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Gardening Journal
Mar. 14th, 2010 04:06 pmThings are looking very good overall. Many more of the peppers eventually came up than I expected, which is great; these are easy and popular plants to share and even fruit well in containers. The peppers from the first tray and from the tray I planted a week later showed up at nearly the same time, which suggests to me that the heat from that light bulb contraption was even more poorly-distributed than I thought.
Everything else is up except the rosemary and the parsley, and considering their long germination times I'm not sure whether to be concerned. I'll give them another week, and if I get nothing by then I'll try another tray in a different environment, maybe soaking them first. It's possible that I got duds, but since these are my two long-germinators and germination rates for all of the other seeds from the same source is near 100%, I'm going to start with the assumption that they're fine and just haven't had enough time yet.
I've set up timers so that the lights come on for 12 hours during the day and shut off 20 minutes before the heating pads and fan come on. (Which looks ridiculous, of course: a power strip with two timers, each with a power strip plugged in. What I need is a great big electromechanical "NOT" gate. Fortunately the wattage of all this stuff is low enough that I'm not creating a fire hazard. But I digress.) This setup seems to be working very well for the seedlings; they appear very strong and robust. Once everything is up I'll reduce and then eliminate the heating pads.
Distance from bottom of hood to the seed trays:
HPS = 10"
T5 = 4.5"
Everything else is up except the rosemary and the parsley, and considering their long germination times I'm not sure whether to be concerned. I'll give them another week, and if I get nothing by then I'll try another tray in a different environment, maybe soaking them first. It's possible that I got duds, but since these are my two long-germinators and germination rates for all of the other seeds from the same source is near 100%, I'm going to start with the assumption that they're fine and just haven't had enough time yet.
I've set up timers so that the lights come on for 12 hours during the day and shut off 20 minutes before the heating pads and fan come on. (Which looks ridiculous, of course: a power strip with two timers, each with a power strip plugged in. What I need is a great big electromechanical "NOT" gate. Fortunately the wattage of all this stuff is low enough that I'm not creating a fire hazard. But I digress.) This setup seems to be working very well for the seedlings; they appear very strong and robust. Once everything is up I'll reduce and then eliminate the heating pads.
Distance from bottom of hood to the seed trays:
HPS = 10"
T5 = 4.5"
