Skip to main content

Forget expensive, power-hungry heat mats!

If you have a lighting rig, you probably already have a great source of warmth for germinating seeds: the top of your fluorescent lights.

Here, in case you're interested, is my entire seed-starting and growing setup in the basement this year.

The top shelf is mostly coleus.
Second shelf is closer to the light, so holds smaller plants, though you can see various helpful orange crates elevating plants of different heights. The tray at the far right is the stuff that is still in peat pucks - mostly portulaca right now, but also some parsley, zinnia, etc.

The huge potting table, I admit guiltily, is my kids' train table. I have promised myself I'll clear it off so they can use it for playing SOON. Really soon.

Anyway - there, on top of the whole thing, are two containers I've planted with some lettuce (to grow indoors for baby salad) and onions. These are reused containers - one from hydroponic lettuce (that's the onions - confusing, right?) and one from cookies. Free planters - yay!

The trick is finding the right warmth. Feel a heating mat if you have one - they're not hot, just slightly warm to the touch. The idea is to warm the soil, not cook the seeds..

Some parts of the lamp will be hotter than others... feel it when it's been on for a while and you should get a good idea of which area will be best for your seeds.

What I also like about this method is that the whole thing is on a timer, so it all goes off at night, saving us a bit on energy. If you have seeds that are picky about not cooling off, however, you might still need a heat mat, because most plants don't love 24 hour sunlight.

So that is the bulk of my seed starting setup at the moment!

Hope someone out there finds this helpful. :-)))

Yes, it's Friday.

Yes, I have way more important things to be doing right now.

Like cooking and cleaning and whatnot.

Off to do all that - right now!!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

Are Jews an "underrepresented community" in children’s publishing?

I applied for a writing award yesterday. I'm not going to get it, but that's not what I wanted to share with you. Here's what I wanted to share. This box:   I stared at this box for a long, long time. And then I decided not to check it. Even though I believe people like me truly are underrepresented, we probably wouldn’t fit the definition in other people's minds. Why? Well, because we're European. Because we are white. Because as everybody knows, Jews control the media. (do we???) If anything, some people say, Jews are over -represented in publishing. And yet. Some definitions are careful not to include people like me. Like this random definition from the State of California which defines underrepresented for some very specific business purposes as: "an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identi