But the cold winter sun mocked my every effort. In desperation once again, I bought a fluorescent grow light at the hardware store a few blocks away. It said, "Make your plants grow grow grow" so I figured this would do the job. The seedlings would take off healthy and strong, but they didn't exactly grow as fast as I had expected from the words on the packaging. At a certain point, they just stopped cold.

Everything was there! I used the best nutrients! The purest water and plenty of TLC! I wasn't about to let this experiment fail me. But sadly enough, my winter basil just refused to grow.

Almost in complete frustration and about ready to give up gardening forever, I went to my favorite local book store, skimmed though one of their hydroponics books once more, and stopped on a chapter on indoor lighting. Strangely enough, there wasn't a single mention of the old "Grow and Show" lamp I bought. Every reference in the book was to a type of light I'd never heard of before: HID.

As I stood in the aisle, I read that HID stands for High Intensity Discharge, and that indoor gardeners used two types of these HID lights they called HPS and MH. I thought the names and initials were bothersome, but I could see how much better they worked from the photographs in the book.

My legs were getting tired, so I bought the book and took it home for further study. I quickly found out HPS stands for High Pressure Sodium and MH stands for Metal Halide. I also found out these were the same type of lights used to flood football stadiums and parking lots at night with daylight intensity for a fraction of the cost of conventional lighting.

I learned that HID lights are nearly ten times as efficient as incandescent lamps and emit nearly the same color spectrum as the sun.

So now I was off on a mission to find one of these lamps. Strangely enough, almost as if fate would have it this way, the shopping mall renovation project I was working on had a few outdoor parking lot lamps torn down and set out for the trash compactor. Being an electrical engineer, I took one home and wired it up to work indoors.

From the shape of the bulb, I could tell it was a high pressure sodium bulb which emits a warm orange light that most closely resembles the sun around harvest time, late in the season. I plugged this bunny in and watched as it flickered and began to emit an increasingly brighter light as it warmed up. Within five minutes my apartment looked as if the sun had come out from behind my wall cabinets. The light was nearly blinding in its intensity

WOW! After I turned it off and after the purple spots in my eyes went away so I could see normally again, I realized I was on to something big. Perhaps a little too big! OK, perhaps WAAY too big! But I was determined to solve this, no matter what the odds. I had literally tasted victory in the form of fresh basil, and a little thing like winter wasn't going to stop me now!

My next problem was trying to get this thing to work with a suitable reflector, as the bare bulb was hardly focusing it's light in the direction I needed it. I can't tell you how many things I tried to get this monster of a light to work right. In the meantime, within four days of swapping it for the old fluorescent lamp, my basil plants nearly doubled in size. I found the missing link! Over the next week, I had to cut the basil back as it was growing too close to the overhead bulb! And I worried about what the neighbors would think with a bright corona of sunlight blasting through the cracks around my hallway door! My apartment hallway was starting to look like a scene from 2001!

Now I was excited and inspired. I finally gave up on the jury-rigged lamp and decided to spring for a horticultural version that was engineered specifically for horticultural application. And that made all the difference! Now I had a nice neat and safe source of light that absolutely made my indoor garden take off. I was growing so much basil I had to start giving it away to the local pizza joint! How much free pizza could I eat?

That was then, and this is now. Since those early days of jury-rigged systems, there are a number of pre-built hydroponic gardens available that are designed to get you growing complete with the right nutrients and supplies - just add water!

We built Futuregarden to specialize in these types of gardening systems. They are environmentally friendly, efficient and make the dream of gardening come true for all those of you who are short on space or are lacking the greenthumb!

Best of all, many new systems have been introduced to the market which allow much greater production from minimal space requirements. These gardens work indoors and out, so even if you only have a couple of feet of space, you can plant a garden that will produce enough to be worthwhile! Not to mention that gardening is really neat! Where else can you actually take part in the creation of nature outside of having a family, and we all know how much work that can be!

SIGNED,
A Former Brown Thumb

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