The first seedlings, onions and leeks, have been started, and a few are even poking their heads up to get some light.

It’s really early in the year to be starting seedlings, but onions are a slow starter,and as near as I can tell, late January is actually the right time to have them ready to go into the ground by April.

Especially with the trouble we were having with the wood stove, the house has been very cold. 50 degrees in the morning, and seldom higher than 60 throughout the day. Putting on thermal underwear first thing in the morning has become routine, although hopefully that’ll resolve itself now that the stove seems to have been fixed. (New gaskets. Where, by, “new,” I mean, putting in gaskets that somehow were not present at all.)

They say that the soil needs to be above about 60 degrees for the seedlings to germinate. This is a bit of a mis-statement. Many plants will germinate at lower temperatures, even down to freezing. They just take a good long time to do it, and the whole point of starting seedlings indoors is to use the warm, protected environment to get a jump-start on the year’s crop.

Additionally, I have found that, with starting seedlings in a windowsill there’s just not enough light and they get very spindly. This house is especially well shaded. Although it has a south-facing front, it also has a porch, and the sun is usually shaded from the windows.

So I decided to get some grow lights and a heat mat for my seedlings.

You can spend a lot of money on grow lights, and perhaps the high-priced lights are better, but for my purposes, I’ve decided to see what kind of results I get with fluorescent shop lights. You can buy them at your local hardware store for about $20 each, and a pack of ten bulbs is about $20. All told, I spent $50 for two lights, which I estimate will be enough to light all of my seedlings.

In the photo above, the lamps are resting on the greenhouse boxes. I plan to build a stand out of PVC. It’s nice to have a stand so that you can adjust the height of the lamps. As the plants get taller, you raise the lamps so they’re consistently just a few inches above the plants, maximizing the light the plants get.

The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.”

Heat mats, you can buy online all day long, but finding them in stores is harder. Even Mayo, the local lawn and garden center didn’t have any in stock. Luckily, Ferry-Morse makes a heated greenhouse kit that comes with 72 peat starter-pellets, a mini-”greenhouse,” and a heat mat, and Home Depot carries all variety of Ferry-Morse products. The kit is about $24, which, if you were going to buy the greenhouse at $7 anyway, is a fair price for the mat.

One of the problems you can run into with a heat mat is overheating the plants. The heat mat will keep the plants about 10-20 degrees warmer than ambient temperature (mine is doing about 22 degrees, so it’s a bit of an overachiever). For my house, that’s no problem, as they hover around 80 in the kitchen. For a typical American house, it would put the temperature in the 90′s, which may be too hot for some seeds. You can buy a digital temperature controller for about $30, but I suggest simply putting the heat mats on a $10 timer.

The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.” The nice thing about this timer is that, if I wanted to, I could put the heat mats on the timer and do 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, all day long. If the timer had removable plastic tabs, I would only be able to turn on and off four times a day.

In order to monitor the soil temperature, I have stuck a kitchen thermometer into a peat pellet that hasn’t been planted with anything. I set it so that 80 degrees is straight up and then I can quickly check the temperature through the moist plastic of the greenhouse.