots of things died. Using the HOS method (hunk o' seedlings) really would work the best, even though it seems wasteful, because otherwise you're trying to separate the tangled roots and that's pretty time-consuming and yields actually more plants than you'll know what to do with, anyway.

I will try it again this year, with some changes. I will plant smaller amounts of seed, and I'm going to sow them in the ground in a 8" area in the general vicinity of where I want them to grow and then fasten the milk jug, with the bottom cut out, on top of that, and fasten it down by bending a coat hanger and pushing it down into the soil through the neck of the jug until the jug is firmly seated into the soil. At least that way if my back goes out, like it did last spring, I will be able to just thin out and maybe have one or two plants that will survive. A lot of things don't transplant well -- morning glories and four o'clocks especially. I like the concept of the milk jug, though. You can write on it with a china marker (grease pencil) and you will never have problems forgetting what you sowed where. And the jug protects the seed from getting eaten by birds or dug into by cats or walked on by dogs.

There are also plants that are warm weather plants that I will not winter sow again. These are gourds, cucumber, morning glories and beans. And never wintersow peppers.

Tomato plants would be OK wintersown. Anything that will come up volunteer in the compost bin is also a good candidate for wintersowing. I've had tomatoes, cantaloupe, sunflowers and hollyhocks that have self-sown and came up in the spring without a milk jug or any other help from me. Of course they always come up where I don't want them growing and not where I do, but if you dig them up carefully, water them in when you transplant, shade them and water them till they get over the shock, they will generally pull through. I wintersowed Mammoth sunflowers last winter and I was disappointed with the plants as they were stunted and only grew a couple of feet tall.

The folks over on the wintersowing forum are really friendly, generous and helpful. Some will send you free seed if you provide postage. Sometimes, though, it's older seed and some doesn't germinate, but they send you so many seeds that if you plant a few of each you'll get more plants than you know what to do with. It's really exciting to get a nice padded envelope full of some 40 varieties of plant seeds you never heard of before. You can also get free vegetable seed and free flower seed by sending postage to an address given on the Wintersowing website, and this is fresh seed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "fresh seed snob". Most older seed will germinate. Some of what I was sent by one nice person who sent a huge package full of all kinds of different things, was four years old, and most of it germinated. If it's old seed, you should sow more of it than you would if it was fresh. I think corn has to be fresh, and I'm told beans but I don't know that from personal experience yet. The nice thing about the old seed is that if you can just get one or two plants from it, then you can collect the seed from that and have fresh seed for next year.

Do protect the seed that you have by keeping it from getting wet or too warm. After the seed is thoroughly dry, I put them in little zip-lock bags I buy at WMT in the crafts section. Then I put the packages in a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid in the refrigerator. I was keeping them in the freezer but then I found out some seed, like peppers and gourds and beans do not tolerate freezing temps very well.

Hope this helps! --Ilene

pattiokie, yes you can do vegetables. I particularly like using the method for cool weather veggies (broccoli, cabbage, spinach, lettuce) I have done cucumbers and it was a great experience, but probably will just direct sow in the future. Cucumbers sprout and grown so easily. It is a great method for starting tomatoes if you don't have space inside. However, having tried it and having enjoyed the experience, I will continue to start tomatoes inside. I have historically started them inside, transplanted with walls of water and harvested by May 1. With winter sowing I don't harvest until after July 1.

I do not recommend winter sowing corn. Corn grows a lot like a grass with a taproot and it grows fast. There is a very short window of opportunity to transplant. If you don't move it in time, the taproot doesn't get established well enough to grow a plant that won't blow over.

Good luck. I hope to see you in the WS forum.

Seedmama