new books / light fixture, lots of pictures soon

Almost all of the seedlings have now put out their primary leaves. I'm still trying to catch up on pictures taken by my guest gardeners and photographers over the break, but should be able to upload pictures soon. Meanwhile...

I had quite the greenhouse Christmas ranging from books to gardening supplies to monetary donations for greenhouse upgrades. My gardening book collection now includes the American Horticultural Society's Northeast SmartGarden Regional Guide, Greenhouse Gardener's Companion by Shane Smith, and two books by Eliot Coleman: The Winter Harvest Handbook and Four-Season Harvest. I've already started the earlier of Coleman's two books, Four-Season Harvest, and am really enjoying it. I find it to be informative and well-written. It's clear that Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, are passionate about organic gardening and fresh nutritious vegetables. They make the distinction early in the book that their gardening techniques are not about extending the growing season (as I am doing with heat and light), but rather extending the harvest season through succession planting and crop protection. I think that their information on harvest-season extension and cold-hardy crops should prove beneficial regardless.

While traveling, I finished reading Fresh Food from Small Spaces by R.J. Ruppenthal. This is a good book about container gardening, and has several thorough sections on building a range of indoor gardening supplies such as self-watering containers, trellises, mushroom colonies, chicken coops, etc. He's also quite the sprout advocate, describing not only how fast-growing and nutritious sprouts are, but also providing numerous sprout recipes and juicing options. It was a pretty informative book, but at times had a bit too much "this will be useful in the coming Armageddon" for my taste.

With the help of some monetary donations from my family, I have bought a new light fixture for the greenhouse. It was becoming apparent that the one 2' T5 bulb per shelf set-up was insufficient to light the seedling trays. The plants along the rim of the trays were growing diagonally (called phototropism) to try to reach the light that was primarily illuminating the middle of the tray. To fix this, I bought a 2-bulb 2' Ultragrow T5 fixture from Harvest Moon Hydroponics for $92.95 (price includes two bulbs). I would've purchased the slightly cheaper Sun Blaze 22 system from ACF Greenhouse, but because of the holidays, they weren't shipping any new orders until the week of Jan. 5th, and I didn't want to wait that long. I installed the new fixture on the top shelf and combined the two 2' T5 single fixtures on the second shelf.

Top shelf:
Second shelf:


I had two choices of T5 bulb for the fixture: grow and bloom, with color temperatures of 6500K and 3000K, respectively. I don't have a good conceptual understanding of color temperature yet, but I'm looking into it. I do know, though, that the grow light emits primarily in the blue spectrum, while the bloom light is primarily red spectrum light. I originally installed one grow and one bloom light in the fixture, but after some reading, it's seeming like the top shelf should probably have two blue spectrum grow bulbs, since it receives very little natural light from the window. Also, the Greenhouse Gardener's Companion says that unless I'm trying to trigger a plant to flower (by lighting it for less time), that I should be lighting the greenhouse for 18 hours a day, so I modified the timer settings for the fluorescent lights to 6 AM - 12 AM instead of 7 AM - 10 PM. It seems like this book is just what I've been needing.