I recently posted about my grow light setup; it is working great. To recap, I am using my solar panels to power a 42 watt LED light to start seeds in my basement. The seed tray in that grow box gets plenty of light to start seedlings.
The seed tray itself has a lot of small "pots" or "cells" to get the seeds started. But they can't stay too long or the plants would get root-bound. The plants grew much faster than I expected but they are in a near perfect growing environment.
As you can see, I only used 24 of the 62 available cells and I still ended up with over a hundred lettuce plants. I will bag up some of these and give them away to fellow gardening friends.
I had ten 3-inch pots in my potting bench so I started with them. I mixed up my own organic potting soil, which is a mix of course sand, sifted compost (three years old), and reused soil from commercial potted plants. I first put a very small amount of mulched tree bark in the pots just to cover the drain holes so my soil wouldn't run out. I separated the small lettuce plants, there were up to four sprouted in each of the seedling tray cells, and transplanted them to the larger pots. Once I had enough to fill this reused tub, I set the whole thing out in the rain to get watered in.
These thirteen transplants are in reused Chobani yogurt cups that I drilled drain holes through the bottoms. They are a perfect size. These also went out into the rain to water in.
After separating the sprouts to transplant into the larger pots, I found that I had a dozen or so orphan sprouts that were the runts of the multi-sprout cells. I transplanted the larger sprouts and had a bunch of smaller sprouts left. "Waste not, want not", the old saying goes and I decided to take a chance and plant those little sprouts right into the garden. Temps are still going below freezing at night and I gave them little chance of survival.
But survive they did. To give them a fighting chance, after transplanting them I set a bunch of half liter plastic bottles filled with water between the plants. This bed is then covered by a frosted shower curtain. Diffused sun light goes through the plastic, gives the plants the light they need to thrive, and also warms up the water in the bottles. At night, the bottles release the heat and keep the plants warm enough to survive. They were all doing just fine after a week so far.
I have onions sets planted around the diameter of this small raised bed. Once they grow, their smell should keep some pests away from the lettuce and whatever else I decide to plant here. I will direct seed radishes soon, I inter-plant radishes a lot since they grow to harvest size in 4-5 weeks and then open up space for the longer term plants. Once the soil warms up more, and I can remove the plastic cover, I will mulch this bed
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