Tea Time For Seedlings

I've read that seedlings benefit from some sort of fertilization, but last year I didn't bother.  This year I decided to give it a shot.

I bought some organic vegetable fertilizer, and prepared some "fertilizer tea" by combining a cup of fertilizer and a gallon of water and letting it sit for 24 hours.

The first thing I noticed was that this fertilizer tea smells like the sewer backed up!  This is most likely due to the manure and fish meal in the fertilizer.  Really - it was quite lovely!

I  watered the seedlings with a solution of apx 75% tea and 25% water, and then went away for three days.  When I returned home, the difference was very noticeable.  The plants were taller, the stems thicker, and the leaves bigger and a deeper green color.

Judge for yourself - here are some 'before' pictures (click for enlargements):

And now here are the 'after' pictures taken 4 days later (click for enlargements):

Needless to say, I'll be doing this with all my seedlings from now on.  I'll give them another dose a week after the first one.

Just two and half weeks until planting time...

DIY Grow Lights

This past weekend I finally got around to building a grow light rig for our seedlings.

Here is what our setup used to look like:

 

 But in looking around the interwebs, I found this forum post.  Yes, it is a pot-growing forum, but good luck searching for "DIY grow lights" and finding anything but tips on how to grow weed in your closet!

It's a basic design using cheap materials, and pretty neat and tidy with the cables running inside the PVC.

My personal modifications were to support the lighting rig with four PVC uprights, with holes drilled at intervals to raise the lights as the seedlings get bigger (since my wife probably wouldn't like to have the lights hanging from the ceiling in our laundry room!)

Here are some quick pics of how it turned out (click for enlargements):

There is definitely some refining to do:  I need to build a hood (instead of the cheesy tin foil hanging out on top), and frankly the upright supports are a bit rickety.  But for now I'm pretty happy with it.  Especially considering I was on "daddy duty" when I put it together.

It's almost planting time!