Changing Our Seed-Starting Setup & Getting Started

I’ve been working on being more chill and relaxed with the garden this year, which is good. However, I became so relaxed that seed starting snuck up on me. I was casually looking at seeds last week and realized that our pepper seeds should have been started a couple of weeks ago. Oops… Part of it was intentional, though, because we were unable to get our starts in the ground on time last year due to weather, so many of them got leggy and died. As a result, we pushed back starting seeds by a couple of weeks to prevent that from happening.

I was also quite chill with our supplies. I had assumed that we had plenty of seed-starting cells and starting mix but learned on Saturday that we had 14 cells/pods and a partial bag of starting mix. Over the weekend, I worked on getting our new seed-starting setup organized, which consisted of using one of the collapsible waterproof plastic tables we have and installing the new grow light we bought. Previously, we had used a wooden door/table that was in our basement when we bought our house. It worked well for the first year of seed starting, but upgrading it was a priority. The plastic table is nice because it’s waterproof and easy to clean.

For a grow light, we had previously used the style of light that clamps on the side of a table and has three “necks” that can be moved and angled to cover the starts as needed. This year, I bought a four-foot shop light from Harbor Freight for less than $20. It’s 5500 lumens, can be linked to identical lights, and uses very little electricity. It can also be raised and lowered to match the height of your starts. It’s a much more economical way to get UVs onto your plants than buying a dedicated grow light. Here’s a picture of our setup:

You can’t really see the light in this image, but it’s just out of frame. I currently have one heat mat plugged in, since there’s only one tray being used at this time. I need to grab an adapter so that I can plug in the second mat and the grow light. I think this setup will be more successful than last year’s. I like that there’s a dedicated table and that the setup is in its own room rather than under the stairs.

What Seeds Did We Start?

I mentioned it above, but we got our pepper seeds going. We have four varieties: Takii’s New Ace bell peppers, Gochugarju hot peppers, West Indies Habaneros, and Jaluv an Attitude jalapenos. They’re supposed to take 10-14 days to germinate, so we’ve got a lot of waiting. Next up will be our tomatoes and possibly some melons and cucumbers in the coming weeks. But before then, we need to grab more seeding-starting cells. Have you started any of your seeds yet?