Indoor plant nursery station

01/2019

When I started to get interested in growing plants last year it began to dawn on me that the season in Germany is way too short to enjoy the plants for long. I was wondering how I could start my plants indoors, so when it’s finally warm enough to put them outside, they would have a head start. Without a garden and the option of a green house, it had to be something practical that could reside inside my flat.

The best option seemed to buy:

• Simple wooden shelves from IKEA
• 10 relatively cheap LED lights from China
• Connectors to put the LEDs together
• Two cables and plugs to connect to the LEDs to an outlet

The material must have cost around 150€ all together. I wanted to be able to move the boards seperately so the IKEA shelves seemed to be a good starting point. They fit the length of the LEDs just great. After putting it all together, which felt like a huge experiment, it looked like this…

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Naturally, it became a pain to move the boards with the leds and take the plants out underneath to look at them. So for a few bucks I ordered some levers that should fix that problem.

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Now I could just pull them up and down as I pleased. Does it look good? Nope, not at all, it’s really for a room that you don’t care much about! But does it work? Yes, my plants did not mind the kind of light. Of course, the lights I bought were not the best. One could buy less and better lights and get the same or a better result. But in terms of cost-benefit ratio this was the best solution for me.

And they lived happily ever after. 🌱