Let there be light...

After just 3 days, I checked the tomato tray to find this. Plants abounding and they were already getting rather spindly while they reached towards the light. That first row you can see is the Pooka tomatoes which were apparently VERY viable. Seeing how quickly they had started reaching made me worry that they were not getting enough light. Especially with how cold and dim it had been recently. I mentioned this to Daddy, which got him thinking.

After only 3 days we have tomatoes.. lots of tomatoes

The more I talked to him. The more we both started wondering about a grow light. I told him my research (which was always in the "someday" category), said that all we needed was a florescent light kit and a chain. I was really on the fence about it, but and we decided to do it. Now, this light will spend 8 months of the year helping light our dim basement, but during seed starting, it would be removed and brought upstairs.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted, but really, I told Daddy "it just needs to do this" and he ran with it. A quick run to the local home improvement store, and $38 and about an hour and a half later. We had light. Daddy set it up for me with the seed starting table and put the light on a timer.

The finished product (Please pardon the mess, We are honest here)

Daddy took some scrap lumber in garage and built a free standing stand since we did buy the 4 ft light. We decided since this was proof of concept, if it indeed works, next year we can knock together a better table then the old blue card table we have been using. The light itself is hung from a chain which will allow us to move it up and down as needed. And when we are done, everything can be torn down and stored until next year. We placed a timer on the light so we don't have to worry about remembering to turn it on or off. We only had to buy the light, the bulbs, the timer and the hooks. Everything else was already on hand. Now to decide if this really helps as much as we hope it will.

Let there be light.