A theme you’ll likely notice about our indoor nursery is that we grow on tables, in contrast to popular shelf based systems. This is on purpose and has become our preference after trying things out both ways.
A big reason we like growing on a “single plane” is because we can see all our plants, in a single glance. This helps us catch any problems early, like when our plants need watering or if they develop any health issues.
Our lighting is simpler, too. Instead of having many, smaller lights to cover multiple shelves, we can use higher power lighting that helps create more compact garden starts. This is usually less expensive than many, smaller lights and is also much easier to wire up, electrically.
Using a table keeps everything at a comfortable working height. This is nice for watering, checking on our plants and moving our plants around when we start our hardening off process. A table is also a convenient working area for sowing, transplanting and other nursery tasks. Move a few trays and your growing space doubles as a working space, creating multipurpose efficiency.
The main reason, though, is that plant height is never a concern of ours. Those tall plants can simply reach for the sky. Whether it’s tomatoes, peppers, corn or onions, vertical growth is not restraint we need to consider in the single plane design. This was always a problem when we had shelf based systems, many plants simply got too big.
Shelf based nurseries are slightly more space efficient and we are not saying they are “wrong.” That’s a huge advantage, especially if you’re constrained on space or need to keep things compact. Not everyone’s willing to temporarily dedicate their dining room to their garden like we are!
For us, though, we’ve found it more important to sacrifice a little bit of square footage for quite a few more benefits.
