Now that we know how to build a grow rack, let’s see how to make inexpensive Heat Mat for Seed from Christmas lights!
How to Make a Heat Mat for Seed Starting
This is a “readers’ favorite” post our how-to site.
When you are learning to grow from seeds, often you might see reference to a heat mat for seedlings.
Heat mats can really help speed up germination for many seeds, especially tomatoes and peppers.
You can buy them, but here I will show you how to MAKE one.
How to Build a Grow Rack for Seed Starting
Thinking of starting some seeds?
In this post, us how to build a simple grow rack and create an environment to raise healthy seedlings.
It’s perfect timing, since many of us are starting seeds this spring.
And it’s not too late to give your warm-season plants a head start!
At some point in your gardening career you either have or will come to a point where you want to learn how to grow from seeds.
Building a grow rack is a common first step because having a dedicated setup to grow your new plant starts will significantly help in the quality of your starts.
This is not a necessary step, but will go far to avoid leggy, weak seedlings.
Now that we know how to build a grow rack, let’s see how to make inexpensive heat mats…from Christmas lights!
Other Uses for Recycle Christmas lights
Soon it will be the festive season again and that time of the year where everyone will put up their Christmas lights.
The ‘green’ among us cringe at the extra electricity that this modern day display of Christmas requires.
Putting up Christmas lights has become a part of the entire Christmas experience.
That is not going to change any time soon.
What we can do is to recycle Christmas lights for as many years as possible.
There is some amount of breakage that will happen every time you put up and take down the Christmas lights but the large majority of them should be in a good enough condition to be reused next year again.
Surprisingly, this seemingly commonsense decision is not that common as you might believe.
Very seldom do people take the time to store the lights in a proper manner.
Instead, they end up just buying more lights next time Christmas comes around.
Green living is to reuse and recycle
One of the tenets of green living is to reuse and recycle whatever you can.
This includes your Christmas lights too.
There are now artificial Christmas trees available quite easily and while it may not inspire the same emotion in traditionalists.
It is time for common sense and responsibility towards your environment to win out over emotion.
Christmas has a deep impact on our culture and we should look at it as an opportunity to imbibe some good core values among the citizens.
Festive messages which encourage people to reuse and recycle Christmas lights, using faux Christmas trees and other such things will really have a lasting effect.
Most of the young children are trying to be ‘good’ during this time and maybe Santa will give them extra credit if they love their environment a little more too!
The Christmas tree decorations are something that have just taken off to another level over the last few years.
The lights and decorations have become very innovative and with the Facebook-culture of posting pictures of everything, the competition to outdo everyone else is intense.
Be sensible and use recycled Christmas decorations this year.
They are very pretty and will make you feel a little better about not polluting the environment.
You can also exchange Christmas decorations with your neighbors so you do not have to have the same Christmas decorations but still avoid wasting older decorations.
There are also a number of people who have much lesser than you on Christmas.
The spirit of Christmas is being lost in the excessive commercialization of the holiday.
We can get real meaning back into Christmas and make it more than just mall fights and traffic jams by trying to celebrate it in a responsible and aware manner.
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so how do you make the heat mats….?