Indoor Hydroponic Garden Lighting: What's the Best?

Let's answer a question with a question!

What do you want to grow in your indoor garden?

We all know that plants need light to exist, grow and perform their magic of giving us the beautiful fragrant blossoms, followed by fruits, flowers and vegetables.

Each color in the rainbow of light activates different plant functions. The plants' ability to orient leaves toward light is controlled by spectrum.

For an outdoor soil garden people throughout the years have generally relied only on our sun for the light they need to grow their produce and flowers.

Light bulbs deliver only a part of the necessary light that plants need to grow indoors but they deliver enough light for plants to survive and grow adequately if allowed, being fed and supplemented by the best plant nutrients that they need to perform each function of their lives .

Indoors we create, employ and control our own atmosphere. What a concept!

The artificial "sun" can shine indoors for 24 hours a day using full spectrum lighting to hasten vegetative growth.

Plants love it. Most or all non blossoming plants do not require the long periods of rest for 10 to 12 hours that they get outdoors. For them it's a waste of grow time.

If you have an indoor hydroponics or soil garden growing carrots or greens including all varieties of lettuce: arugula, mesculen, bib, or leaf there is no reason at all that I know to ever turn off your grow lights. Vegetative growth thereby can continue for 24 hours a day.

You can be eating your own fresh baby lettuce salad in around 30 days after planting your seeds.

However when you are looking for flowering blossoms for your cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. or when you are wanting blooms on your flowers we have to go back to the old fashioned concept of 6 to 12 hours of dark rest per night for them.

Too much light and not enough dark rest on flowering plants will send plants back to vegetative growth putting off or inhibiting their blossoming.

The closer the plant is to its light source the better and faster it will grow as long as it is not close enough to burn or receive too much heat from the light.

Fortunately there are "cool" bulbs that will give you the full daylight spectrum without the heat.

You can put them as close to your plants as you like and watch the fascinatingly fast growth.

Ideally, any lighting we supply for our indoor plants or gardens can be supplemented at least part of the time by sunlight through a window or a skylight.

There are hydroponic systems that are long and narrow and do quite well along the side of a window. There are even heat mats built for these long systems that warm your seeds and plants up from the bottom encouraging both young seedling and mature growth.

Let's say you would like a fragrant gardenia bush in your entry hall or corner of your bath or bed room. Ideally it would be situated under a skylight. The sunlight could easily be supplemented with spotlights of a full daylight spectrum incandescent grow lights from two sides.

Getting the picture?

For a vegetable garden, salad greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans depending upon its length a 2 ft or 4 ft. fluorescent light fixture containing a T5 full spectrum daylight grow bulb could provide everything you need as far as lighting goes.

There are light movers available to move grow lights back and forth over a long indoor hydroponic garden.

Reflectors are a productive addition to increase the area of ​​light on your garden.

That covers lighting for just about anything to grow well and survive adequately indoors.

Now let's go for spectacular!

What kind of lighting do we need for dramatic flower blooms in your indoor hydroponic garden or indoor soil garden?

How about high intensity discharge (HID) lamps which are very very bright.

Gardeners use the intense brightness of the HID lamps to replace natural sunlight indoors and grow outstanding blooming plants. and receive a higher harvest.

A horizontal HID light reflector system hanging as close to your flowering plants as you can get can give you spectacular results all else being equal: temperature, humidity, nutrients.

A 1000-watt HID emits a lot of light and also radiates a lot of heat. Many indoor gardeners find that (3) 400-watt bulbs can cover more growing area than one 1000-watt and can be hung closer to plants.

A lot of indoor gardeners highly on the higher yellow lights as found in the Agrosun Gold bulbs for increased flowering. Others say it's the increased red part of the spectrum as found in Agrosun Red that works best for them.

Again others swear by metal halide lamps and others say only the high pressure sodium lamps produce the best blooms.

So it seems to be a choice of what works best for each individual and their own growing circumstances.

Any an abundance of a variety of lighting is all out there and readily available online to try.

So try whatever looks to you and see what works right for your indoor garden.

Plenty of room for individual creativity in indoor gardening and lighting.

Do your own thing! Make it work right for you just the way you thought it would.