If you want to start a few garden vegetables or flowers indoors this year, you will need some form of light system to raise the plants until you are ready to set them outdoors. If you start plants in March, you just can not reliably put the new seedling outdoors. It will be too cold, and the days are still too short. But you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on a light system.
The simplest way to use a four-foot utility light over the small plants on a table or floor. You can make a light tray with multiple levels and hang the lights on the different levels. On a four-level tray rack, you can have over 32 square feet of growing area on a 2’ X 4’ floor space.
The utility lights come with cool white, fluorescent light tubes which are fine for starting and growing seedlings. I like to use the special grow lights made for growing plants. They cost more than the regular fluorescent tubes, but I think the plants do better in the long run. Make sure the grow lights will fit into your utility light fixture, the light ends could be different.
The lights should be placed from 2 to 3 inches from the top of the seedlings and ran for 15 hours a day. I use a light timer. I use a chain to raise and lower the light fixture as the plants grow. Rotate the seed trays to make sure all the plants get adequate light. Also, a cool room around 60 to 65 degrees is fine for most plants. In doing these procedures, you will not get leggy plants that fall over.
I use LED tubes for starting the garden and flower plants. They provide a higher quality of light with lower energy requirements. The actual grow lights have more of the red and blue spectrum of light which growing plants need. Since LEDs are brighter in the blue and red hues, have them 6 inches above the plant tops.