Lighting for Plants – What to Use and How to Supplement Light?

In recent years, growing plants indoors — in a room, a grow tent or even a mini greenhouse — has become increasingly popular. Besides a suitable growing container, substrate and nutrients, another important factor for the plant's growth and overall vitality is light. If you enjoy growing but your apartment or house doesn't exactly overflow with windows or enough windowsills, providing additional light for your plants may be the right step.

There is a vast array of types of plant lighting on the market that can be used for cultivation. LED lighting, however, offers the best price-to-performance ratio. The main difference compared to conventional discharge lamps, which can also be used for indoor growing, is that LED lights have lower energy consumption. Other advantages include a long lifespan, which manufacturers state between 30,000 - 100,000 hours depending on the specific product, which is many times more compared to common discharge lamps. Additionally, they emit little heat, so it is not necessary to handle its removal with additional fans or ventilation, and they have high efficiency in converting input energy into visible light.

If you want to fully replace daylight for your plants, you need to provide a light source with the appropriate spectrum for the vegetative or flowering phase. Therefore, full-spectrum LED fixtures are ideal, as they provide the complete range of colors. This enables plants to carry out photosynthesis and with it all the physiological processes necessary for their life.

How to illuminate plants? The duration of supplemental lighting will vary depending on whether the plant is shade-loving or light-loving. While the former will be satisfied with 2–4 hours in the evening to extend the day, light-loving plants placed far from a window will require more intensive lighting throughout the day. To simplify control of these cycles, a timer is used, which allows you to switch the light on according to your preferences.

Place artificial light as close to the plants as possible, because its effectiveness decreases sharply with distance. Ideal placement is 20–40 centimeters from the plant, but at most up to one meter. For lighting smaller houseplants you can use LED bulbs with a standard E27 base, which can be fitted into any household lamp. Artificial light is also excellent for pre-growing seedlings, indoor forcing of herbs or growing sprouts.

More tips and everything you need for the care of your ornamental and useful plants can be found at higarden.cz.