Winter Garden

In an attempt to use up some of the older seeds I decided to try out an indoor garden this winter. I planted butterhead and loosehead lettuce, radishes, arugula and basil in late September for a January harvest. They grew under the fluorescent lights in our basement and despite all the work it took it was really fun! It gave me something to do the winter months in which there typically isn't to much gardening going on and it was really fun getting to eat some fresh homegrown greens in the winter. It also gave me a sense of what to plant in the the vegetable bed in the spring. My favorite plant out of the five I tried was the Butterhead lettuce. It has a fantastic crunch to it, beautiful ruffled leaves with deep purplish highlights and compact growth. I would advise against growing Loosehead lettuce, for at least in my hybrid it had next to no crunch, its growth was not at all compact and was really slow growing. I currently still have one Butterhead lettuce plant left and am planning on eating it some time in February to give it some more time to grow. As a whole I had great success with the older seeds with the one exception being onions. I tried planting them from seed in January to give them the 8-10 weeks they need before transplanting outside and did not get any to sprout. So I took this opportunity to do my first official germination test of the old seeds! More about this is above.

Fluorescent Lights

In our basement we have a stand with fluorescent grow lights. They're kept on nearly all year except for a two or so months in the summer and have been fantastic. I use them for just about everything from starting seeds to reviving any unhappy plants elsewhere in the house. Just yesterday we went out to the hardware store to get some new lights for the upper tier of the lighting system which we just opened up the other day after totally running out of room with just the bottom one. The shelf was made so that a second level of grow lights could be installed but we had never needed to use it before. When the upper lights were turned on we noticed the lights were the kind of you would find in an office and were not as suited for plants as the ones made for "plants and Aquariums". Upon doing a little researching I found that the only kinds of light plants really need is blue and red. Blue promotes leaf growth and vegetation while red combined with the blue promotes flowering. The special tube fluorescent lights defiantly have a noticeably redder, warmer and in general much more pleasant hue to them. We got these kind of lights for the bottom level of lights a few months earlier and while I don't have any real evidence that they helped the plants I highly suggest switching to this kind of lights if you haven't already.