Indoor Gardening Fluorescent LightsPlants need energy to grow and this energy comes from sunlight in an outdoor home garden but grow lights are must if you’re scheduling for indoor gardening. Two basic and most vital plant processes, transpiration and photosynthesis, require light. Apart from these, light also affects various other processes like flowering, seed germination, pigment production, and certain growth phases of plant life.

It is essential to pick your grow lights wisely while starting with indoor gardening. Hydroponic grow lights come in various varieties like incandescent, fluorescent, and high-intensity discharge lights. Fluorescent grow lights are very popular amongst indoor gardeners because of their inexpensiveness, easy availability, and versatility in size, color spectrum, and low heat output.

Technological advancement has changed the face of fluorescent lights, which earlier weren’t considered as good as the other two lights. Whether you’re growing seedlings in a stacked grow cabinet or cultivating prized plantings and clones, you can be tension-free with these grow lights that can be placed closer to the lamps. You don’t have to worry about foliage curling or burning because these lamps produce less heat with soft light intensity compared to others. These lamps produce sufficient cool light so that the plants don’t grow leggier and weak.  It’s ideal for your indoor garden.

Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are great for seedlings and very useful for low-growing plants like lettuce, spinach, or plants that need indirect light like African Violets. They have longer life span of about 10,000 hours, which means value for money. Many compact fluorescent fixtures are horizontally placed along with reflectors to make the most of every bit of light. Available in warm/red (2700 K), full spectrum or daylight (5000 K), and cool/blue (6500 K) types, you can choose from these CFL varieties for propagation and for growing larger plants. However, you can choose a high watt CFL lamp to increase light penetration. Another system, called as T5 fluorescent grow lights, use several bulbs side by side with an arched reflector behind each bulb. These are ideal for growing sturdy, healthy plants up to 24 inches tall in the vegetative stage.

These fluorescent lights not only provide the right mix of light colors and broad even coverage for growing vegetables and herbs indoors but also reduce electricity consumption. Therefore, if you want to cut off your indoor gardening lighting budget and still want your small clones and seedlings to thrive, fluorescent lamps can be the best choice for you.

About Jean Smith

Hydroponics Grower experiencing and enjoying gardening using new technology and methods. Connect me on Google+ at Google+