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Grow Lights

One of the best things I ever got was a grow light for my plants. It makes such a difference that I will never go back to not using one. Grow lights are special light bulbs that come in a variety of styles and shapes, designed to mimic the optimal light that plants need to grow healthy.

Science time!

In the winter, many plants go dormant. This is for several reasons which include cold temperatures, low water availability, and poor lighting. When you have plants indoors, watering and keeping them from freezing are not difficult. However, maintaining optimal light levels can be more difficult. The standard unit of measurement for light is the lux.

I’ll give you a comparison. When the sun is directly overhead, the light intensity measures around 100,000 lux. On the other hand, your standard office lighting is about 300 lux. While it’s obvious that we don’t need the full intensity of the sun in order to be functional, you can see that full outdoor lighting and indoor lighting are hugely different.

Plants have adapted to a wide range of lighting conditions, from full sun to almost full shade. Most “house plants” are low light plants. If you’ve ever taken an outdoors plant inside to keep it going through the winter, you’ve seen what the effects of light starvation do to it.

Grow lights not only provide a boost of light intensity for your plants, but also the specific “type” of light that most closely mimics the sun. When we break it down, light is comprised of many wavelengths, and each wavelength corresponds to a visible color. When you combine all the different colors, you get white light. Break it back down and you get individual colors. Most of our household light bulbs emit very strong yellow tinted light because  it's relatively cheap and works well for human vision.

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Chlorophyll in plants performs best in red and blue light wavelengths. Green light provides little benefit.

Unfortunately, plants do not thrive in yellow light. The best lights for plants are in red and blue. Green is the worst (they look green to us because they reflect that color away). Red light tends to promote flowers and fruit production. Blue/violet light tends to promote vegetative growth, for fuller, bushier plants. There are many high-tech growers and researchers out there that use LED lights tuned to specific red and blue wavelengths to optimize plant growth.


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LED growth light tuned to red and blue/violet light.



You don’t need all that.

You can get what you need at your local hardware store. Household growth lights are cheap, easy to install, and do an excellent job. They simulate natural sunlight that plants are accustomed to. That is, they produce an intense white light, which contains all colors of the spectrum that your plants need. You can buy higher cost LED growth lights (don't let me stop you), but I've found that the cheaper ones do the job I need.

The easiest thing to do is replace one of your existing light fixtures with a grow light bulb. I used a reading light stand (one with an adjustable swivel arm) fitted with a grow light, for years. It made a noticeable difference for my plants. Later I switched to a fluorescent tube growth light.

Grow lights are also great for starting from seeds. I built a grow light tray, designed specifically for seedlings and smaller plants. Check out my next article HERE, for details on building a grow light tray.