Gardening in the dark

The beginning of February found us totally excited about our future garden, about planting and about the end of winter.  Forest discovered a wonderful blog from some folks here in Minnesota and was inspired by how early they were able to get their starts going.  They build this beautiful little hot room thing with grow lights and a watering system in their basement and by the time they could plant safely outside, they had big and beautiful plants all ready for the garden.

Forest and I thought this was a great idea and perfect for us.  We have a huge basement and as most of the rest of the house is under construction (and/or occupied by curious kids or crazy cats) we thought it would be great to tap into the space that, to this point, had been un-used except during tornadoes.  It's warm in the basement because we heat the house with hot water from our outdoor wood boiler and all the pipes run through the basement.  Perfect.  So we bought the grow lights, dug out the extra lumber we had and Forest started building.  In just a few days he had built this beautiful bench.

Unfortunately at this point in the story is when our family got sick and stayed sick for two months.  The plants were sorely forgotten.  By us anyways.  The mice thought they were awesome and ate a lot of the seeds and some of the starts (though they did leave our flat of lettuce alone).  It was very disappointing.

Finally Forest brought a table and our starts, up into our bedroom where they could get more sunlight, stay a more consistent temperature and be mouse, child and cat free.  Since we moved them up there the lettuce has gotten much bigger and we even have two small comfery plants coming up.  This is thrilling because we planted about 100 comfrey seeds!  They take 30 days to germinate and we thought nothing was going to come of them.

We may try to replant tomatoes and peppers, or maybe we'll just buy started plants from the highschool again this year.  It's disappointing that our attempts to start seeds has gone so poorly.  But then we didn't anticipate getting (and staying) sick for so long.  Maybe next year we'll do better with the starts.  but this year has certainly been a good learning experience for us.