How I Set Up My Grow Tent
There's no getting away from the fact that the best type of light to grow under is natural bright daylight. But if you want to steal a march on nature and make an early start to prolong the growing season, growing under artificial lights and on heat mats is a great way to get things moving early in the year when the days are at their shortest and the temperatures at their coolest.
Over the last few years, I've developed a set up which not only works well for me, but it is also temporary so can be packed away when daylight hours increase and things can be moved out into the polytunnel. To compliment this early season growing, I have also invested in two Garland Super 7's. Each of them fit perfectly onto a windowsill, are heated and come with 7 1/4 sized seed trays. These are ideal for germination and getting seeds going, but as the seedlings grow on, they need more light to continue developing. This is where the grow tent set up comes into it's own.
The set up goes onto my work bench in the garage. I've previously had it set up in the spare bedroom, but it took up a lot of room.
I bought the grow tent online and it's made from a metal tubular frame, with a heavy gauge nylon cover with reflective interior. The easiest way to put it together I have found is to put the frame together first, and then insert the frame into the cover.
As you can see, it's correct orientation is upright with the smallest facet of the grow tent on the ground. This would be ideal for tall plants, but that's not what I want it for.
Once put together though, it fits on the workbench in the garage perfectly on it's side. The zip up door facing towards me makes it really easy to open up the whole front of the grow tent and makes watering or working on it very straight forwards.
Once the grow tent itself has been set up, the next part is putting the lighting frame together. Last year, I spent some time thinking how I could easily fit the lights without having to spend a couple of hours with tape and cable ties every time I put the grow tent together. I came up with an idea to make a wooden frame that I could attach all the lights too. The lighting kits came with clips that could be screwed into a surface (or the wooden frame in my case) meaning that the tubes can be clipped and unclipped with ease.
These are two lighting kits which I use in conjunction with each other. But they aren't identical. They are both LED kits from the same manufacturer, but one set contains more red LEDs while the other contains more white. This means that I'm giving the plants not only light, but light in the right wavelength, optimised for plant growth in their early stages. The lights are all clipped into the wooden alternating between red bias and white bias LEDs. They're then all connected together in series with the connecting cables.
You'll see on the wooden frame, there are 4 cable ties loose, 2 down each long side of the frame. These are used to hang the wooden frame onto small S shaped hooks hooked into the frame of the grow tent.
The final part of the set up are the heat mats and propagator. I was given a propagator which is also heated and had a plastic lid which help with controlling the humidity for the young plants. But the propagator only uses about 1/4 of the space that the grow tent provides. Rather than investing in any more propagators, a cheaper alternative are heat mats.
The other things that you will notice that the grow tent cover has various vents and holes. This makes it easy to run cables from the lights and heat mats out to the mains sockets.
I've found that between the Garland Super 7s and this grow tent, I can get everything I need to for the whole plot off to a good start. The only thing that this system lacks is air circulation. While the vents provide a route for air to enter and escape the grow tent, there is no flow of air, but that can also easily be addressed by adding a couple of small fans clipped into the frame. Not only does this help with humidity levels, but the movement of air around young seedlings also helps them strengthen their stems, producing stronger plants for when it comes to hardening them off and them being transplanted onwards. The grow tent usually goes up around mid January and stays until such a time that I am happy that the worst of the frosts have passed and that the plants can be hardened off to survive in the allotment polytunnel.
