Best Grow Lights | Grow Room Tour For Indoor Plants | Affordable & Easy || Budget Gardening

I love using my LED growlights to grow plants all year long! Here in New Hampshire, zone 5B, I like to start plants very early during the winter months. That’s necessary to do in cold areas like northern New England. During my grow room tour, I show you a Gardener Supply grow system as well as an affordable DIY shelving unit grow system. I include ideas, tips and tricks.

Expand a grow light system: https://youtu.be/0plqLetpt9I

Here are links to products I have or similar to what I have:
$99.98 – Five Tier Shelves (47.7-in W x 18-in D x 72-in H): http://tinyurl.com/57r8rkw6

$19.98 – Linkable LED Shop Light – http://tinyurl.com/52zhdpvy

$8.08 – 2 Inch Swivel Caster – https://tinyurl.com/SwivelCaster

$800 – Gardener’s Supply System: https://www.gardeners.com/buy/t5-grow-light-stand-three-shelves/39-357.html

Let’s chat! Leave a comment if you have a gardening-related question that I can answer or an idea for future videos!

📷 Follow me on Instagram for updates, announcements, and pictures of my gardens: https://www.instagram.com/budgetgardeningvita/

#growlights #growyourown #growyourownfood #seedstarting #organicgardening #homestead #homesteading

hey budget gardeners VA Loca here join me today as I show you my indoor grow light system so let’s [Music] go a lot of you have reached out to me asking for my setup and how I start my seeds so I thought it would be nice to show you the system behind me and kind of go over the thought process behind why I made these systems and the pros and cons for this type of system so even though I’ve been gardening for about 30 years I want to say I started growing plants with from seed indoors about 25 years ago and way back when when I used to grow things from seeds I did not have any grow lights I really didn’t know I needed grow lights things grew but they became very leggy and even though I had the plants in Windows it didn’t help the plants were just very leggy very weak and so I started doing more research and over time my mother-in-law bought me this beautiful grow light system here and it’s from Gardener Supply I’ve had it for about 10 if not 15 years I’ve had it for quite a while I loved it I love it so much the only problem is it’s very expensive but there are some Li limitations with this particular grow light system one limitation is I’m limited with how many plants I can put on this stand so while the stand worked for me for a number of years I outgrew it although there are many benefits to it too and I definitely want to call those out one of the benefits is aesthetically it’s a beautiful piece I really enjoy it one of the big benefits of the system is it has a chain on the side and when you pull it you can very easily lower and raise the lights you just have to do it on both sides but it’s very convenient very smooth how it works so I really do enjoy that with the system when I bought the system years ago it used just regular fluorescent lights and that’s what’s still in here I know that I can now buy the LED lights and switch them out it’s a little costly so I’m not sure if I’m going to be doing that yet or not right now I’m just going to use what I have and another limitation with this grow light system is when I have these type of trays here which are called 10 x 20 trays I like to bottom water my plants it makes it really easy down here you can see only two trays fit on this particular shelf granted I could remove the trays I could put all of my six-packs or my plants in here and then when it comes to watering I could put water in this Reservoir here but that doesn’t really work for me because I might have small little sixpacks in here I might have a 4in pot in here and they all have different watering requirements so again there’s great things about this system but there are things that I don’t really enjoy also when it comes to the 10 x 20 trays technically I could place them this way if I wanted to and I could fit it looks like four going this way but I don’t have LED lights in here that means that these plants would not be getting the right amount of light especially out on the sides here so hopefully this gives you an idea of the pros and cons for a system like this one so now let me show you the DIY grow light system that I’ve built over the last few years so Mr budget Garder and I built some DIY grow light systems we got the idea off the internet and we love it it’s definitely within my price range and we love it so much in fact that we ended up building three of them but for today we’re just going to focus on one system so what we’re looking at here is a five tier shelving system and it’s made of metal I bought it from a big box store and it’s about four feet wide I specifically wanted a shelving system that was four feet wide because a lot of the LED shop lights were four feet wide however I encourage you to look in your house maybe you have some shelves that you’re not using anymore maybe they’re not four feet wide maybe they’re three feet wide defin definitely use what you have if you want to get started with a very simple cheap easy grow light system don’t feel like you have to go out and just start buying all this because even by making your own system like this one it can add up when it comes to money so I did not have some free shelving units that I was able to use so I had to go out and buy them I did start though by looking on Facebook Marketplace and at the time that I needed the shelves there wasn’t a lot out there but that’s also another place that you can check is Facebook Marketplace what I do like about the fact that I bought my own is that then I all three of the ones that I made all match and this grow light system area is in my eaten kitchen part of my house so it’s in a main part of my house so aesthetically I like the look of it but you definitely don’t have to go out and buy a system like this you can definitely look on Facebook Marketplace or within your own house so it has five shelves I know that you can buy some systems that have four shelves or three shelves that is fine also I do a lot of growing I grow a lot of vegetables a lot of flowers a lot of herbs I do grow perennials but I do that using the winter sewing method but I’m just saying that you know I do do a lot of growing of plants so it makes sense for me to start with a five tier system the other thing is when it comes to the shop lights you don’t have to buy grow lights specifically when you go shopping for lights if it has the word grow lights on it yes it will definitely work for you but it’s very expensive and these are just normal LED shop lights that I got from a big box store and you can buy them at like Costco Home Depot Lowe’s Sam’s Club you can find them on Amazon Walmart there are a lot of places where you can find these the big thing that you’re looking for is the lumens and these are either 5,000 or 5,500 lumens that’s a perfect sweet spot for what you’re looking for for your LED shop lights another thing that I was looking for was I was looking for the proper width of my shop lights I wanted my LED shop lights to be four feet so that they’re not sticking out too much from my system here and also that they’re not too short so this was the perfect length and the other thing that I encourage you to do is to buy the proper amount of shop light up front and maybe even buy a spare one just to have it on hand and the reason is these don’t last forever if one shop light ends up dying you do need to buy another one and just like anything that particular style might go out of stock and so it’s nice to have matching LED shop lights but it’s not the end of the world if they don’t match and one thing that I didn’t do but I encourage you to do if you want to is to buy linkable LED shop lights that really would save you a lot of space when it comes to how many outlets you need to plug into when it comes to plugging them into the wall I did not buy the uh linkable ones so I will show you how I have it set up when I have it plugged in there but that’s something else to look for the uh linkable LED shop lights and it’s important to have two LED shop lights on each shelf because of the width of this particular system you want full coverage for all your plants under here so don’t be don’t skimp out and only buy one light per shelf especially if it’s as wide as my like the shelving system that I have here and what I’ll do for you is I will put specifics like the width and the height of these shelving units as well as the grow lights and anything else I’m talking about today I’ll just pop them down in the description area so when it comes to raising and lowering the lights you’ll see that there’s some chains here on each of the corners and it’s definitely not as convenient as The Gardener Supply system but it works you just have to notice over here we have some S hooks and you just have to basically raise or lower the lights with the Chain by unhooking and reh hooking the chain it definitely works it’s not a problem but the other thing that you can also do is you can raise your lights higher and if your plants are on the shorter side you can just basically raise your plants up to the lights by using some something underneath the tray it can be books it can be another tray like I’m using here and that’s what I’m doing is I’m using an upside down 10 by2 tray to raise this particular tray so that my plants are closer to the lights because that is key when your seedlings are very small you want the lights to be pretty much right on top of those seedlings within a few inches of those seedlings so there are a couple of things you can do to make life easier you don’t have to raise and lower them this way you can also raise up your plants closer to the lights and notice over here I have four of these 10x 20 trays and they fit very nicely under these shop lights it really works and I can fit on this particular system each row I can fit four 10 x 20 trays and so that makes 16 but then at the top here you will notice that this is the fifth row on my system and last year what happened was I was just using this for storage that’s what a lot of people do is they just use this top row for storage and that is perfectly fine but believe it or not I I ran out of room and so my husband did a DIY system using what a lot of what we had in the house so we had a lot of PVC pipe and he just retrofitted it to fit on the top here and I really only had to just go out and buy a few things the biggest cost was the two additional LED grow lights at the top and what I like about this top shelf is then I was able to put my taller plants up here on the top and still use the lower shelves for my shorter plants and I do have a video that shows how we retrofitted this top part of this shelf and I’ll be sure to add the link to that video at the bottom in the description so you’ll notice in the back here I have lots of light coming in natural light because there are windows here and what I’ve noticed happens sometimes are the plants that are over here get double the amount of light they get light from the LED shop lights but then they also get the natural sunlight that’s coming in from the window so what I do is I just switch the tray around and that way the plants that are on that side over there come over here and I don’t do it that often I might maybe do it every few days just so that the plants are getting equal amount of light so at the base of each of these grow light systems that we made we opted to add Caster wheels that are non-locking and this is definitely an optional piece that you don’t have to do it’s not an expense and I’ll add the price that we spent on each of these wheels in the description below but what’s nice about having the wheels is if you do need to move each of these systems around it makes it so much easier when you have the caster wheels in place and I got the idea because the The Gardener Supply system had Caster wheels already on them and that’s why I just wanted to mimic that so I just wanted to point that out for you so over here is a timer again it is optional it is not required but I highly recommend it because who wants to be turning these lights on and off every single day and this particular timer is a three-prong timer and I can plug in on this side as well as on this side over here this is how you would turn each of these lights on and I’m only going to turn the lights on when I actually have plants growing underneath otherwise I don’t want to spend the money and waste it if there’s nothing growing so I keep lights off unless I need them and a zip tide over here is a power strip look at how many plugs are plugged into the power strip so that’s what I’m talking about if you buy the linkable lights you will cut down how much you have to plug into each of these power strips by half but this works it’s a little bit of squirrly mess but you know I’m okay with it so you can see that we’ve just ziip tied each of the power strips up to here with each of the lights plugged in and then the power strips get plugged into the timers it’s important to point out that yes I have a lot going on when it comes to electricity and things plugged in and things plugged into timers but I do want to assure you that we’re using very low power here so I’m not concerned about the potential of a fire or anything like that it there’s really just not a lot of power not enough to generate an issue here so I just wanted to point that out and I definitely like the idea of using LED lights versus the fluorescent lights and the biggest reason is cost it definitely is cheaper to have the LED shop lights even if once an LED shop light dies you need to replace the whole entire unit maybe there are some units out there that you can buy and you can replace the bulbs that’s definitely not the case in these particular LED shop lights but generally speaking this is a much cheaper option for me if you did the math though and you calculated how much I spent on all three of my units yes it is expensive but it was something that I saved up for and I really wanted I do a lot of growing I also have a backyard plant nursery so you know there were many factors that I considered but I wanted to make this video just to give you the idea of one unit and how you can easily make it and you can even scale it down you can follow the same system you don’t even need to have a full shelving unit you can just have one or two LED grow lights just enough to start a couple of plants you can scale down as much as you want but what I’ve learned over the years is gardening is therapy for my soul I absolutely love gardening I feel like you can’t put a price tag on gardening and when it comes to starting plants indoors especially during the cold winter months here in New Hampshire it really is therapeutic for me I love looking at my plants and taking care of them babying them so I hope that this video inspired you to create some sort of grow system for yourself be it big or small or something in between and I hope that it answered some questions that you might have had and perhaps there are other questions that you have that I didn’t answer so please feel free to add a comment below I always answer any questions that I get and I’ll be sure to answer any questions that you might have I also want to show I have a fan here there is so much that’s going to be going on over the next few months the fan is definitely something that’s optional but I highly recommend it when it comes to your seedlings and having healthy seed leans I’ll be going over lots of things over the next few months about how far away your lights should be from your seed leans how to water them how to fertilize them so you don’t want to miss out there’s a lot of great content that’s going to be coming out over the next few months well before we go back out in the garden so make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already subscribed and until the next video make it a great day with gardening