I decided to significantly change the way I treat my garden this year. My goal is to raise as much food as I can and that means a wide variety of crops grown in a wide variety of ways. I am planning to write about the endeavor to maximize my edibles from my huge garden and this is the first post in a series about that.
And although I am cash-strapped, I had to begin by buying some LED-lights. Because I want to grow onions and peppers from seeds,
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Onions and peppers need a really long time to germinate and grow in size sufficient enough to be planted outdoors. I tried to sow three types of onion but so far only one started to grow, which bums me out. So far I had very little success with onions in my garden, I hope to change that but preliminarily I have little reason for optimism.
After (if) the onions are big enough to move into the greenhouse, I will use these lights to start my tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and corn indoors too. I do hope that this way I will get plants big enough to resist slug damage later on. Once the plants are big enough, the slugs should not damage them anymore. I also want to try growing these in a novel-ish way, so stay tuned for that.
When I am not growing anything under the lights, I now have a consistent diffuse light for photographing my handmade products, something that I needed for some time by now.
Best of luck.
All my gardening is indoors now.
Note on starting corn indoors, which we did for many years: we were growing on sandy soil and encouraged deep roots by making tubes of newspaper about 10 inches long, filling them with soil, then one pre-soaked corn seed per tube. When the root ends started to emerge on the bottom of the tubes, they went into the garden. Whole sequence was timed to plant out when the nights got up to 50 F.
@rwiess, thanks for the tip about pre-soaking the seeds. I did not do that in the past and that was a mistake.
I saved up some cardboard tubes from paper towels as growth receptacles that can subsequently be buried whole and I also invented a two-part seedling pot that I hope will allow me to plant the corn without disrupting the delicate roots.
charly: What intensity/wattage of LEDs are you using? Just curious. Many years ago, before LEDs had the output, I used metal halide lights for indoor growing: a 400-watt light for 24-hour growth, and a 1000-watt for 12 on/12 off flowering stage. I haven’t done any indoor growing in a LONG time, so I was just wondering how the technology had progressed.
I’ve been living in the Northeast US for almost the last 10 years now, and I’ve been doing similar things. Since some have been asking questions, I’ll offer a little of my experience.
1. Hardening off requires a lot of care. Growing under LEDs, unless they are EXTREMELY high power, is still much less intense than Spring daylight outdoors. Go very slow, and realize that you will need to be careful, check in every day, and put your seedlings in shade when it’s sunny. I’ve actually done some amateur indoor weed growing tents, but even the best of those pale in comparison to direct outdoor light. If your garden really gets a ton of direct light, be very careful of hardening off any indoor-started plants.
2. You can get a great jump on things by starting with hydroponic systems like the Aerogarden, but keep in mind that this makes the hardening off process even harder. The roots will need at least 2 weeks to acclimate to soil. My work flow is to transfer to a small pot with soil in a South facing window for 2 weeks. Transfer to partial sun outside in a larger pot for 2 weeks, obsessively monitoring for overexposure. If you’ve done those two tasks well, it will plant in the ground easily.
@johnson catman, I am using 7 pieces 4000K white LED strips, 8W and 800 Lumen each. The light intensity at the top of the pots is right now about 4000 lux, should that be insufficient and the plants get leggy, I will put them on a shelf closer to the lights. These lights are not meant for full-time indoor growing, just for starting plants that are not cold-hardy enough to start in the greenhouse. Unfortunately, I do not have any south-facing window that I could use to start seedlings, so there is a need for LED lights.
@DrVanNostrand, I certainly will do my best to harden off the seedlings slowly before planting them outdoors. This is not my first time starting plants indoors, just my first time with LED lights. I also regularly put my indoor plants outdoors for the summer so I know the process.
The plan is to start the plants about two to three weeks earlier than I would start them in the greenhouse. Then transfer them to the greenhouse and slowly harden them off. And only after the danger of frost is over, will they be planted outdoors.
A friend of mine tried to convince me about the benefits of hydroponics, not for seedlings but for veggies. Once I realized that I would need to build a monstrosity from pipes with water pumps, and make and test precise water solutions, just to grow a few heads of lettuce or kale, I politely nodded and ignored the rest of his enthusiastic explanations. It looked a lot like saving a bit of water by spending a lot of money and even more effort. Good for an enthusiast who has a tiny garden and wants to grow a few veggies purely as a hobby. He was happy with his setup and it brought him joy, which is a valid reason for doing it. But it did cost him several times more than those five heads of kale would cost him at the store. Therefore completely unworkable in a garden over 1000 sqm with the goal of saving money.
I feel your frustration with onions. I wait each year for the email from the local (DFW) garden center announcing that they have onion plants. (mid January) I quickly buy them and get them in the ground. They grow reasonably well but never get very big before they start bulbing up. By early May they are done.
Day length is the trigger and different varieties require different day lengths. I would hope that the local garden center would stock suitable types. I tired raising them from seed once. That coincided with the great 2021 freeze so that didn’t go too well.
A few years ago I switched from fluorescent to LED lights for my tomato seedlings to great effect. The plants liked the LED light so much that I have had to delay starting them a couple of weeks just to keep them from getting too big. The latest batch is just at the first true leaf stage.
@dschultz, I did not know that onion bulbing is determined by daylight length. That might be why last year it was so abysmal -- the spring and beginning of summer were so overcast that the days were effectively shorter than they should be. I now wonder if my LED lights will have negative effects on the only variety that germinated so far -- I set them up for 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. We shall see. I will wait one additional week if the other two variants sprout and if not, I will try once more with new seed packets of a different variant. I also planted two beds with overwintering onions at the same time that I planted garlic. We shall see if I have better results with those than I have with seeds.
The beginning of spring is extremely stressful with me waiting if the crops that I planted last year survived winter.
Another method we have found useful for growing lettuce in no space is the Kratky method. A gallon plastic milk jug, full of fertilizer solution, lettuce seedling in a little seedling pot with no bottom, started under lights until the first true leaves, then the pot goes into the top of the milk jug, roots barely touch the water, and the whole goes outside wherever there’s sun. Roots grow, water is consumed, and when most of the water is gone the lettuce is ready for harvest. No other tending required. Search Kratky Method for details.