Description
Interested in starting plants indoors? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to make a window garden box. His wife setup a plant nursery in their window that needed a way to reflect light back onto the plants to help the plants grow straight. Harley attaches a white shade to reflect light back into the plants.Here's a playlist of other gardening related videos.
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For a written transcript, go to How To Make A Window Garden Box
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Rocket Power"
Transcript
Want to know how to make an indoor plant nursery?Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to be talking about that.
My wife had this space in front of the window where she wanted to make a nursery for her plants.
So we got her some shelves.
These are chrome plated, kind of utility shelves that have wheels on them so she can move them around to make for easy maintenance, clean-up, that sort of thing.
Then we got her these trays.
These trays have two parts to them. One part has holes in the bottom that you put the soil in and the seeds.
And the second part is solid where you put the water in.
When you put this tray in here, the water soaks up from the bottom and waters the seeds, kind of through capillary action.
And in a couple weeks time, you get this.
The problem with this though is these plants are all leaning towards the window.
They get the sun from one side and there's not enough light coming in from the other direction.
So to solve that problem, we picked up this.
It's a outdoor roller shade and it just goes up and down and the idea is we'll mount it on shelves here and we can roll it down and it should reflect light back in from the opposite side.
We'll see how this works out.
The problem is that it's designed to mount on wood and the shelves are metal.
So, I'm going to have to make a mounting bracket for this to mount it.
And then we'll see how it works.
Welcome to the House of Hacks. If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and I make stuff. Usually it's out of wood or metal.
Today we're going to be talking about making garden materials for inside and we're going to be using a combination of these metal shelves and some wood.
OK, here's the plan.
The shade is just as long as the shelves are and so I can't put anything on top of the shelves and still have the brackets hold this on because it's just too long.
So, I'm going to use this longer piece of plywood and cut it down so the brackets will fit on here like so, and that'll hold everything together.
And then in order to hold this onto the shelves, I've got these two pieces of wood that I'll attach one on each side but close enough in where they'll both fit on the shelves.
And then I'll sandwich the shelf between these long pieces of wood holding this on and these two shorter pieces of wood in the middle just to clamp everything in place.
That's the plan. Let's see how it works.
I have the wood cut to length. I have the holes marked.
The brackets go right on there.
I've got these self-tapping utility screws that are short enough that they won't go through the wood.
And we'll just use the drill to put them in those locations.
And now I've got some longer self-tapping screws that I'll use to mount these two pieces of wood together.
Well, that's installed.
We'll see how well it works long term for helping the plants grow straighter.
Over here I'll see you in another gardening video.
And when making things remember...
Perfection's not required. Fun is!
