If the gardening bug has bitten, sooner or later you’re going to want to start some plants from seed.

Vegetable starts, bedding plants, perennials, and even some trees and shrubs (for the patient) can be grown from seed.  When you’re ready to graduate from the sunny windowsill to a real propagation station, here’s a seed-starting rack you can make at home for much less than what a ready-made one would cost.

These racks hold four flats. I’ve chosen to use 72-cell trays, which means that with 100% germination (ha), I could have 288 plants here!

I got the shelves on probably only my second visit ever to Walmart. I normally wouldn’t go there, but these were only 15 bucks each (there are two of them that I fastened together with zip ties), and as you can see, I was able to snuggle in two shop lights and four seed trays perfectly. There is one more tier included, but I thought that adding it would make the station too tippy, and I didn’t need two more trays anyway.

If I had been more patient, I could have waited for a cheaper, used, and probably more sturdy set of shelves to pop up on craigslist. And if I were more handy, I could have built my station from scrap lumber. But I’m pretty happy with what I created.