Plants need water, soil and sunlight to thrive. But sometimes your home cannot deliver enough light to keep your favorite room plant or a tray with vegetable seeds happy and healthy. Growth lights come into play there.
“If you realize that your plant looks pretty healthy but has stagnating growth, this could benefit from a little more light,” says Anna Ohler, co -owner of Bright Lane Gardens in Lake Ann, Michigan.
Growth lights are a great way to ensure that light -village plants and seedlings can grow successfully indoors. You can also use them to offer your plants a little additional light. You must know the following about the selection, use and purchase of growth lights in order to make your inner plants look lush.
Full spectrum LEDs are the gold standard for attachment lights.
What are growth lights?
Growth lights are light bulbs or fittings for inner plants that imitate the natural light systems when they are grown outdoors. Plants transform light through photosynthesis into food. So if you give you more light, you will fuel healthier growth.
Growth lights can be as easy as the old school's light bulbs, even though their light is weaker and they give up a lot of warmth. Fluorescence pears can also be used as growth lights, but most of the growth lights use LEDs. They are brighter, more efficient and emit less warmth than the other options.
I do not recommend setting up a growth room in a bedroom, even if slight reflectors grow. Unless you like to wake up with light lights.
Why do lights grow?
If you love plants, but don't get your home or apartment much natural light, it can be a challenge to keep inner plants. There are many types of poor lighting conditions such as pothos, spider plants and zamioculcas (ZZ) plants that can process lower lighting conditions. However, if you want to grow houseplants that need more light, you need help.
Some plants that need a lot of very light, direct light to thrive, such as some succulents and cacti, dwarf citrus trees and flowering plants, also need an additional growth light in the brightest interiors to grow properly. If you plan to start seedlings indoors for your vegetable garden, even the brightest, sunnest window does not give these baby plants the bright light that you need.
A sign that you may not get enough light for blooming or fruit plants is that you do not achieve suitable stages of development. Another sign that plants need more light is that they are etyrized or long -legged. This means that the stem becomes high, with plenty of space between leaves to get more light.
House plants and seedlings can also lean a light source or reach in the direction of a light source if they don't get enough. Varied plants can return green, and colorful plants such as crotons cannot maintain their color without sufficient light.
Red LEDs are purely optional nutritional supplements to white LEDs in full spectrum in growth lights.
How to select the right growing light
Plants can use different parts of the light spectrum for different purposes. Blue light supports vegetative growth, while red light helps with fruit and flowering. There are also white spectrum growth light lights, the white light (a combination of all light colors) and the complete spectrum growth light lights glow, which give white light at a temperature that rather imitates the natural light.
When choosing Grow Lights, this certain light plays a role on the light spectrum, but according to Justin Hancock, a gardener with the hood in kindergarten, according to Justin Hancock, the intensity of this light is a gardener.
“What I have learned in the gardening school is that your plants generally get much more about getting enough light than the wavelength,” said Hancock.
A trio of potted plants and a growing light.
This light intensity is measured in foot candy, which describe the amount of light that falls on a surface. The performance that you are probably used to equate with brightness in regular household flower bulbs measures how much electricity the light bulb uses.
If you buy for basic growth lights, different measurements are displayed in the specifications. Foot scandles are the most important measurement.
“Your average growth lamps will probably meet your needs for the average houseplant-everything of 50 to 200 foot candy, which is a fairly wide range,” said Ohler.
If the measurement of the foot scandles is a little too complicated, you can choose the growth of light bulbs for houseplants instead. Ohler recommends to provide 10 to 20 watts of light per square foot for a standard room plant.
A powerful artificial light can help produce many houseplants a deep color.
Grow lights for houseplants
Your houseplants can benefit from attachments, even if you keep it in a very bright room that receives sunlight all day.
“People underestimate how much light is needed for certain types of plants. If they get a lot of sunlight through their windows, it is of course to be assumed that they can go well,” said Ohler. “But this window only lets the light come in from an angle, and as soon as the sun comes over at this angle, the direct light is cut off.”
Ohler recommends basic LED lights for white spectrum for your average houseplants. First place the growing light two feet away from your houseplants. Based on how the system reacts over time, you can adjust how close the system is to the light or the experiment with a stronger light.
According to Click & Grow, his system uses biomimicry to simulate a natural growth environment indoors.
Grow lights for the start of seeds
You may be able to help a houseplants to thrive with a single light bulb. However, if you need growth lights to start seeds indoors, a stronger light is required.
“Sämlers are much more needy,” said Hancock. “A good, strong light will be really advantageous for you. Otherwise you will ultimately have long -legged seedlings.”
You want to use panels with full spectrum LEDs that can cover the surface of a seed shell to ensure that your seedlings do not become weak and long -legged. Fluorescence loading lights are another popular option for cheaper option if you have it at hand. However, they are not as energy efficient as LEDs and they get hotter, which means that they have to be careful how close they come to the sensitive leaves of their seedlings.
Start with light panels about two inches above the floor line when you see the first green growth and then gradually increase the height when the plants grow. Many models are equipped with hardware such as chains, with which you can attach it to a rust, a shelf or a ballast over the plants so that you can adapt the height of the light when the plants get larger.
I hang my Barrina growth light with adjustable chains.
Where to buy to buy lights
There are many high-end growth lights on the market, but both experts recommend that you are ashamed of something chic if simpler, affordable onions will probably do the work as well. However, Ohler recommends that many of the growth lights available from Amazon.
Instead, she recommends starting with an LED growth lamp from her local hardware store, which is probably more reliable than some online brands. Depending on where you shop, you will find light bulbs that are specially identified as a growth light from established brands such as Phillips and Sylvania.
Ohler recommends a brand on Amazon. Lively Powered a variety of LED growth of light plates, seed start mats, ballasts for the hanging of growth lights and other equipment for gardening indoors.
“Don't rethink it too much, but also not, don't choose the cheapest option at Amazon,” said Ohler. “Somewhere in between will usually be good for everything you do in the house.”