What lamp to illuminate seedlings, what is phytolight and how to use diodes?

Most gardeners in Russia prefer planting plants with seedlings, rather than seeds in open ground, due to the late warming in our latitudes. But the prolonged winter is accompanied not only by cold weather, but also by short daylight hours, which means that additional lighting for seedlings is simply necessary. It not only allows you to increase the duration of daylight hours, allowing plants to fully develop, but can also help prevent stretching, strengthen the shoots, and even enhance flowering and fruit formation. It remains to figure out how to properly organize it with your own hands, so as not to harm the plant and grow the strongest seedlings from the very first time.

Will I have to buy a lamp?

If you are going to grow crops with a relatively short growing season with seedlings in April, or if sunny weather sets in your latitude in March, you do not need to buy a seedling lamp. But this does not mean that you can forget about additional lighting. What are the ways to save money and light up the seedlings at home? The answer is reflective screens installed opposite the windowsill next to the seedlings.

Small mirrors, plain foil, or reflective plastic like on car screen protectors are suitable for this purpose. A self-made screen should be placed behind a box with seedlings with a reflective side to the window. Just keep in mind a few important points.

• Such supplementary lighting will help in cloudy weather, but it cannot increase daylight hours.
• On a sunny day, it is better to remove such a screen: the foil located close to the sprouts will heat up and create more discomfort than benefit.
• The reflection of sunlight in the mirror is poorly diffused, so it is better to put the mirror a little further from the box than foil or a plastic screen.

Advice

The easiest way to add lighting at home at no cost is to place the seedlings on the south windows. Of course, not everyone has such an opportunity, but if you are the lucky owner of a south-facing window, do not miss the opportunity to give the seedlings a little more real sunlight.

Which lamp should you choose?

Is your goal still to extend daylight hours? Then you will definitely need lamps to illuminate the seedlings. But which ones? The variety of lamps is so great that it is not immediately clear which one is best for home use.

• An ordinary incandescent lamp. Such lamps, although they are already less and less used in homes, do not give any benefit to the plant. Their light does not have the full spectrum that plants need, so they cannot be counted on.
• Fluorescent lamps. It was them that our mothers and grandmothers did, because it was the easiest way to make supplementary lighting with their own hands. Such lamps are inexpensive, and they do not heat up much, but they do not compare in efficiency with other lamps for seedlings and lose power rather quickly. There may also be problems with installation at a certain height from the seedlings, because they need special mounts. Nevertheless, these lamps remain the most popular for growing crops in greenhouses and greenhouses. Such lamps are placed at a height of 15 to 50 cm from the seedlings, and if you manage to find lamps labeled LDC or LD, the plants will also receive a blue spectrum of light, which directly affects their growth.
• Energy-saving lamps. They, like fluorescent lamps, will not be able to strongly influence growth, but they will give some support to plants, especially if there is blue or red spectra in the light of the lamps. Such lamps also consume little energy, which will have a good effect on the cost of vegetables grown.
• Discharge lamps. Plants love arc lamps, they give out a lot of light and are not too expensive. But this is definitely not the best option for balcony seedlings: the lamps get very hot and are quite difficult to install with your own hands. But you can choose mercury with a blue spectrum or high-pressure sodium lamps with red, only it is better to do it for lighting greenhouses.
• LED or LED lamps. LED seedling lights are the best option when you want strong seedlings. They save energy, do not heat up, do not dry out the earth and serve for years. But white light will be of less benefit than specialized light.

Advice

For growing seedlings at home, you should not choose the most powerful lamps: for small areas like your balcony, the middle option is better.

So what is phytolight?

We have described several backlighting options, but never mentioned phytolight. But it was he who made a lot of noise in the field of gardening in recent years. Why did we bypass him? It's simple: phytolight is not a specific type of seedling lamp, but rather a special color spectrum that can be applied to any type of the listed types of lighting. Remember when we talked about red and blue lights? So, plants are especially sensitive to these two spectra in lighting.

• Blue promotes cell division, accelerates growth, while preventing stretching.
• Red is useful for the development of the root system, as well as during the flowering and fruiting stage.

To grow seedlings, both spectra are needed, therefore, walking down the street in March, in some windows you can see a bright purple-lilac glow. This is the very phytolight, and which lamp provides it is another matter. True, for seedlings, the proportion of blue should be greater than red, and in purchased phytolamps, their proportions are approximately the same.

Just do not rush to run after phytolight in specialized stores. You may not need it if you manage to make it yourself.

Advice

Do not forget about the day-night mode, which is also important for plants: lighting around the clock can have the opposite effect.

How to make phytolight yourself?

Additional highlighting of seedlings is useful without phytolight, but you can do it yourself if necessary. Gas-discharge lamps contain these spectra by themselves, fluorescent lamps are easier to buy ready-made, so we will work with LED lamps.

The easiest way is to buy LED strips with red and blue diodes in a 1: 2 ratio and fix them above the seedlings, which will provide the desired spectrum at home with minimal cost and effort. The diodes do not heat up, so you can bring them as close to the sprouts as possible. In purchased lamps for lighting seedlings, ordinary diodes are often used, which you can buy in the store and install it yourself, so the savings will be significant.

If LED strips are an expensive option, you can attach individual LEDs, the quality and wavelength of which you can personally check in the store, to any base, for example, a plastic rail, using hot glue. Then connect the LEDs by soldering and connect them to the power supply. The lamp will be powered from the outlet, so do not forget about the wire with the plug. For a person who is not versed in electrics, it sounds difficult to implement with his own hands, so you can use the help of a fellow craftsman.

Do you really need additional lighting?

For many crops in our latitudes, there is no way to do without phytolight support, but you can reduce the importance of its role if you start planting seedlings a little later.Of course, you should not delay until May, but after all, often the seedlings planted at the end of February have time to outgrow the optimal age of planting in the ground and stretch out. You can also do without additional lighting when daylight hours reach 12 hours, and this happens in most areas already in April.

By the way

Supplementing with phytolight is also useful for some indoor plants, such as citrus fruits: this way the leaves will not turn yellow and fall off.

So, you can deal with insufficient illumination of seedlings using different light sources, and there is no one best option. The most popular for home seedlings are LED and fluorescent lamps with phyto-light, which provide the plant not only with additional lighting, but also with the spectra necessary for proper growth and development. We also recommend using them: jack of all trades can try to make such a lamp on their own, but in case of failure it will not be difficult to buy this important device!