Seedlings are easy to grow indoors even if you don’t have a south-facing window.
You don’t need fancy apparatus and any light will do. Just keep it a couple of inches above the seedlings at all times so they grow stocky and strong, raising the light as needed. Keep the light on for sixteen hours a day, and use a timer if possible.
I bought a shelf unit and three two-tube fluorescents second hand and attached the lights to the undersides of the shelves with chains so they can be raised and lowered. I connected them to a timer that works automatically and draped clear plastic over the whole shebang. I only have to remember to remove the plastic in the daytime and keep the seedlings watered.
You can buy potting soil but it’s cheaper if you make it yourself and you won’t ever have to go to the store because you ran out. The accompanying recipe calls for organic fertilizer and coir or peat moss. I use Solomon’s latest fertilizer recipe but any other one will do, but not as well. Coir is compressed coconut dust that can be used in place of peat moss. I add a bucketful of water to one section of coir and let that soak in thoroughly before I measure it for the potting mix. Yes, coir is imported while peat moss is available right here in Canada and we have huge, unharvested peat bogs in the north. But that is the problem — most of it is sequestered in the far northern muskeg and I doubt that commercial suppliers will access those bogs until they’ve used up the more accessible ones down south.
These southern bogs are disappearing at an alarming rate, so until I can find something better, I’ll stick to recyclable coir that works well for me. At $10 from Home Hardware for a block of coir that expands to three cubic feet, it’s a good deal. Someone with a time-lapse camera could entertain the family by filming a 12 by 12 by one inch block of coir billow into a cubic foot when a bucket of water soaks into it.
This potting soil needn’t be sterilized but when I haven’t done it my seedlings got eaten while in infancy. The fastest, easiest, most foolproof method I’ve found is to pour boiling water to cover the soil/compost mix, stir it around to ensure all the bits get saturated and leave it to cool. Then I add the rest of the ingredients as per the recipe. If the mix seems too water-soaked, spread it out to dry until it’s easy to handle. This is a good, all-purpose potting mix I use for all my vegetables.
Garden Club Members: April 18 meeting at 1 p.m. in the meeting room upstairs corner of the arena.
All-purpose potting soil
Mix together:
1 part garden soil
1 part sifted compost
Add enough boiling water to this mix to cover. Stir it until all is evenly mixed in. Cool.
Add and mix in:
1 part coir (coconut fibre) or peat moss
For every cubic foot of the mix (five gallons!), add and mix in:
1 cup organic fertilizer
¼ cup agricultural lime, finely ground