Every January I am faced not only with some of the coldest temperatures of the Colorado winter, but with reconciling the insane bounty depicted in the influx of gardening catalogs with the bleak brown garden outside. This year is especially tough because I didn’t get to garden all last season due to a mid-summer move.

Thanks to my wonderful husband, however, I am happily gardening indoors this January. He built me a 4-shelf plant rack, the design of which he adapted from Hammer Zone. Using a few shop lights, a power strip, and a timer we used to use to turn the Christmas tree lights on and off, we now have a rack big enough to grow 16 flats of plants indoors. The shop lights are on chains so that I can raise and lower them as the plants grow and I have the lights set to run 16 hours a day.

Within a week, I had spinach, various lettuces, and kale sprouted and within two weeks the basil, chives, tomatoes, cilantro, parsley, watercress, and sorrel had sprouted too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to try to grow tomatoes all the way to harvest indoors (OK, I may try, but I doubt I’ll succeed unless I upgrade my setup a bit), but by starting a few of the earlier varieties now (I started a 4-pack of Romas & a 4-pack of Yellow Pears) and planting them out early in my beloved Wall-o-Waters, I hope to have a particularly early tomato harvest.

I’m guessing we’ll be eating baby greens before St. Patrick’s Day, which is when my outdoor gardening season usually kicks off with a massive planting of peas and spinach. The most expensive part of this setup was the shop lights & bulbs–the wood was literally $40, the potting soil is about $5 a bag, all those seeds were about $20, and I had seed-starting flats on hand.

One thing I’m going to do differently with the next batch of seeds that I start is I’m going to try to replace the usual bleach wash-down the Cooperative Extension recommends to combat damping-off with a hydrogen peroxide rinse. I had forgotten how bad bleach smells since I rarely use it anymore and I couldn’t get the smell off my hands (or my garage floor where the wash-down took place) for what seemed like days! Has anyone out there tried this?

If you’re wondering where the gorgeous photo at the top of the page came from, you have my husband, Matt, to thank. Want to see more of his pretty pictures? Check out his new photo blog. I intend to change these photos periodically and although it’s possible that the odd one will come from me (or my talented sister-in-law), it seems more likely that most of them will come from Matt. Hope you like them!

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be “spreading my wings” but that wouldn’t tie back into the theme of this site, the latest ChezArtz creation.  I’ve been blogging more and more about gardening on ChezArtz and found that I was cutting out some of the detail I wanted to include for fear of boring all those wonderful readers who really just wanted to check for updates on the children. Now I don’t have to do that, and if you don’t care a bit about my kids, you can just read the garden-related stuff and skip the rest right here on GreenArtz.