My Gardens

The tomatoes are spaced 24" apart and each are in a square tomato cage 48" tall and 20" square with a two 5 foot rebar to keep them from falling over. I am going to erect 4 six foot tall wrought iron trellis for the cucumber to climb.

Flower & Vegetable Garden Layout	Vegetable gardens

I have built a cart upon which I have 2 Earthbox  with New Ace green pepper (see http://www.earthbox.com/)

Two days after transplanting the pepper plants (5/17/05)	Three weeks later (6/4/05)
Three weeks later (6/25/05)	First picking!!!  72 peppers!!!

Here is the plan for my flower beds for 2010. The color refers to when the different flowers bloom. 

I start my own seedling under a growlite in my basement. The first Saturday of February I start my green peppers, the first Saturday of March I start my tomatoes, and the first Saturday of April I start the rest of my seedlings. Here a couple of pictures showing my growlite and seedlings:

(click thumbnail to see larger picture)

		Growlite and seedlings February 2010. Underneath the seed tray I use a 40 watt heating mat to maintain a temp of ~60 degrees, the concrete floor was a 40 degrees when I checked the first week of February!
		Growlite and seedlings March 2010, peppers 5 weeks after seed planting, tomatoes 10 days after seed planting.
		Growlite and seedlings April 2010, peppers 10 weeks, tomatoes 5 weeks, zucchini and cucumber the day they were planted.

In 2003 I found the original plans for my growlite on Cornell University's "Garden Resource's"  page (http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/factsheets/growlite/index.html).

I built the double shoplite version of the growlite in 2003. The following year I made it wider by replacing the four 17" pieces of pipe with four 24" pieces and added a third shoplite.

The next year (2005), I added a fourth shoplite. I had originally planned to widen the stand but I noticed that my lights were not fitting thru (between) the legs on each side. So... what I did was lengthen it by 2".

I took the two 49" pieces off the bottom and cut them so that they were now 2" longer than the 2 long pieces at the top. Then I replaced the bottom pieces with two 51" pieces. This modification now allows a shoplite to hang between the legs making room for 4 shoplites. This allows me to have 4 trays side by side and 2 at the end (see below). Since 2006 (as seen in pictures above) I have used 5 shoplite.

Office Depot