Seed Starter Rack

A seed starter rack provides a spot for you to germinate seeds and grow seedlings indoors, any time of the year (in particular, immediately before the start of the outdoor growing season). Starting your own seeds can save money over buying established plants each growing season. And in many cases, it also lets you grow less-common varieties that might not be locally available in plant form.

This simple starter rack is perfect for a basement or utility room. The basic structure is built with 2 × 4s and has shelves made from 1/2" plywood. Plants that need the warmest temperatures should go on the upper shelf.

Each shelf of the rack measures 24 × 48"—plenty of room for four full-size seedling flats. Two fluorescent shop lights illuminate each shelf and are fully height-adjustable so you can raise or lower them as needed to provide plants with the right amounts of light and heat at different stages of development (see page 38 for tips on choosing light bulbs for your fixtures). Because seeds and seedlings can require as much as 20 hours of light per day, it’s most convenient to control the lights with an automatic timer. This should be plugged into a GFCI-protected receptacle, due to all of the water used in the area. Even so, it’s best to remove flats before misting or watering, to keep water away from the lights.

As with many projects in this book, you can easily modify the dimensions of the rack as shown to suit your specific needs. For a smaller unit, switch to 2-ft. or 3-ft. lights and re-size the shelves accordingly, or make the shelves half as deep and use a single fixture for each. For a larger rack, you can make the shelves square and hang four 4-ft. lights over each shelf. Another option is to bypass the construction and use a store-bought shelving unit for the basic structure (see Variation, below).