We have been starting seeds indoors for decades. There’s something enormously heartening about tucking tiny seeds into pots while March winds howl outside. In a few months those pale specks will result in glossy eggplants, huge squash, fiery peppers, and much more.
In our earliest years we started seeds in pots made of coiled newspaper alongside sunny windows. Now we’ve got a large planting table and start hundreds of seeds, sequencing to start heat-loving plants after we move early cool-tolerant seedlings like cabbage and broccoli out to harden off.
One year we had tremendous losses soon after germination, only to discover that peat pots we’d bought were themselves contaminated. Never again. We now stick to large reusable pots.
But the last few years we encountered a new problem. Seedlings that germinated well began to get leggy, their elongated stems indicating the plants weren’t getting enough light. We tried lowering the lights till they nearly touched the tops of the plants. We tried setting the timer to leave the lights on longer. Nothing seemed to help. Early this spring my husband discovered the problem. He read that grow lights, like our old full-spectrum bulbs, can actually wear out. They are just as bright, but don’t emit enough of the light plants need.
So he started the search for the best-reviewed new lights. He settled on very different-looking lights, compact and strangely colored. The basement glowed fuschia but the difference in our plants became obvious within a matter of days. They grew stronger and faster than we’d seen in years.
The grow lights he ordered have two settings I’ve never seen before. Bud or Bloom. “Huh,” I said, like the clueless person I can be. “What’s that about?”
“Pot,” he said. “Looks like most people who order these lights grow pot.”
We do grow herbs. Basil, cilantro, lemongrass, that sort of thing. But not THAT particular herb. I hope our neighbors, seeing the strange pink glow from our basement windows, don’t assume we’ve gone into a different sort of grow business…
Bit of Earth Farm 
I’m afraid I was just as clueless… It would be entertaining – after the event – to have your basement raided, only to have the police discover rows and rows of innocent vegies. On the other hand, perhaps you’re housing aliens or doing mad science. Who knows what neighbours with too much time and fevered imaginations will think?
A basement raid would be a distraction from the sameness around here…
We’re thinking of hauling the plant set-up back out in the winter to grow greens, peppers, and tomatoes indoors so we may be glowing strangely pink around here more regularly.
If you do, I think hats with horns would be fun for working outside in the dark. Just *think* of the legends you could create!
Ha! My immediate thought was “They bought grow-op lights, of course. Those are the best”. The pot industry has produced a lot of innovation that spread to legal plants. Hopefully your neighbors are as ignorant of the major use for this color as you were.
Of course I live where growing your own is legal, so if one of my neighbors is glowing fuchsia it’s no big deal. Unless the whole house is, in which case they’re way over the limit and we don’t want pros in our family neighborhood.
I appreciate the innovations, that’s for sure. Our state has not legalized growing, just very limited use for medical purposes.
but isn’t pot a good alternative to wine?
So I hear!
It’s like good red French Bordeau, but you don’t get hangovers. I know that this myth about harmful drugs appeared in the USA which used to be a world leader in drug prohibition, but I wonder why they did not prohibit the valeriana root and alcohol which have similar properties. This stigma still cannot leave the heads of the brainwashed population. And guess what? That very USA who started to ban this plant, the same USA has become a leader in legalizing it, and the rest of the world is still putting people in prison for smoking valeriana. The world is so slow in this respect.