Faux Rock Construction

When you think of indoor gardening there is one obvious problem that needs to be dealt with, and that’s the lack of adequate lighting to keep your flowers or vegetables healthy.  The most common way that this is solved is the use of grow lights to create the conditions necessary for your plants to thrive.

Ordinary lights don’t normally work very well for use as grow lights, since most plants need light in a different part of the light spectrum than is generated by lighting that has been designed to appeal to the human eye.  In fact, as a plant matures, and goes from it’s early growth stages on to the mature and fruiting or final growth stages, the optimum lighting actually changes, so a grow light is either optimized for one part of the life cycle of a plant or they have to be tuned to have a broader spectrum to service a larger part of the growth cycle.

These days there are a variety of choices for your indoor lighting solutions.  For many years the only choice was incandescent lighting, which in many ways hasn’t changed that much since Thomas Edison created the first commercial electric lighting almost 100 years ago.  Of course, one of the problems with almost all types of incandescent lights is the fact that they are not very energy efficient.  So, for use as a single grow light, or a small bank of them, they can work reasonably well, but quickly get to the point that too much heat is being generated in too little space.  So the search for other alternatives continued.

Most folks are somewhat familiar with fluorescent lighting.  It has several advantages over traditional incandescent lights.  It can be about twice as efficient, and the lifetime of the fluorescent grow lights can be up to ten times as long.  The bulbs can come in the traditional tubes which often come in twenty four and forty eight inch lengths, and fit into the low cost fixtures available in any home improvement or hardware store.  There are also compact fluorescent grow light bulbs, which use a form factor that screws into a base instead of the long tube.  Unlike common compact fluorescents, these come in fairly high wattage levels.

Finally, the latest in these devices is LED grow lights.  Using the latest in Light Emitting Diode technology, these units are even more efficient, and tout an even longer life cycle.  One advantage these solid state lights offer is the ability to create a narrow spectrum of light, which allows the light to only emit light in the exact range that it is needed for the plant growth, which helps account for the very high efficiency that these lights attain.

Grow lights are great for use in starting seeds indoors, or for use in a year round garden.  The useful light falls off quickly as the unit is moved farther away from the plants that are growing, so it is best to mount them in some sort of adjustable frame, that allows the height to be varied as the plants grow taller over time, ensuring that the lights can be kept close to the plants for the greatest growth.  Setting them on a timer is critical as well, as most indoor plants will need twelve to eighteen hours of light each day to achieve optimal growth.

Tags: row lights, indoor gardening, gardening fluorescent grow lights, container gardenin | row lights, indoor gardening, gardening fluorescent grow lights, container gardenin

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