Northern California is experiencing a mild winter.  My greenhouse has transformed into a tomato house with a seed starting zone.  I don’t have any direct sunlight in my greenhouse for about two months in the winter so I supplement things with grow lights.  The grow lights work well but I have a lot of side effects from incorrect lighting.

• The seedlings sprout extremely fast.  The stems out pace the leaves.  A natural seedling can be 5″ tall with about 10 leaves.  The greenhouse seedlings are 10″ tall with 5 leaves.
• The plants grow to the lights.
• Some of the lights are hot causing the tomatoes to burn and the leaves to wilt.
• The tomatoes like to grow into the cooler lights while compacting into their-selves.  The compaction causes a curious dense ball of growth.  If fruit grows in the densely packed area, it will die because there is no room for growth.
• The plants grow into the ceiling creating unwanted density.  The density prohibits growth and hides ripe tomatoes.

Today’s mission is to clear out the density to clear things up.

• More airflow from the fans
• Room to grow tomatoes
• increased visibility to find the tomatoes

This is post number one.  It has been more than ten years since I posted anything.  I assumed things would get easier in ten years but I am struggling with all of the advertisements in WordPress.  Hopefully, I can figure things out and continue to post things.

My posts are basically online note taking for my experiments.