Growing containers under fluorescents : help and advice

[richielee14]

Hello all,

I live in a flat which has no balcony or any type of garden. All I have is two window sills and a shelf outside spanning the length of both windows. I'm at least fortunate enough to have a south facing window so get a lot of sunshine, whenever it allows (living in London).

I've resorted to grow indoors, but with the aid of fluorescent tubes (3x 2ft T8's - Sylvania Gro-Lux 18W T8 2ft), built into a MDF box (seems dodgy, but im just trying to grow my own veg ) Lights are on a timer and get 14 hrs of light each day.

Currently im growing, tomatoes, basil, rosemary, pansies, aquilegia(?) and chillies. Most plants seem to be doing well, but my basil seems a bit tired. Im using some organic fertilizer (fish), every two weeks and water every other day. Soil is mixed with vermiculite to aid drainage.

The basil has had some signs of spider mites, but I have washed the leaves and sprayed to keep them down.

Please could anyone advise on whats wrong with my basil and anything in general. I'm dreaming of getting a garden one day so I can expand out of this growbox and do things properly!

Im completely new at this and all I can find on google is people growing drugs. So any help will be greatly appreciated.

Rich

[airconednightmare]

hi richie, i'd say the basil probably isn't getting enough light at the bottom of the plant. i can see why you thought spider mite but they would attack the plant all over rather than just at the bottom and you would have seen it spread to the other plants in a matter of days. you will notice the same thing happen to the chillies when they get bigger....the lights stay above the plants rather than moving round like the sun does.

you can either invest in more powerful lights, leave more space between the plants, or accept that you're not going to get any large plants to harvest.

i use an almost identical setup to start off toms chillies etc but they get moved to a greenhouse or the bigger, better grow room before they get much bigger than yours.

i have a 1.5m sq grow room with a 600 watt air cooled hps light....expensive to build but only around £5 - £10 a week to run.

on the fertiliser front, it's a good idea to feed them with a trace element feed every now and again, and flush the soil from time to time. feeding with one type of feed can result in a build up of unused nutrients which will damage the plants and stop them absorbing other nutrients. pour 2-3 times the volume of the pots in water through the soil to wash out any bulid up then feed once the soil has dried out. the trace elements are things like calcium, iron, zinc etc, you never need to add these outdoors because there is generally enough in the soil but in pots the plants can run out in a few months. for example, tomartoes grown in containers often suffer from magnesium defficency whereas ones grown in the ground don't tend to be as bad.