Ashley Swansong: We're here at the home of Liz Hamilton, who's a horticulturalist, and she's gonna give us a quick little tour with lots of good information about her awesome indoor growing setup here where she starts 85% of her garden and flowers.

And please subscribe to Modern Gardener because our next episode is gonna be with Liz demonstrating her tuber forcing using her canna lilies as an example.

I love this because I think for a single family home, this is a great size.

It's funny, 'cause I came in here imagining you'd have this entire room and a mini greenhouse, and I love that it's just this perfect little setup.

- My little tiny guy.

I have a regular yard like anybody else.

Sometimes it's even hard for me to scale it back, so keeping it small like this actually helps me keep things in perspective.

Anytime you're starting seeds and you're new and a beginner, it's a lot of trial and error.

I hear a lot of questions like, "Well how much do I need to water every?"

and there's really no one-size-fits-all answer, right, 'cause it's gonna depend on how humid or not humid your house is, what your lighting situation looks like.

Are you over a heat vent?

Are you near a window?

And then your soil medium directly affects how long it'll hold water and how long it won't.

And so there are so many variables, so it's a lot of, well, I just killed everything in that tray.

Good thing for me seeds are really cheap.

So this is ordered from Gardener's Supply, which is gardeners.com I think is their main website.

And this particular model is called the sunlight.

And this one's the two-tier.

- The lights came with the whole setup?

- Yep, everything's included.

These are T5 full spectrum LEDs and so you can raise and lower these through the knobs, but these don't need to be raised and lowered because they won't make the plants stretch.

- I did notice you have the two lights and not just one.

So it's definitely getting lots of good light.

- Mmm-hmm, but I like 'em too, 'cause they don't burn out, takes forever.

This is 10,000 hours per bulb.

And the other nice thing is because you've got an LED, they're not sucking a ton of energy.

So I don't notice a difference on our energy bill.

And so you can buy one of these.

These are really easy to find at any of your home store and then you just put a plug in there and if they're pushed down, that's when the light's on and when they're pulled up, the light's off.

So you can just adjust by pushing these down and then pulling these up based on when you want 'em to run.

Some of these trays are self-watering, which is really nice.

It has the dome and it has this and then it has this wicking pad.

- Oh wow.

- And so then you can see here, so you water down in here.

You set this and then this part of the pad goes down into what would be your water reservoir.

And it wicks the water up to the top, which then comes in through here.

And that's really nice.

It can give you an extra couple of days.

If you leave town or whatever, then you don't have to call someone over and like, "Ah, my gosh, my seedlings, I need someone to water 'em," but starting out, if you just filled the water reservoir and you weren't, 'cause these little tiny seeds don't have a radical or a root that's gonna reach all the way down that's gonna suck up all the water.

So the first couple of weeks, you're still eye-droppering water until your plants get up to a certain size and then you can start using the self-watering compartment.

- Oh, gotcha, okay.

- The other great thing is all this stuff is reusable so you can wash all of your seed starting equipment at the end of each season with a 10 to 1 bleach solution.

And it'll knock down any of those fungal issues.

Like botrytis, it'll wash all that off.

If you had spider mites, if you have spider bites or any of those things, that'll get rid of all those issues.

And so reusing your equipment is really nice too.

And then some things that need heat to germinate.

If I tried to do it in this house, they wouldn't, but I'm not doing too much of anything really crazy right now.

But if I were going to, I would buy myself a heat mat.

There's mostly two different kinds.

One just gives you an additional 10 to 20 degrees of whatever your current ambient temp is, but there's no real gauge.

And then the other kind, which is gonna obviously be more expensive, comes with a soil probe that you put down in the soil and then that comes with a dial and so it measures what temp is in the soil and then you dial whatever you want the temp to be and it would heat to that degree.

So it's a lot more precise, but obviously more mechanics.

Most of what I've ever used is just those generic, it's giving you a couple extra degrees to boost, but I do start some things a little bit early if I know that they prefer warmer temps 'cause it'll be slow to germinate.

And peppers are notoriously slow, so I've started mine.

One thing to remember, too, with these home units, there's not a lot of air movement, like in these big professional greenhouses, they have these great big huge fans, intake and outtake and they blow all over the place.

And part of that, when you're raising seedlings, is to imitate air movement outside and it helps strengthen so if you're moving those stems around all the time you're strengthening those cell walls so that you have nice strong plants that will stand up.

And so introducing air movement, which also helps prevent mold and things like that, 'cause it is very easy to overwater indoor seedlings.

So adding a fan, which I don't have yet, 'cause I don't have any seedlings up, but you can buy at the dollar store.

There's these little clip fans and it's a buck and they're battery operated and they clip right here and I've seen people use those oscillating fans that rotate.

If you already own one of those, rotating is good.

Otherwise you're rotating the plants, which is what I do with mine.

I just move them around so that they're getting some kind of air movement from all different sides.

And all the lot of times when you see dampening off, which is a mold issue in seedlings where they'll get up to a certain height and then they'll just fall over and they've rotted at the soil line, dampening off is the name of it, but the mold that causes it is botrytis.

You see that because too much water, not enough airflow.

- Oh interesting.

- And so yeah, you can have a lot more success adding just a little tiny extra fan.

You don't have to buy the fanciest thing out there.

You can go to any of your big box stores and buy shelving units and you can purchase these lights on your own and rig them up yourself so that you can raise and lower the lighting and do it for a lot cheaper and you can be totally successful on your own without purchasing something like this, too.

- Thank you so much, all of this has been super helpful information.

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