African Violets and Gesneriads: Hi! and plant stand question..., 1 by SaraCatherine

SaraCatherine wrote:
Hi! I'm new to Dave's Garden and the forum, and wanted to say hi. I had just 4 african violets when I started here a few weeks ago, but after browsing things like the AVSA photo gallery, and reading the forum and enjoying photos of everyone's gorgeous plants, I saw the message about one of the sales at Bloomin' Jungle, and after a moment of weakness I'm now the proud owner of 25 baby violets. :-)

Right now the plants are living on the dining room table, but I'd like that to be temporary. I'm trying to build a plant stand, with shelves with lights above them, and trays for wicking. (I have this theory that 29 plants with wick watering and artificial lighting will be *easier* to take care of than 4 plants in the way on the kitchen counter that I tend to forget to water. I'm not sure it's exactly true, but now that I have 29 plants I figure I should try to do whatever to make things easier.)

The trouble is, that the dimensions of the stand just aren't working out, and so I wanted to ask some questions. The main one being, if you have lights above your plants, how far above the top of your plants have you hung the lights? And how many bulbs / what wattage in the light fixture?

I have a 74" tall metal shelving set that I'd like to have 5 shelves on (the top one just to hang lights from and storage above, and then 4 shelves with plants on them). This seemed reasonable when I bought it. Hah. :-)

It turns out that the poles the shelf attach to only have 71" of space where shelves can go. And then each shelf is 1.25" tall just for itself (there's a lip around the bottom of the shelf that the light fixture doesn't fit into). The light fixtures are 3.25" tall. The trays I plan to use for the wicking reservoirs are 3.25" tall. The eggcrate lattice (to go on top of the trays) is .25" tall. And my grown-up violets seem to be about 4.5" tall.

This means that each shelf with plants has 7.5" taken up not even counting the plants, and then 12" counting the plants. Which means that if I put 4 shelves of plants in that 71" tall shelf, there will be 5.75" between the tops of the plants and the lights. Which seems awfully close... Both with what web sites seem to say (not that they agree, of course, LOL), and just eyeballing it. Even if I make one or two shelves shorter on the theory they'll be holding minis (so cute!), it seems iffy.

My next thought is to disassemble the darn thing that I just assembled, and reassemble it this time to deliberately put the shelves in upside down so that the lip is on top and the lights can go flush with the bottom of the shelf. This would gain me 1.25" per shelf (so 7" between the tops of the plants and the light), if I can get the trays to fit inside of the lip. But I think that's still not enough.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, and hi everyone!

Sara

As a reward for reading all the way through, here's a photo of all 25 babies together!: