What are you growing with that grow light?

We have a grow light, yes, but rest assured people, we are using that grow light because we're growing plants of the vegetable and legal herb variety! You still may be wondering about the grow light situation - it does sound weird - so I'll give you a bit of an overview of our recent gardening adventures.

This year we are upping our game, taking our gardening to the next level (hopefully). We've had two growing seasons since we started gardening and our experiences during those have helped us learn a great deal. Houston has two growing seasons each year and sometimes, especially if you have weather like we've had, your growing seasons never end. Our jalapeno and cherry tomato plants are still producing.

Although we learned a lot from our first two growing seasons there are a few main take-aways:

1. Per Michael Pollen (and verified during our experiences) you cannot be one with nature and be a gardener - you must be ok with waging war on pests of all kinds. Thankfully, I'm particularly fond of my garden and not fond of pests. 
2. Buying plants is EXPENSIVE.
3. Growing seedlings is a pain, time-consuming, and doesn't work out well without a lot of planning.

We came up with a game plan to address these issues this year. Our solutions included building another garden so that our plants have more space and we can keep a better eye on pests. The husband also researched growing seedlings and discovered that a grow light is most helpful. He built a growing station with a grow light and lets just say its amazing - SO much better than growing seeds without it.

Our progress thus far:

The husband planted the seeds January 14th and with our new grow light, we had little sprouts in three days.

In the next two weeks we saw a ton of growth, such that by February we had substantial baby plants.

The husband then transplanted the little guys to solo cups where they continued to grow.

Finally, our little growing station became a jungle of plants ready to be moved to the garden.

The tomatoes were the first to be planted and then a week or two later, we planted the remaining vegetables.

They look a little sad but just needed to be watered!

We have not taken pictures of the garden in the past few weeks but I plan to do so this weekend so you should see an update soon.