Market Farming

[Pat Meadows <pat AT meadows.pair.com>]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:56:05 -0400, you wrote:

>Pat has to be right. How can you argue with success, especially
>30 years of it. My input was based on 30 months (not years)
>of moderate success plus whatever comes from reading five
>books on growing tomatoes from seed. So now a question for Pat:
>
>Pat, I am using a single-tube flourescent light source, but will soon
>change to two tubes w/large reflector. How does that compare with
>what you use and what do you recommend as an optimum light source?


I use ordinary cheap shoplight fixtures - each has two,
four-foot 40-watt cool white tubes and they have a small
reflector.  The reflectors are very narrow nowadays:  they
have 'cheapened up' like most things.   (I would buy one
warm white and one cool white except that I can never FIND
warm whites).  You need to be careful that the tubes are
really 40-watt tubes:  nowadays there are some four foot
tubes that are of lesser wattage.  We get these at a local
hardware store.

I keep the lights on about 16 hours a day (turn them on when
we get up in the morning and turn them off before going to
bed at night).  Or you could use a timer.  

The lights are hung on chains and I keep them very very
close to the plants, maybe 2-3" above the plants, raising
them, of course, as the plants grow.

The lights are hung from shelves in our living room now, and
it happens that the wallpaper is quite dark (awful stuff!),
so I line the wall next to the shelf with scotch-taped
aluminum foil to reflect some light back.  If we ever get
around to getting rid of Horrible Dark Wallpaper, we'll
paint the room off-white and then I will not need to use the
aluminum foil.  We'll paint the shelves and wall behind them
with gloss paint for good reflection.

I've had really good results this way:  nice stocky healthy
seedlings.  

It's even better - if you have room - to have a wide table
and to have two of the shoplights side-by-side (four bulbs
side-by-side).  You can get the same amount of flats in as
having the shoplights separately, but there's more light
bouncing around.  But we don't have room for this in our
current home (no cellar).

Pat
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