Oops. Our First of Many Mistakes

Nothing growing yet. Not quite time! Patience, patience!

Last weekend we began our seed starting supplies search. Lots of cool stuff available out there--mostly ridiculously expensive. We hit Lowe's and our local Farmer Store (that's what I call it, anyway), where a pet mouse ran around on the loose for awhile before he scurried out the door into the wilds of Bellingham. Good luck on surviving, kid. We skipped out, too. Didn't want to pay 25 bucks each for kits, especially when we would need several.  Cheap is how we're doing this garden thing.

Our do-it-yourself system requires flourescent lighting, so we went by the recycled building supply, the RE Store. There, we scored no lighting, but did find a bunch of recycled plant pots. We bought 120 or so for a few bucks, along with some stakes to keep a certain big dog out of the beds.

Next day, I was telling my friend Cyndi about our score at the RE Store, and she said, "I dropped those stakes off yesterday morning. I could have just given them to you!"  It was true. We paid 20 cents each for them, too. Darn.  Could have saved 4 bucks. Here's how the beds look staked and covered with snow:

But while we were searching for used lighting fixtures for our lights, the genius in the family (that day it was David) said (and I swear a spiral-shaped lightbulb appeared over his head), "Hey, we don't need no stinkin' light fixtures! Every light fixture in our house has flourescent bulbs in it." After we pondered this for a few minutes (staring at each other with puzzled looks, trying to figure it out) we realized that yes, we have a zillion flourescent lights in our house already.

Giddy, we went home and set up our seed starting station.  I set all the little pots on plastic draining trays and filled each one with the seed starting mixture we bought at the Farmer Store. I brought them into the house (without spilling, even), and set them on the leftover-from-our-old-house plastic shelf unit David had set up in the mud room. 

Then, we rigged up lights and lamps, and popped in some flourescent bulbs.  It looks like this:

We don't know if the light will be bright enough or close enough to the pots.  Might have to go with the long tube type lights after all! Drat.  But even this isn't our real error in all of this set up.

We forgot to clean out the pots. DOH! It's very important to sanitize the pots so your little seeds will have a nice clean environment in which to hatch and grow.  We knew that, but in our excitement, completely forgot to do it.

Now I have to dump out all the starter dirt, clean the pots with a bleach (blech, so not environmentally friendly) solution, and refill. Sigh. Mistake numero uno!

[Does anyone know if the hydrogen-based "bleach" products sanitize like traditional bleach does?]