Kuunari

Last spring, my wife got into growing plants indoors to plant outside.  Very quickly, we had lamps and workshop lights propped up on books on top of shelves and counters.  Not the best system, and with a cat who likes to knock things off high places, a system that likely wasn’t going to last.

Indoor Growing System

So, I built her a shelving system with lots of space for her to grow plants that she can later plant outside.  Here it is in our new kitchen.

You can see there is three levels for growing.  We used florescent shop lights for each level, hung by chains so we can change the height as the plants grow.  The top level becomes a great place to store extra soil and fetilizers.

To hang the shop lights, I drilled holes in the shelves and put an eyebolt through it.

I used a large washer to reduce the pressure of the weight of shop lights on the particle board that the shelves were made out of.  S-hooks connect the chain to the eye bolt and the shop light.  

The only problem is that the lights go out past the shelves, but my wife will often run out of space on the shelves and have trays hanging off the side, and it ends up working great.

Seed Journal

We had a great time last year growing plants, but this year as we went to the store to buy seeds we quickly realized we didn’t know what varieties we had last year and how each type did.  This year, to prevent that knowledge from being lost, we created a seed journal.  We got plastic sleeves with 4 pockets from Amazon, and have started putting our seeds in it.  We have note cards to write any information we might need to remember and we have labeled each seed packet with the year we purchased them.

I’ll be fun to look back and see all the plants we’ve grown through the years and how each one did.