I topped the basil plant so it would start growing out instead of just up. You can see how this made the plant split, and once it grows out a bit more, I’ll top each of the two main stems in order to make it branch out again.
The cucumber plant is starting to grow flowers!
While this mystery plant has been growing extremely slowly compared to the others, it has been making some noticible progress lately.
The two pepper plants are doing great. It’s really obvious that they are doing much better than they would have under the old lighting system.
The fixture is hanging from ratcheting pulleys, which allow me to raise and lower the lights very easily.
Most of the plants are starting to grow their secondary set of leaves so hopefully I can start identifying some of them soon.
The cucumber plant has shot up pretty quickly. It’s already about an an inch and a half tall. Since it was doing so well, I moved it to its own pot.
Not sure what these are, but they’re also growing pretty quickly.
I planted the seeds in ½” rockwool cubes and then placed all the cubes in two flower pots with some expanded clay pellets on the bottom. I covered the pots lightly with some plastic wrap in order to increase the humidity.
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You’ll notice I started some seeds in rockwool cubes and placed then on the table.
]]>I would need a structure to hold the flood table as well as something to hold my lights, so I decided on PVC because it’s cheap and you can make almost anything out of it. In order to help myself figure out how many tee fitting, etc. I needed, I thought it’d be a good idea to model out the structure before buying anything. I used Sketchup to do this since it’s free and someone else already modeled out all the PVC connectors I would need.
You’ll notice the lights don’t exactly connect to anything in the model, but they’re there to act more as placeholders than anything else. Now that I had a plan, the next step was to get started on construction.
I needed to make the table modular so I could get it in and out of doorways. So the legs, the vertical pieces that hold the light bar, and the light bar, are all separate pieces. Here is the table without the top pieces:
The vertical pipes that hold the light bar are how I will adjust the height of the lights. When I need to raise the lights up, I just swap out those pipes for taller ones. Here is a picture of the tall vertical pieces with the light bar on top:
This next picture is a closeup of the light bar, and it shows how I’m actually connecting my lights. The lights I’m using are two 65 watt compact fluorescent flood lights. Each one has a ½” knuckle that would normally screw into a junction box. In my case, they screw into this ½” threaded female reducer.
On the backside of the tee fitting, I drilled a hole for the lights’ wires to come through.
And here is a picture of the completed table, with the lights installed:
And lastly, this picture shows the table with its short vertical light holders.
