Setting up a Seedling Station
After your germinated seed trays come out of your propagation chamber you want to slide them into a seedling system. There they will get the light to keep them from getting too leggy and the nutrients to grow them into transplantable seedlings.
Low Space
Because the seedlings coming out of this station are only going to be a couple inches tall, racks can be quite close; for the system that you see in this video, the shelves in the system are about 10 inches apart.We keep the shelves about ten inches apart to maximize space. That distance will have to increase if we use fluorescent lights.
This spacing allows you to fit hundreds of seedlings (we had about 2200 seedlings growing on our rack) in a system.
Low Maintenance
This seedling system is a flood and drain system, so a pump fills up the top tray, then a siphon drains it down the next tray, and so forth. We have our seedling station connected to a sump via quick-release so that we can unhook it and roll the racks away easily.
Lighting
In this system we have LEDs. Seedlings don’t need full nutrients and full light right away, and putting them into a system with less light and nutrients can even keep them from becoming stressed.
