In our season kickoff post, we glossed over a term “early season grow room” that deserves a bit more exploration. Especially for us northerners that pay a pretty penny for their electricity. Energy is, hands down, the largest cost input of raising our garden from seed in the subarctic!
One of the design parameters we’ve heavily used for our growing spaces is the ability to control lighting down to exactly what we need at any given time. You could use the word “modular” to describe it, but we think of it more like “scalable.”
What this means is that we aim to provide lighting only where and when we actually need it. Our lighting and growing spaces are built into smaller six to nine square foot “chunks” if you will. When our indoor growing areas must expand, we “light up” another chunk in the system.
While we’ve discussed the concept of using “high power” LED lighting, it’s not so overkill that we’re wasting energy on areas where plants simply aren’t growing. We’ve tried to balance energy usage, the growing footprint and efficient space usage against each other.
As our indoor garden matures, you’ll also see us leverage this scalability both up and down. Eventually, we’ll migrate plants into our heated greenhouse, where we’ll trade heating costs against lighting costs.
We’ll explain all this more in time, but juggling 36 cents per kilowatt hour has real fiscal benefits. We’re always looking at the most cost effective way to get from seed to a large garden. Growing from seed is not free, from our perspective it’s not even “low cost.”
Tomorrow, we’ll be discussing a concept we’ve been pursuing and trying to “quantify” for years now. It’s the question of “what does it cost?” to grow our garden from seed? The answer to this question will likely surprise many of you!
