HGTV's Chic Grow Station Is Perfect For Starting Seeds Indoors

Mid-summer can be a brutal time to start a little tray of seedlings outdoors or in a greenhouse. Luckily, HGTV has a nifty approach for a little grow station that looks right at home anywhere in your house. Your plants don't have to deal with heat and bugs, and you don't have to water them every 12 hours. Also, when you do water them, you can do it in your pajamas. Use it year-round, or this will work well for late-winter prep for a spring garden when even a greenhouse won't necessarily keep your seedlings cozy.

HGTV's maker takes a simple three-tier freestanding shelf and outfits it with full-spectrum indoor grow lights that are attached to the bottoms of the upper and middle shelves. The seeds, themselves, are sown in six-cell seed-starting trays, which she nests inside a couple of standard 10x20 seed propagation trays. Keeping the total space used by seedlings low is a great idea that makes the most of the light strips. Thankfully, this grow station is endlessly customizable, so you can change almost anything about it to better grow your favorite plants.

As with most GardenTok hacks, there are plenty of ways to make this little station fit your home and your needs. First, let's look at a few things that could be improved. You're not going to make an indoor grow station look much better than HGTV did, but a few tweaks might make it work even better. For example, putting the propagation trays on some kind of stand –- perhaps an inverted tray –- to get them closer to the grow lights would help to minimize legginess in the seedlings. Of course, this will only help so much in a living space with other natural or artificial lighting that will inevitably attract plant growth too.

You can customize this idea as much as you feel the need to. To add more shelves, you'll need additional grow lights and more propagation supplies. If you do buy the common black 10x20 trays, get ones without drain holes, like these 1020 Plant Trays Without Holes from Amazon. You can also plant more seeds per shelf, though a dense seed-starting operation might be less chic than HGTV's vision. If that doesn't bother you, you also have a huge selection of grow lights for indoor plants at your disposal, so look for ones best for your budget or lights with more features, such as the ability to switch modes for vegetative versus flowering stages of plant growth, such as these FLEHEIT Grow Light Strips for Indoor Plants on Amazon.