The Stylish Indoor Grow Box

Update:
If you would like to see how our plants are growing in our grow box, here they are: Grow Box Updates

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Hey everyone, this is Keith.  Usually I'm the "behind the scenes" helper when it comes to this blog but I was asked to do a short write-up on the newest addition to our gardening arsenal, our indoor grow box.

Temperatures here in Indiana (or anywhere else that gets snow) make it a bit difficult to get our gardening “fix” during the winter months. The obvious solution to this is to have some sort of setup indoors that will allow us to grow some plants, and start some seeds during the times when mother nature isn't being cooperative!

However, from looking at pictures around the internet of people's indoor gardening setups, I find most of them to be a little..... ummm...... “rough” looking (no offense to anyone!).   As Minji will no doubt confirm, I tend to be a little (very) picky when it comes to how the inside of the house looks, and a table with a light hanging above it doesn't fit very well into my interior decorating plan. :)


So I set out to build something that would allow us to garden in the winter months, while still making it easy on the eyes. Here's what I came up with...

My perfectly logical drawing of a grow box.

Makes perfect sense, right?  Minji was skeptical though.  I can't imagine why!  Basically, I explained, my goal was to build a grow box inside of an old armoire!  Still skeptical.  "Trust me", I said.  :)

Warning! Long Post!  If you just want pictures of the finished product, skip to the end!

Step One - Get an Armoire!

I searched around on craigslist.com for this until I found one that I thought would fit our requirements.  I was was looking for something that looked fairly nice, and that had multiple shelves (no drawers). I found this one for $50.

Step Two - Prepare for Lighting

My idea was to run lights directly down the center of the armoire so I didn't have to mount a bunch of light socketts on each level.  This involved drilling some holes in the shelves.

The lights I used are 4' fluorescent bulbs (four 6500k "daylight" and two 3000k "warm white" fluorescents), and seeing as how the armoire was taller than 4' inside, I had to build up the top and bottom a bit to fit them correctly.  Luckily, I saved all the circle pieces that I drilled out for just that purpose.  They weren't quite tall enough though, so I cut a few more pieces from some scrap wood I had left over from another project.

I then measured how many I needed and glued them to the top and bottom inside the armoire.  To those, I glued the lamp holders in a hexagon...... ending up with this....

Step Three - Wiring

I used two, three lamp ballasts (for six lights total).  Wiring these to the lamp holders was the most time consuming part of this whole process.  After I wired it, I used electrical tape to neaten it all up and run everything as cleanly as possible.

Next, I mounted the timer I bought to a piece of laminated shelving and used some small "L" brackets to secure it to the bottom of the armoire, in front of the ballasts.

At this point the whole unit looked like this.....

Step Four - Finishing!

Now it was time for the finishing touches!  After putting the light bulbs in we measured the inside temperature while the lights were on.  It was getting up towards 90 degrees so we decided to install an exhaust fan to let some of the heat out.  I drilled out a hole on the back of the unit and installed a simple 120v computer fan.  It now stays between 76-81 degrees in the box at all times.

We then added some aluminum foil to help reflect the light for the plants and put a few test subjects (basil, lettuce seeds, rosemary) in to test it out!

So right now it looks like this.....

And here it is in full operation.....

As the picture above shows, I found it was difficult to take good pictures looking directly at the box because it is so bright and my camera tries to compensate.  Here is one from the side....

Our plants are so bright, you gotta wear shades!

As for materials and cost.....

Item	Cost	Where to buy / Details
Armoire	$50	Craigslist.com
Two GE332-N ballasts	$56	Lowes
Four F32T8 6500k fluorescent bulbs (daylight)	$14	Lowes
Two F32T8 3000k fluorescent bulbs (warm)	$7	Lowes
Two outlet digital timer clock	$17	Lowes
Twelve medium bi-pin lamp holders	$30	Lowes
120v Fan	$25	Radio Shack
Small “L” bracket	$1.75	Lowes
8' Three prong extension cord	$6	Lowes
10' Two Prong extension cord	$6	Lowes
Small white laminate shelf (or scrap wood)	$3	Menards (just for looks)
Two boxes of aluminum foil	$5	Kroger (grocery)
Double sided scotch tape	$3	K-mart
Total	$223.75

So that's it!  We set the timer to come on in the morning at 6am and go off in the evening at 8pm.  And from the outside, you can't tell it's anything but a normal armoire!

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome but being new to gardening I'm sure there are ways to make this thing better.  Anyone have any suggestions?  Do I have to worry about humidity too, or just make sure it doesn't get too high?  I heard humidity is a killer for tomato plants.

Thoughts and suggestions are always appreciated!  Any ideas?

Update:
If you would like to see how our plants are growing in our grow box, here they are: Grow Box Updates