The Spinach House

This past spring/summer Eric and I had a garden where we grew spinach. WOW. Freshly grown spinach is amazing. It makes you never want to buy spinach from the store. So, in order for us to eat it FRESH all year round I decided to make a little indoor garden. I bought this thing at St. Vinney's for cheap ($5 maybe?) I liked the idea that it could have shelves and that it had doors so that our naughty kitty, Becker, won't go in there and dig around (and perhaps use it as a litter box, as he likes to do with all our other plants).

My intention was to put a shelf in here along with a grow light and have a mini greenhouse. Well, I first repainted and cleaned the nasty dirty glass. Then I fastened a grow light (18" from Walmart, the fixture was $7.98 and the bulb was another $8) and then put a shallow tray of dirt and seeds in there. Well, nothing happened. Eric insisted that it was because the seeds needed to be much closer to the light. So, we put in some boxes to lift it up. The seedlings were still reaching. So, we put in more boxes. I also noticed that when we opened the glass doors it seemed like a friggin' sauna in there and the soil always remained damp. Eric's mom then told us that spinach doesn't like to grow in warm/hot weather. So, I moved the "garden" along a wall so there isn't any sunlight coming in to warm the interior. That helped a lot. Just yesterday I put in brackets and cut a shelf so we can have a layer of seedlings starting on top and then another light fastened to the bottom of that shelf to grow already started seedlings into maturity. Let's see how my plan works. If this doesn't seem to work well I know I need to move it all to the basement where it doesn't get much warmer than 50 degrees or so (that's what Linda said was ideal). But, I hate to do that because I like how we've put other plants on top of it. Oh well, I'll do what we have to do!