Homemade Germination Chamber: Wire Rack Model

I know some of you have been waiting eagerly to see what we do for germination of seeds I started seeds in lots of different ways at our farm. I've started them on racks in a spare room in the basement. I've started them in unheated tunnels with a special hack that we do to create a whole row of heated seedling grow space.

And I've also done them in our heated tunnel. This is what we do now. This is a regular wire rack shelf set. I've talked about them before. We use them here in the studio for our rolling carts. We use them all over the farm for different purposes. And then this is a plastic jacket that you can purchase to enclose a rack like that.

They're usually used to keep dust off of goods and storage.  But in this case we're using it to trap humidity inside the wire rack. It's kind of like a Martha Tent setup. You can buy sets of hobby shelves like this, but a little bit smaller with jackets. You can find them at low cost online. We're just using our seed starting rack since we already have it and a jacket from Uline that we can add on easily.

You do wanna make sure if you're purchasing a jacket for your wire rack shelves, that you purchase it a little bit deeper than the deepness of your shelf. Our shelves are 18 inches deep, but this jacket is about 22 or 24 inches deep. And that's because our 1020 trays are a little bit longer than the shelf depth.

They're 20 inches, that's the “20” of “1020”. So they stick out over the edge of the shelf a little bit. And if you buy a jacket that fits your shelves exactly, you won't be able to close it. You won't be able to zip it up. I've learned that lesson the hard way. So make sure that you give yourself a few extra inches if you're using 1020 trays in the orientation that I am, so that you can close up your jacket.

So what I love about this setup is that we are controlling the environment and we're maintaining our optimal humidity (really high humidity) and temperature. Inside, I've got heat mats on each shelf and they are thermostatically controlled. You can buy a thermostatic controller to go with your heat mats. I have just one set up and then all my mats are all linked to turn on and off from one switch.

So that works well for us.  And then the humidity is being controlled by this little Ink Bird reptile humidifier. Ink bird sells these. And I just have it feeding up here to the top of the tent. I cut a little hole in so I could feed the tube through. And then if you're adding humidity like this, you want to make sure that you add it from up high, because that's really dense air and it's gonna sink down through your shelves that way.

 And then I have a couple of these trays that are a little bit too big to fit on my shelves and I'm just using them to kind of trap the heat in there and the humidity from escaping. I have one on the front and one on the back. They seem to be working okay. On the very bottom there are some trays down here to catch any moisture if it falls down into the ground. I'm really not seeing much moisture dripping down from this system. It's been running for a few days here in the studio. But it is over linoleum. It is a space that commonly has a lot of traffic and gets wet a lot.

I'm not sure that this setup with all this extra humidity would be great if you're doing this in a spare room or something like that, and certainly not over carpet. So those are some things to keep in mind. I've also heated setups like this with a little greenhouse heater. This is the type of heater that we use to heat a lot of very humid spaces here at our farm.

It's meant to handle humidity. It can hook up to an Ink Bird and control this whole space and heat it to 70 or 75 degrees as well if I'm not using the heat mats or as an alternative to them. There are lots of different options and obviously if you are putting a system like this up in a space that is already warm, then you don't have to worry about heat.

If I was working at room temperature in my home, I probably wouldn't even use the heat mats. They's just not gonna add a whole lot extra to the situation. But the humidity is fantastic and the fact that these things aren't gonna get fried in the sun of the greenhouse or dried out under lights in the basement means we have a good start for our plants. One of the biggest challenges for me is keeping newly sewn seeds well watered. And I don't like spraying them because all those tiny seeds can get moved around by the force of spray. This humidity situation is really fantastic because it means we won't have to water our seedlings at all. So that's pretty nice. And you'll notice that it doesn't have light. If you buy a fancy germination cabinet, (they can cost thousands of dollars) —they don't have lights. They maintain the proper humidity and they maintain the proper temperature.

And then as soon as the seeds pop, they get moved out into a growth space where there is light. But when a seed is nice and contained, you know, it doesn't notice light as much as those seed packets would lead us to believe. So this is what we're doing for our germination chamber and we're pretty excited about it.

And we will definitely keep you posted and let you know how things are going. Last year we ruined a whole bunch of seeds and seedlings that we were starting to work with in our greenhouse. We just kind of got ahead of ourselves. Moral the story. If you have something that works, don't change it. Unless you need to scale your operation and find a new solution.

I saw online recently someone who was really happy with their seed starting set up. They knew it, they knew it worked well. Someone in their family purchased a small like hobby greenhouse kit for them, thinking that that would be a great alternative for them or maybe to get them out of the house.

But all I can picture in my mind is all those seeds and seedlings just getting fried in this space that's not temperature controlled— a space that would take a huge amount of monitoring to make it work for them. So, yeah. For me, this is pretty hands off. The dehumidifier is set on a controller, so it turns on and off itself as are the heat mats.

And we are just going to put our trays in here and kind of set it and forget it and then come back and check on them periodically and move them right to their grow space. Let me know if you have any questions. But hopefully some of these things you may already have, if you're interested in a setup like this.