🌱 Home Hydroponics Gardening Update - Indoor Seed Starting for Spring (FL)
Hello my fellow gardening enthusiasts. It's that time of year for us here in South Florida to start seeds for the Spring growing season. Starting seeds indoors now will ensure we have mature plants producing sustainable food by the beginning of March that will carry us into early Summer.
Since I am rebuilding my front hydroponic garden I don't have any plants growing at the moment. Therefor, I am not starting seeds for a successive planting, but rather for a fresh start. I need to start all of my long-term high producers first, then in a few weeks start seeds for short-term crops like lettuces.
Tomatoes: SteakHouse Hybrids (Giant) , SuperSweet Cherry, Money Maker (Smooth-Skin Cluster)
Cucumbers: Tyria (14-16" thin European style)
Peppers: Carmen (Sweet Red Tapered), Glow (Orange Mini-Bells)
Cantaloupe: Standard Market Sweet
Seeds were set in Rockwool cubes in the growing tray surrounded by washed clay pebbles. This will allow plenty of room for the roots to grow out naturally into the pebbles for a strong, healthy start with minimal disturbance when I later transplant them to the dutch buckets and rails.
I'm using my custom build seed starting system with three 24" red/blue and daylight LED lights and the PARK Seeds Bio Dome tray. The top vents will be closed until the plants are about a week old, or at least have their first pair of true leaves.
I hope this helps with some tips to get you started as spring approaches in your local area.
As you may know, I am an Official Community Advocate for the the Looking For Niche (LFN) project. The purpose is to help connect people with similar interests here on Steemit. Simply join the LFN Discord, it's free, and use the friendly WhaleBoT to enter your interest or "niche". It will reply with a list of other users registered with the same niche.
Example: Whalebot LFN Gardening
WhaleBoT will reply with: These other users are also interested in talkin' about "gardening"!
Find the Looking For Niche Discord Here:
https://discord.gg/gxMfe8J
Let me know what you think, please leave your comments below.
As always, please upvote this post and follow me
if you like my work and want to see more.
If you think others will enjoy this
Please ReSteem it!
Thanks for reading!
This is the future of food production, exactly what the UN have planned for us... Whilst it could be beneficial, i fear monsanto will invade the world of indoor food production, and we will all end up as mutants.
X-Men becoming reality, i wanna see that ;)
:-) Yeah, will be good if we go back to a time when we all grow our own food. It's better for us and the planet.
Still in my things to try out this year!
Definitely post about it if you do.
I'm going to try to start my peppers and tomatoes earlier and in move them to bigger pots, before they go outside. I have another month before I have to worry about getting started, my last frost date is March 31st this year.
@steempowergarden
Interesting post, are the LED lights just normal red blue and white or are they specially designed for gardening?
They are specific wavelengths for plant production (well for optimal growth) but plants generally only absorb the red and blue spectrum of light, the other colors are reflected out and we see the plant as green. So although they sell "full spectrum white grow lights", 50% of the energy used to put out that light is then wasted.
Okay @steempowergarden this is very interesting, I have seen some different experiments with different color spectrums lights on growing plants... It is interesting with uv light also, I wonder about uv-a and uv-b...
Good information
Thank you for sharing
I like it
Awesome!