Supplemental winter lights
Steve Marak via pbs (Thu, 24 Feb 2022 21:29:04 PST)

I agree with Leo - light for plants is an area - along with nutrition
and to some extent water quality - that can be about as complex as you
care to make it. As a geek, I enjoy diving into that stuff, but I think
there is a point of diminishing returns for most growers and that cheap
efficient LEDs with higher color temperatures have moved that point much
closer. I used to have an hour-long presentation on artificial lighting
for orchid people covering a lot of technical material. Now it would be
one slide that said "buy cheap LED fixtures of at least 5000 K color
temperature, up to 6300 K, start at a conservative distance and
day-length to avoid scorch, see how your plants respond and adjust
accordingly". Far from the complete story, but enough for a lot of
people who don't care about the tech-talk.

I've bought some fairly expensive LED fixtures with diodes in a
carefully selected range of colors to provide the "perfect" spectrum for
plants, and I bought expensive PAR meters to check them. They were
well-designed and built fixtures and the plants grew well. But I can't
say they grew any better than they do under $30 4-foot LED shop lights
with a 5000 K color temperature from Sam's.

Steve

On 2/24/2022 6:46 PM, oooOIOooo via pbs wrote:

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