I am very excited to have an indoor grow-light stand again this year, and again it is cat-proof!
Only two of the lights are hung so far, but it will have six shop-light fixtures and will accomodate eight flats of seedlings.
I used to start all of my seeds indoors and have written about it many times. A composite article can be found here. Every year my light stand looked a bit different, but my favorite growlight set up was when I had a double-decker stand on one side of the room and a table annex on the other. That set-up didn't work so well because our cats ate some of the plants! I then built a cat-proof frame around the double-decker stand.
That set-up was great until it had to be dis-mantled when our finished basement flooded. We had to remove all of the carpet and the bottom half of the dry-wall. Eventually I replaced the drywall and we are about 80% finished with restoring it back to a livingroom. The idea was to put the lightstand back afer the remodel was complete. The only problem is that I re-use wood every time I build something. The big light stand and frame got repurposed and last year we had no grow-light stand.
All of this is history and really unimportant. (I'm not even sure why I bothered writing about it here)
All I really intended to post is pictures of my new cat-proof light stand for 2011.
It is ugly and pretty simple. It's just a half sheet of plywood screwed to an ond table for the base. If I didn't have to worry about our cat eating the plants, I could have simply hung the lights from the ceiling. Instead I hung them from a frame made of old wood (the wood used to be tomato stakes). The frame has eye hooks on both sides - the bottom ones have the lights hung on them and the top ones are connected to hooks on the ceiling. Here is a wide shot to better understand:
Each section of netting is only attached to the underside of the table with hooks. That way I can easily lift up a section of net to work with the plants.
This stand is scaled down from what I used to have, but I think six or eight flats of seedlings inside at a time will be enough since I will hopefully be able to move older seedlings out to the greenhouse before getting planted in the garden.
Now I have to get planting those seeds! I feel like I'm a little late since I had to build this stand first. At least the extra-early tomato seeds are already sown. I'll tell you all about them tomorrow for Tomato Tuesday.
Happy Seed Starting!
- Marc
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