Finding the right indoor gardening lights is a crucial step to growing your plants indoors.
In certain cases, especially when you are trying to grow plants larger than culinary herbs, a windowsill container that garners a few hours of sunlight a day isn’t nearly enough to make your indoor plants and shrubs flourish and grow.
Sometimes you need to use indoor gardening lights because you don’t have a window in your apartment, house, or building that gets enough direct sunlight during the day.
Such occasions call for indoor gardening lights to help your plants grow. Not only that, though: you need to have the right indoor gardening lights.
Indoor Plant and Growing Lights
Indoor gardening requires a lot more care and attention than outdoor gardening.Outside, Mother Nature takes care of a lot of the magic. But in your home, you need to supplement that magic with indoor plant lights.
Below we’ll take a cursory look at what indoor growing lights do and what the different kinds are.
From there, you should be able to take the next step in finding the perfect indoor gardening lights for your own project.
What Do Indoor Gardening Lights Do?
In general, all plants use the light from the sun to change carbon dioxide into an array of sugars that are used to help them grow.
When you are doing indoor gardening, it’s hard to make sure these plants are getting enough sunlight to convert the right amount of carbon dioxide into sugars to make them grow at a healthy rate.
In order to flower and bloom (and, in the cases of some plants, bear fruit) a plant needs no less than six hours of sun light per day.
Now this may not be a possibility in some places like apartments or town houses. Depending on the building’s construction and directional placement, you may find yourself without window that receives three hours (let alone six hours) of sunshine a day.
In such cases, all is not lost. There is an answer: indoor gardening lights.
Artificial, indoor plant lights are reliable and functional stand-ins for the sun.
With indoor growing lights, your plants can receive the nourishment they need without having direct contact with the sun’s rays.
There are a number of different kinds of indoor gardening lights. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
What Kinds of Indoor Plant Lights Do You Need?
Here’s a brief overview of the three main types of indoor gardening lights, and one that is still in the early developmental stages, but could prove to be heralding in a new frontier of indoor growing lights.
1. Incandescent Light: Even though this category of sun-substitute is labeled as an indoor plant light, it is really almost worthless as such. These are best used to help highlight plant groupings in your home and make them look nice while only adding supplemental sunlight.
2. Fluorescent Light: This is the most popular indoor growing light available. Fairly inexpensive, these lights do well mimicking the life-giving properties of the sun. And with new. technological advances, you can use special, fluorescent, indoor growing lights to not only grow a plant from seed, but also feed a mature, fruit-bearing tree.
3. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) Lights: These are industrial strength, indoor gardening lights, capable of growing full-sized plants and trees indoors. Originally used by professional horticulturists to substitute for greenhouse light, HID lights are not suitable for the independent, indoor gardening amateur looking to grow some herbs in a back room of an apartment.
4. Light Emitting Diode (LED) Lights:LED lights used for indoor gardening may be the wave of the future. They are still in a developmental phase, but once perfected, these lights will offer all the growing power of the sun with ultra low costs. Low energy consumption and low heat output make this a truly, green light. When perfected, LED indoor growing lights will leave all the others behind them.
Return from Indoor Gardening Lights to Indoor Gardening Supplies
Return from Indoor Growing Lights to Landscape and Gardening Design Advice
Related Articles:
