Its Raining, Its Pouring

It was a total washout of a rainy day today.
I ducked out, between downpours, to pull some weeds (aka make some compost).  Once I determined that it was far too wet to plant anything, I figured that I had better find something to do indoors.
I could clean, but the house would just get dirty again.
So I finally decided to take the leap and build a seed-starting grow-lamp setup.
I have had terrible luck with starting seeds in my windowsill.  I just don't have enough natural light from one source or the space to move my seedlings from sill to sill.  I saw a great article in the March/April 2011 issue of Urban Farm.  See www.laguerrillagardening.org/PDF/urban_farm%20article.pdf pp44-47.
My husband nearly had a heart attack when he spied me behind a copy of Urban Farm.  This is "Green Acres", but he is Eva Gabor and I am Eddie Albert.  If it gets more farm-like around here, he may leave me.
But he was really helpful when it came to building my grow-lamp.  I was on my way out the door to the home improvement center, when he made some helpful, money saving suggestions.
Since I was just setting the grow-light stand up in the basement, why not forgo the stand and suspend the lights from the ceiling?  And why buy new shop lights when I could scavenge ones from the garage?
It was much easier than I expected.  I suspended chains from the basement ceiling joists with screwhooks and hung the salvaged shop lights from the chains.  I plugged both lights into a short extension cord, plugged that into a timer, plugged the timer into another extension cord, and plugged that extension cord into the wall.  It worked!  Just for good measure, I installed another smoke detector.  I'm weird like that.
Had I not gone with the basement option, the Urban Farm grow-light stand would have worked perfectly.  Built of PVC pipe, the whole stand goes together easily and breaks down for easy storage.  Best of all, I had most of the PVC pieces needed around the garage and basement.
PVC is always overbought in my house.  Either we didn't need that much or that diameter.  We use some of the pipe and throw the rest in the rafters of the garage.  Any re-purposing it may see is for the making of bottle rocket cannons.  Lord knows, I don't need any more of those.
This article is definitely worth a look when taking the plunge into seed starting.  My squash starts look great and seem happy enough in their bed.  But I am worried about the sunflowers.  I never had much luck direct sowing sunflowers and my windowsill seedlings never seem to develop a strong enough stem to give the flowers a good start.  I started a new batch of sunflowers and placed them under the grow-lamps.  We'll see how they fare.
With garage sale season in full swing, it may be time to put shop lamps and PVC pipe and fittings on the shopping list.  Ours can't be the only household stocked with leftover PVC.  Many old garages and basements have shop lamps in them that are unused.  It never hurts to ask if someone holding a sale if they'd like to be rid of them.  You could make someone's garage a happier place.