There are so many plant grow lights available in the market and choosing the best one can be a really tough job! So, Then How do you choose the right LED grow light to grow plants indoors?
There are many important factors to consider while choosing led lights, let’s split this into 5 sections. And please follow this video till the end. Will try to keep it as concise and simple without bothering you with too much physics.
- The Purpose of Buying a Plant Grow Light?
A grow light or plant light is an artificial light source to stimulate plant growth by emitting a light appropriate for photosynthesis. This light spectrum is similar to that of the sun. Grow lights are used for horticulture, indoor gardening, plant propagation from cuttings, seed germinations, Indoor food production – specially for those zones which do not receive adequate sunlight, indoor hydroponic gardening and to grow aquatic plants.
These are some of the cheaper options you can find online on amazon. Most of these are some cheap products without any warranty or proper specifications. If you want to grow indoor plants that need very less amount of light, then you can use these options. But at your own risk as there is no warranty and you won’t know how long they will last. The cost of these ranges anywhere from 5 dollar for a 5 watt bulb to 30 dollar for this type of model. But the light intensity and quality of photons they emit is too low and you may require multiple number of lights kept too close to the plants which is practically difficult.
The best option is to invest on a good quality reliable grow light like atleast a TS-1000 grow light from Mar-Hydro Company. It’s a very reliable company and into this LED grow light business since 9 years. They have a lot of products and models of LED grow lights and even grow tents for different uses. You can check their website mars-hydro.com. I have linked that in description below.
This TS-1000 set up costs around 200 USD for this powerful 150 Watt light including this beautifully designed large grow tent.
Now lets move on to the next factor in choosing your grow light:
- LIGHT INTENSITY: This is the most important factor. It simply means the amount of light a bulb emits out. We will not go into physics or science of this. But To decide on this, check out the manufacturer’s recommended foot print to know the area in square foot covered by this light. For example, this TS-1000 model covers a 3 x 3 feet in bloom stage and 4 x 4 feet in the vegetative stage with a distance of about 18 inch and 24 inch from the source respectively. If you know a bit of physics, You should also look into PPF, PAR chart and PPE values given by the manufacturer to decide on the light intensity.
Few more tips on this: The light is most intense at the middle of the light source and less intense at the peripheries. Seedlings and Young plants require cooler light intensities than vegetative and blooming plants. So, this can be achieved by either increasing the distance of these from the light source or placing seedlings and younger plants at the peripheral areas.
- COLOR SPECTRUM: Make sure you pick the correct spectrum depending on which stage your plant is in like the vegetative stage or the blooming stage or a full cycle of growth from seedling to harvesting stage. There are two types of spectums for LED lights – Targeted and the Broad Spectrum. More blue spectrum is better for Veg, Red is better for flowering stage and some fixtures have a tunable spectrum like red only or blue or stuff like that.
This Mars-Hydro Ts-1000 is a broad spectrum led light which works perfectly from seedling stage to harvest stage. You only need to adjust the distance using the rachet mechanism provided. You can look at these multi color LEDs. This is actually very bright, though in camera it may not appear that much bright. This one also got a dimmer screw right here. You can dim this further depending on your needs. - WATTAGE: or the electrical power measured in Watts. This actually does not determine the intensity or the quality of light. This only gives you a general idea on how powerful your led grow light is. The model number like TS-1000 doesn’t mean 1000 Watts. Make sure you do not misinterpret this number. This Mars-hydro light is about 150 Watts. One thing you may need to know here is: How many watts are required for the area in square foot. Generally 30 to 50 Watt is required for 1 foot x 1 foot area of coverage. Like about 30 watt or even less for veg stage or indoor plants and about 50 watt per square foot for flowering plants.
- WARRANTY: 99 percent LED lights from good companies will never have any problem and they have a very high lifespan of atleast 50,000 hours of usage. But still go for a company that provides a warranty of atleast 1 year. Mars-Hydro offers a 3 year extensive warranty on every grow light they sell. That’s really good!
- You can use Discount code GARDENTIPS and avail a discount on their website mars-hydro.com.
Urban gardening or small-space gardening in containers is on
the rise! And the number of people growing plants indoors is also on the rise.
The most important aspect of container gardening is the potting medium used,
because this, along with light and moisture will be the most important factor
to help your plants grow healthier and disease free.
I never use the commercial potting mixes available, which are infact too expensive.
I rather prefer to make my own homemade potting mix recipe for both my indoor
and outdoor plants
Now, lets start looking at the ingredients we use to prepare our indoor soil mix, one by one. We will list out the formula or the recipe with the proportions of each ingredient used, shortly.
- Garden Soil: This forms the major component of an outdoor potting soil recipe because one of its major functions is plant anchorage which is very important for outdoor plants which can easily knocked down by strong winds. We will use garden soil in our indoor potting mix too but in smaller quantity.
- Cocopeat or Peat Moss: I prefer cocopeat because its easily available and inexpensive and has a neutral PH. Plus mixing this with garden soil removes the compactness of garden soil and makes it well draining. This forms the major ingredient of our indoor potting mix. Its available as a compact brick or in powdered form. The coco peat brick can be easily reconstituted into cocopeat powder by mixing it in water. One brick of about 5 kgs will give you a large volume of upto 75 liters of cocopeat powder.
- Compost: like vermicompost or decomposed cowdung or horse dung powder or both. Compost manure is an essential component of any potting mix to provide the major and minor plants nutrients like the NPK – nitrogen phosphorous and potassium along with the trace elements. We have already discussed this in our previous episode on the basics of indoor gardening.
- Neem Cake Powder: This is optional. But adding this will take care of any fungus and harmful bacterial growths and protects your plants.
- Bone Meal Powder: This is again optional but very useful if you are growing vegetables or flowering plants indoors under grow lights. This will induce flowering and fruiting if mixed in potting soil.
- Perlite, Vermiculite or Pumice: All these serve the same purpose of making a well draining potting mix plus adding a good aeration system for roots. Among these Vermiculite should be cautiously used, because it holds lot of moisture and can rot you plants especially succulents. Vermiculite can be used for water loving plants like lucky bamboo and others. Pumice and Perlite are the best options. Among these two, the main drawback of Perlite is it gets crushed into powder if you use it along with too much garden soil and in this case pumice is the best if available. Garden Pumice or horticultural pumice is available in various grades or sizes and it does not get crushed unlike perlite. You can find the links to purchase these items online in the description below.
Now quickly, before the formula
or recipe, lets know the difference between Potting Mix and Potting Soil.
Potting Mix is simply a mixture of all the above ingredients minus the garden
soil. That’s means it is a soil less medium. On the other hand, Its called
Potting soil when you use garden soil in the mixture. That’s simple! But most
often these two terms are used synonymously.
Well, here in this recipe, considering the importance of plant anchorage, we
will use garden soil too but in small quantity.
Now lets look into the actual recipe of this indoor potting soil.
- Cocopeat forms about 40 to 50 percent of this mix.
- Garden soil about 10 or 20 percent.
- Perlite or Pumice or both about 20 percent
- Compost like vermicompost or Cow dung compost or a mixture of both 20 percent depending on what you want to grow. For veggies and flowering plants, you can increase this to 30 percent. For ornamental plants 10 to 20 percent is sufficient. This can also be added later on to the top layer of the soil – a handful of it per container once or twice in a month.
Optionally you can add 5 percent bone meal plus neem cake powder.
Let’s start discussing on Indoor Farming or Indoor Gardening in simple Q and A format to keep this episode interesting.
- What is Indoor Gardening or Indoor Plantation?
It simply means growing plants indoors. This might be at a residential home or an office building or any other enclosed area.
- What are the Types of Indoor Gardening?
Indoor gardening can be
a. Container gardening which is the most common and the simplest type,
b. Hydroponic gardening which is growing plants in water using various techniques,
c. environment agriculture,
d. vertical farming and more. We will discuss these later in various posts of this series.
- What are the basic components of Indoor Gardening?
The Three basic components or requirements are:
a. Water or moisture,
b. Growing Medium like potting mix for container gardening.
b. Light Source which can be natural light or a Plant Grow lights like LED grow lights.
c. Plant Support as they grow. We will discuss these in detail in next post.
- What are the benefits of Indoor Gardening?
- Grow anything anytime! Yes, you can grow anything at anytime of the year using indoor gardening. This is really important for those countries and zones which receive very less hours of sunlight. Owing to recent technological advancements, especially the usage of LED grow lights, indoor gardening has become pretty convenient and you can grow any type of flower, food and any ornamental plant, regardless of the weather and the time of the year.
- Air Purifying Plants: As we all know, plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, while the human body does exactly complete opposite. Having plants in and around your house will drastically improve the quality of air you breathe. Many air purifier plants filter the air around the plants and absorb toxic gases such as benzene and formaldehyde. You can check a detailed video on NASA recommended air purifying plant list from HERE.
- Grow Fresh Herbs and Vegetables organically for you Kitchen. This I feel, is the most important benefit. I understand, this may not be so easy practically as it sounds. Though not indoors, I have always recommended organic vegetable gardening in your home or terrace in containers.
In our next post, we will discuss on the principles of indoor gardening and things you need to set up a basic indoor garden.
Happy Gardening!