Home built seedling warming tray

The sun room I have at my house has old single pane, aluminum sliding door windows which don't close very tight and is not insulated that great. It gets very cold in there, much too cold to grow little seedlings, especially the warmth lovers like Tomatoes, Peppers and Eggplants. I tried growing these in there, but I always had to wait until almost April to start them, because the room just did not warm up much before then. Even then it took a long time for those seedlings to sprout and then to grow to transplanting time. Being in the Northwest I learned with time one better get these warm season plants started early to grow them to a good size before transplanting in May to June, because you need a good head start to get them to produce due to the cooler summer nights we have.
Tomatoes, which can take a bit cooler then the Peppers and Eggplants did alright in that cold room, but my Peppers and Eggplant did not do so well and so most years I hardly got any peppers and no eggplants whatsoever out those plants. They were stunted in their growth and needed the whole season to recover, so hardly set any fruit.
Last year in a desperate attempt I cleaned off my sewing table, took apart the upper part of my light table and set up a small growing station in my office.

Which did work much better but I couldn't use my table for anything else and it also was not large enough of a growing area for the many plants I normally grow. I needed a better solution.

So this year I started looking at seedling heating pads with thermostats online to find 'they are very expensive' especially if you need 4 of them or the extra large sizes. I just was not willing to spend that much money on something being used only in the beginning of the garden season. How much technology is in that plastic pad anyway? Nothing I say what justifies the prices being charged.
But as I was researching these heating mats I kept coming across sites of people who built themselves warming trays with rope lights and I decided we would built one ourselves. Disclaimer: I made the decision and attempted to make a cheap version using old wire fencing and winding the rope through it, but my husband looked at it came up with a better way to built it. So in the end it was my husband who built it not me

                                      Here is the finished warming tray
                                                             
He used foil backed insulation foam for building the trays, since the reflective foil will channel the lights heat up to the seedling trays, increasing the heating potential with less heat loss. The rope lights are just sitting inside the foam channels, the whole foam tray is just sitting on my PVC pipe light table with the Plexiglas sheets sitting on top. The foam is strong enough to support the planting trays so we didn't bother put a wood shelving underneath. The lights are plugged into a seedling tray thermostat which is set at the right temperature for the seedlings being grown. Since the room is much colder at night and I did not trust the rope lights to keep up with the coldness I also covered my light table like a small green house in plastic sheeting which I open during the day, when it is warmer outside and the sun room heats up and close once the temperature drops.
The warming tray has made such a big difference. My tomatoes, peppers and eggplants have sprouted so much faster then normally and are making good growth. They look like happy little plants, healthy and all.


Here is how my husband built the warming tray:
These are the major heating tray materials you need. Foil backed insulation foam, 24' rope light, Plexiglas sheets and a heating mat thermostat if you want to control the temperature.
You also need 'Liquid Nails'  to glue
the pieces together and a sharp knife to cut the foam.    
All the dimensions are depended on the size of your growing area
or how large a tray you want to built.

First you need to
cut small, long strips of the foam for the edges of the tray.
About an 1/2" wide or slightly slimmer then that.

Which then get glued onto the top edge of the bottom foam pad.

Make sure you live a little gap on one edge for the light rope to be guided through like where the arrow is pointing to.

To be able to wind the rope light inside the tray we need to built some channels for it. So you need to cut some more 1/2" wide foam strips, a bit shorter then the others, because you need to be able to wind the
rope light around them.
We made two separate trays which are using one rope light. We had to separate our trays since my light table middle section is divided by PVC pipes as you can see in this picture. But we wanted to use one thermostat for both trays. So we wound the rope light from one tray to the other.
It would be easier and probably a better solution to use only one long tray for the whole area.
You could also make the channels a bit tighter then we did and use a longer Light rope.
I think it would maybe give you more heat then ours does, I just used what I had available. Anyway I measured the temperature with a minimum/maximum thermometer and the lowest the temperature has gone down at night was 59 F.

Here again is our finished warming tray.

Next season I might change it all to a longer rope light and see how much of a difference it will make.
For now my plants are growing nicely and I can see it is already making a big difference in the plants growing compared to the last years.

And I have a nice clean office with a clean table to do my other projects on.






                                                                                                                  

IGPro Garden software review

I am trying to be a bit more organized this year with my endeavor of growing my own food.
Since I have such a large variety of seeds it is a bit of a challenge.
I like variety, to me it is not good enough to just grow one or two Lettuces, or one Zucchini, Radish, Carrot or whatever I want to grow. I love to have a colorful salad and the middle eastern Zucchini tastes very different from the dark green Zucchini or the Romanesco. Variety is the spice of life, right?
Also how else will I find the perfect varieties for my Pacific Northwestern Garden, I am still not a seasoned Northwestern Gardener, still trying to figure things out how things grow out here.

So this year I am working a bit more with my wonderful garden software 'IGPro' I got from the UK written by an independent software programmer who himself is a gardener and is a nice guy always improving the software as we users come up with new demands.
We call out to him "we really would like it to do this task" or " It really would be great if the software could be used for vegetable gardens", because it really was written for the ornamental garden not for growing vegetables and he takes it all in stride and making it better for us users. Since there are now quite a lot of vegetable gardeners using his program and it has been quite a challenge to use the program for the vegetable garden use he actually is writing now a new program, just for us vegetable gardeners. How often do you find that kind of customer service, especially nowadays?

I know it will be a great software when he is done with it and I will be standing first in line to get it.

The program is different from many other garden software program that it is not a program to design a garden but it is designed to keep track of your plantings, like a database of your garden. Once you input all your information you can keep track of where your plants are situated in your garden, when you need to take care of them like fertilizing, pruning, spray schedules, seeding schedules, you can link photos of the plants to their profiles, do queries to find specific plants, print out reports. You can collect all the information you need for each plant, when you purchased it, where you got from, profile information, growing information and the beauty of the whole software you can make it your own. You can configure the Plant Care Topics or plant cultures and properties to your needs the software let's the owner change the program to his/her liking.
It has tons of features and because it is so configurable and let's us build to independent data bases, us Vegetable gardeners with Ornamental Gardens got the idea of  using it to keep track of our vegetable gardening also.
This year I finally managed to get all my vegetable seeds into the data base, with some of the growing information. At least I now have almost all my information in there of when I need to start my seeds inside the house or outside and when to transplant them. With the built in Task program I now can set up the tasks for each vegetable I plan to grow this year, assign them to a garden area/garden bed, set the dates to plant and after it is all set up I can print out my report what I need to do today and take it out with me into my Kitchen Garden. The report shows me what bed it goes in. No more confusion of putting seeds into the wrong bed or not remembering where I put them because I ran out of the labels. Labels? You can even print out labels with this software.
Since this software is so versatile it also can be used for the professional gardener like Nursery owners or Landscapers, you can set it up to keep track of all the plants you use and things you need to do at a nursery and design your catalog with it. Or as a landscaper create a garden for each client with garden areas, the plants used in it and link photos of the plants then use the query program to make lists according to specific criteria like plant size, color, soil type or any other site specific criteria.
I highly recommend this program to anyone who likes to be organized in their garden.

I am still far from having it all set up perfect for my use since I started using it for my vegetable garden but once it is done I know I will be Soooo Organized.

Growing seeds-Built a light stand

The house I am living in is typical for the US that it is not situated on the lot for using the movement of the sun in consideration for optimal light in the house or solar gains. Typically they seem to plot the houses on the land just to be able to have the front door facing the street. At least it seems like that to me.
In Germany, no matter where I lived we always had large windows with deep windowsills, facing south or southwest, just the perfect place for your house plants or starting your seeds.
I never had a place in the US where I had a window with the proper lighting for house plants or window sills which actually can fit a planter. It is hard to grow your vegetables in such conditions.
In North Carolina we had a laundry room/mud room which had a long wall. To grow my seeds we put wire shelving on the walls, attached shop lights above which worked pretty good and it kept the dirt out of the house.

This house I have now has no room inside the house to grow my plants and no window which lets the proper lighting in. But I have a sun room that even it faces the wrong way, (only the small side faces partly to the south) at least it has room for my plantings. Unfortunately it also has old single pane windows, which let all the cold air in, so during the winter it does not warm up very much, only in the afternoon it starts warming up a bit, but then later in the day the sun is again on the wrong side of the house. The first year I moved in here I got all excited about finally having a sun room that I bought a bunch of  house plants just to have them all die on me when the winter came, when it went below freezing outside, it can get very cold in there.
It is not a good place to start seedlings, with no warmth and not proper lighting.
Sometimes you wonder why people bother to built a sun room if you can't keep hardly any plants in it and it is too cold or too hot most of the year, even for people, to sit in there.

I needed more light in there but light tables, the ones you can start seedlings on are a bit expensive.

Years ago I saw in a magazine a table built with PVC pipes, so this is what I decided to make. It was easy to built, most of the material I already had and I could make it myself, and because it is made with cut pipes I could make it any size which fit my space and needs.

I made the lower part double wide, to be able to fit more trays on one level. This way I can move the plants better around as they are growing. The trays sit on Plexiglas shelves which just are laying across the pipes. They could be screwed in to be more solid in place, but I never bothered with that. It works fine as it is it is easier to change my setup. The upper part I made extra high, to be able to keep the plants longer under the lights as they get taller. And the bottom shelve, even it is double wide I am using only single wide Plexiglas sheets. This way I can put big pots on the floor, which would be to heavy for the Plexiglas sheets.
You can glue the pipes together, but I never did myself and it is holding up fine. Even if you decide to glue the pipes I recommend not to glue the upright longer pipes in, this way you can always take the table apart for storage, or if you decide to make a section higher you can switch out pipes. 
The beauty of working with the PVC pipes is that you can make it as big or small as you want it too be and as long you don't glue together it is always changeable.

My table is about 4 feet wide x 18 inch deep and 6 feet 5 inch high and to make my table this is what you need:
You will be using 3/4" PVC plumbing pipe
Material list. 6 End caps, 48 T connectors, 19 4-way connectors,
8 Elbow connectors
Pipe lengths of upright pipe sections:
You'll need 27  3-1/2" length pipe sections, 9  12" length pipe sections,
9  19" length pipe sections,
6  30" length tube sections
Pipe lengths for the depth of the table:
14  3-1/2" length pipe sections, 12  7" length pipe sections
Pipe lengths for the width of the table:
28  2 feet length pipe sections

Then you also need either a hack saw or a PVC pipe cutter, PVC glue (optional), 4 Plexiglas shelves 24" x 20" deep, 2 Plexiglas shelves 24" x 10" deep, 4 shop lights with the light bulbs and chains with S-hooks you use to hang the lights up with.

Now all you have to do, cut and assemble your growing table, start with the bottom and work your way up to the top.

                       Here you can see how the light tables leg part is assembled.
                      See how the plexiglas shelve is sitting only on the back side
                      of  the table.
                      This way I can put larger pots on the floor in front.

Notice how the PVC tubes the shop light is hanging from are set in a bit from the front and back.This gives the table more stability and also positions lights just right above your plants

                              Another view for the lower part of the table

Here you can see a bit how the next level of the light table is put together. If you wanted to, you easily could add another light to the front of this table or even make bigger plexiglas shelving for the bottom shelf.

Here the plexisglas sheets are sitting across the whole depth of the table at the middle level.
Again notice how the pipes the lights are hanging from are set in from the front and back a bit.
The chains to lower or shorten are just simply wrapped around the pipes.

Here you can see the lamps suspended from the pipes.The plexiglas sheets are laying again across the full depth of the light table

The upper part of the table. Here I use only one light. If you wanted to, you
could make it as deep as the lower part of the table. I have two pipes
connected together for the height of the upper part, because after I wanted
to keep my perennial chili peppers overwinter on this table I found I
needed the light to keep them happy, but I did not have the height.
So I just added some more pipe to it.

A view of the middle part with the 4 way connectors.These are the pipes the lights are suspended from.
These pipes make a great storage area above the lights for the unused planting trays.

                       View of the left side of table.
                      Light suspension pipe and shelf supporting pipes

                               Another closeup of the middle section

                             So here is the whole table again.

It really is quite easy to built and so easy to customize to your liking. It is just like building with the kid toy 'Lego'. Make it bigger or smaller.
The whole table without the shop lights which I still had from my previous light table probably cost me about $30 to $40, quite inexpensive compared to the light tables you can buy.

Maybe I should have washed the dirt off my table before I took the pictures, as I looked at the pictures I could see quite some dirt on there. But hey, it is a planting table it will get dirty. Right?

disclaimer: Not to be shared with the Dervaes Family of Path to Freedom Website. Thank You