For today’s post, I thought I would share my latest project:
the ultimate (for me anyway) growing/seeding table!
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| Front view |
For some time I’ve been toying with the idea of a
all-encompassing grow table for seedlings, winter herbs, and the citrus trees
when they come in for the winter. Of course, my preference would be to put the
citrus trees in a nice south-facing window, but in our current apartment we are
in a bit of a predicament when it comes to that. We have many windows (and it
is nice and airy and bright in here) but the vast majority of them face north,
west, or east. The only south facing windows we have are in the kitchen,
bedroom, and one small window in the current growing room.
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| Side view |
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| Corner view |
Here’s what I came up with. The footprint of the table is
55x50, so it’s large. I purposely over-built it, because I also home brew and
all of my empty glass bottles are stored on the top shelf, so it needed to be
quite strong. I wanted to have around 30 inches of space under the table for
storage so that we could store large items underneath and out of sight. The
table height is also a comfortable height for access.
Since we live in an apartment and have moved several times,
I also wanted to make it both future proof and easy to disassemble and
reassemble. By “future proof” I mean that it would be designed to fit in a
place with a lower ceiling and that it would fit nicely in a corner. Right now
we are lucky to live in a place with pretty high ceilings, but that hasn’t
always been the case. The lowest ceiling height we ever had was 7.5 ft, which
is 90 inches. That’s how I arrived at the self height of 70 inches. That would
allow 20 inches of clearance for the empty bottles even in that scenario, which
is plenty. To make it easy to take apart and reassemble I put block underneath
each rail so that they could be set in place, clamped, and then attached quickly
and easily.
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| Don't worry...you can trust me... |
Here’s another consideration: I wanted to cat-proof it. As
anyone with cats knows, you’re more making something cat resistant than
cat-proof! Our two cats seem to share in my love for the garden, although their
way of showing it involves chewing on and/or stepping on the seedlings. To
accomplish this I toyed with many different ideas, but there was always a
double-edged sword involved: anything that made it harder for the cats to get
onto the table would also make it harder for me to access the table. I wanted
to do just enough to stop them from getting on the table and still allow for
ease of access when I watered or checked on the plants.
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| Table with panels installed (the screen is hard to see) |
Since we had some old scraps of screen left over I decided
to construct 2 removable screen panels that would block the sides that were
open to the room (the other two are against walls in the corner of the room).
So far, it has worked well. Of course, it is physically
possible for the cats to jump from their nearby cat tree over the panels, but I
think the panels are just high enough that they don’t feel secure doing that.
The table has been up for about 6 weeks now and so far they have never been
able to get on it (and every time I water the plants they go crazy and try to
find ways up). I would have made the
panels higher, but the screen scraps were only a certain height, and I was
afraid of having a seam that the cats could either get through or get stuck in
somehow.
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| The panels hook in place at each end for easy and quick removal |
Today it is -7 outside, so I am going to start some seeds!
I’m behind (calendar-wise) where I wanted to be, especially for the eggplants
and peppers. However, look for a post this week about my experiment in getting
peppers to germinate faster! I began this experiment last week on 6 types of
peppers, and this afternoon (about 5 days later) it looks like I will be able
to plant all 6 types of seeds as they all have small taproots!
Until next time, happy gardening!
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