Our grow room has definitely exploded! We set up our second temporary growing table as we’re anticipating needing it. With low temps easily still getting into the negatives overnight, hopes of heating our greenhouse soon are on pause.
This does give us an opportunity to “properly” show you our temporary growing setup, though. We built a super inexpensive PVC light hanger to mount our LED lighting, it’s easily set up and taken down in about 10 minutes. This setup can hold nine 1020 trays, which is easily competitive with most shelf based growing systems. We love single plane of growing over shelving based systems because it’s easier to water, quicker to uncover problems with our plants and also is much easier to tell when our plants need water.
We have two of these temporary setups, the second of which only gets deployed if we’re experiencing a super late spring like we are this year. It does seem, though, that we have to use it more years than we don’t. We haven’t ever hit the total capacity of this second system yet, so it finally got us to the “right size” of temporary indoor growing capabilities.
All in all, this setup cost probably about $400-$450 to put together, soup to nuts. While that does seem expensive, this would be well less than half of a single growing season if we were to actually buy plants. Over the years, these investments definitely pay off. For example, we switched entirely to LED lighting years several ago and this decision alone easily paid for our new indoor growing builds within a short three to four years.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of how we deal with the serious demands that “at scale” growing requires in the north. It’s hardly inconvenient, for us, to walk past a table for a couple months. For the benefit of being able to grow hundreds upon hundreds of our own garden starts and save better than a thousand bucks!
