BY KYLE L. LADENBURGER
BUDGET GARDENING I GARDEN CULTURE
As long as you have the right tools and supplies...
g tarAtinBudget SOn
As gardeners, we grow our own food at home for multiple reasons. It gives us a certain piece of mind knowing exactly what inputs go into cultivating your food crops, and the bottom line is that the food we grow for ourselves is fresher, and likely more delicious than the grocery store equivalent. But, there are often other reasons that one decides to venture into the realm of at home cultivation. A large source of encouragement for the modern gardener is the increasingly high price of fresh foods, and the strain it can have on the normal family budget. drainage, or individual plastic seed When executed properly, the act of gardening lets us take personal FOOD WE GROW FOR starting cells that fit comfortably nutrition into our own hands in a OURSELVES IS FRESHER into the propagation tray. These allow the grower to have one plant budget-friendly way, and one of the in each cell, and to grow it until they things we can do to save even more money is to start our reach the desired size. The tray, individual planting cells, own garden plants from seed before the season begins. and the humidity dome can usually all be purchased for This is a relatively easy thing to accomplish, as long as you about $10. have the right tools and supplies. The trick, however, is doing so in a budget-friendly way.
Let’s start with the seed starting containers. The first thing you will need is a starter or propagation tray with a plastic dome lid. The standard tray is 2’ long by 1’ wide, and is capable of housing over 100 seedlings. You can start seeds by simply filling the tray with growing medium and planting the seeds but this may require transplanting some of the seedlings into individual containers in order for the seedlings to grow big enough to eventually be planted in an outdoor garden. You can use plastic cups with holes punched in the bottom to allow for adequate water
Adequate lighting is a must for raising healthy seedling indoors. A two foot, four bulb T5 fluorescent light fixture is easy to mount, low in energy usage, and provides excellent light coverage for one standard propagation tray. It will also help supply the heat that seeds need to germinate. Proper lighting is important for seedlings as they begin the process of photosynthesis, and developing both vegetative and root growth. Raising seedlings in a sunny window will result in plants that are “leggy” from stretching to receive light, and have only modest root growth. The light fixture and bulbs will be the most cost intensive part of this project, but
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