Why You Should Use Grow Lights For Indoor Garden: How Manage / Affect It?
Why You Should Use Grow Lights for an Indoor Garden
One of the best ways to increase the efficiency of crops is by using gardening grow lights. According to a 2021 research paper, garden lights improve the photosynthesis process, leading to the production of more leaves, seeds, and fruits. That should give you enough reason to use garden lamps to grow your crops. Whether you’re involved in vertical or horizontal farming, these lights are beneficial in more than one way.
Undeniable Reasons to Use LED Lights for Your Indoor Garden
Garden grow lights increase crop production efficiency by improving the directional focus of light. They enable you to customize the spectra to the one required explicitly by certain plants. With broad-spectrum grow lights for an indoor garden, you can easily improve your indoor working conditions. Plus, garden plant lights can provide prolonged service due to their unmatched longevity.
Additionally, LED garden lamps produce negligible heat, providing perfect conditions for plant growth. With a compact configuration, you can use garden indoor lights to maximize space usage. In wintry conditions, LED lights can prolong a plant’s productivity. You do not have to wait for perfect weather to get maximum plant yield.
You can also regulate how long your plants spend in light or darkness. Besides reducing physiological disorders, you can prevent or reduce the incidence of pests and diseases by using LED lights for gardening. Finally, it allows for dynamic light control.
Are you itching to bring your indoor garden to new heights? Here is how to increase crop production efficiency using grow lights in greater detail.
Improving the Directional Focus of Light
Indoor gardening with grow lights is perfect for vertical farming. It improves the directional focus of the beams, thus directing more light to the plants. The plants are able to produce much more than they would otherwise have done. In an LED grow light garden, the focused beams go straight to the plant leaves. Plants will definitely thrive in such an environment.
Plus, owing to their easy directional focus, it’s unnecessary to purchase light movers, reflectors, and other equipment for capturing misdirected light. Consequently, you can save on the initial cost of indoor gardening with grow lights. Since you’ll only install indoor gardening lights, you’ll also save on space. As a vertical farmer, space is critical to you.
Customizing Light Spectra
Did you know that an indoor garden with grow lights allows for customization of the light spectra to great effect? Research shows that you can control the output of light to increase crop productivity. To photosynthesize, plants primarily utilize the red and blue light spectra. It’s from these two that plants absorb energy and make their food.
LED grow lights can narrow the spectrum to what plants require to photosynthesize. Go to any farm, and you’ll notice swathes of purple light, which is a combination of the red and blue spectra. You can also use these lights to grow your plants. But you do not have to restrict yourself to blue or red light. Broad-spectrum garden indoor lights also work perfectly well.
Enhancing Indoor Working Conditions
Indoor spaces often lack natural sunlight. Instead of purple light, which can be challenging to work under, install broad-spectrum white LED lights. With white light, you create conditions similar to sunshine. In these conditions, gardening work is much more enjoyable.
Providing Prolonged Service
Did you know that LED grow lights have an impressive lifespan? They provide prolonged service compared to other indoor gardening grow lights. Of course, LED lights are costlier than high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps and compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). However, a typical LED light provides over 50,000 hours of service life. You can use them for more than six years non-stop.
Why do LED lights for gardening provide such a long service life? They are incredibly energy-efficient. The energy consumption for LED lights is much less than any other type of indoor gardening lights. That’s why they last three times more than CFLs. For example, the products from Bata Grow Light offer up to 50% more efficiency and last much longer.
Implementing More Effective Heat Control
Typical gardening LED lights are energy efficient. They emit little heat. What’s the benefit of low heat emission on plants? There’s little or no stress on plant root zones and canopies. Plus, it minimizes sunburn and leaf scorch. Plants remain healthy and have extended shelf lives post-harvest.
What would happen if heat control in indoor growing spaces isn’t so efficient? There would be the need for additional ventilation to regulate airflow and prevent the excessive accumulation of moisture and pests. However, that’s unnecessary with LED garden grow lights. There would be no need for additional ventilation, making it more cost-effective.
Enabling Compact Configuration
One of the reasons for choosing vertical farming is to maximize the plants grown in indoor spaces. Vertical farming allows for optimal use of space. On a small farm, you can grow many cannabis plants, for example. Grow lights indoor gardening is more efficient and takes up less space. It creates room for growing many crops in a small area.
Furthermore, LED indoor gardening grow lights emit little or no heat. You can place them close to each other without worrying about heat accumulation. Similarly, the lights can go near plants without damaging them in any way. By creating room for compact arrangement, the lights create additional space for cultivating more plants. Thus, you can use them to multiply crop production by several times.
Improving Light Quality in Wintry Weather
Research shows that indoor gardening with grow lights can improve plant growing conditions in wintry weather. During winter, natural light tends to grow dim. Plants may fail to produce as efficiently as they would in other seasons. Enter LED garden lamps, and you have the perfect solution for dimmed ambient light. By intensifying the light available to the plants, garden lights improve plant quality and yields.
Gardening grow lights further enhance the time available for plants to remain productive. Instead of waiting for the summer, when natural light is intense, plants can produce throughout the year. Consequently, the lights make farming more efficient and productive.
Regulating the Length of Light/Darkness
The seasonality of flowering plants largely depends on light/dark cycles as determined by the availability or lack of sunlight. Since they’re used indoors, garden plant lights regulate the length of uninterrupted dark periods. They provide plants with prolonged darkness, especially if they require shorter periods of light, to help them flower quickly. For plants requiring lengthy periods of light, reducing the time for darkness is critical in helping them to bloom. By improving the frequency of flowering, an indoor garden with grow lights will likely have enhanced plant yields.
Reducing Physiological Plant Disorders
Garden grow lights tend to be monochromatic, producing mainly red and blue spectra. Blue and red light can reduce the effects of intumescence injury in cowpeas and tomatoes. But what’s intumescence injury? It presents as damage to the photosynthetic tissue and can harm a plant’s physiological processes. Overall, it results in the production of low-quality crops. Using broad-spectrum grow light gardening can help improve efficiency in plant production.
Decreasing the Proliferation of Plant Pests and Diseases
Did you know that grow lights for indoor gardening can reduce the incidence of plant pests and diseases? When released in specific wavelengths, LED light beams can reduce the occurrence of pests and suppress diseases in plants. That results in improved plant yields.
But how does it work? According to existing research, gardening grow lights produce specific signals that activate internal plant defense mechanisms. You can tailor the light quality to improve the accumulation of flavonoids (and other metabolites), which will enhance plant immunity and reduce the likelihood of disease. Plus, some flavonoids are off-putting for insects and reduce attack from pests.
For example, LED indoor gardening lights that produce ultraviolet-B light can help control powdery mildew in strawberries by targeting the pathogen Sphaerotheca aphanis. Similarly, they inhibit the onset of Botrytis cinerea in individual tomato leaves. In some instances, it can also prevent Pseudocercospora fuligena (black leaf mold) in greenhouse-grown tomatoes. Finally, in a green LED grow light garden, it’s possible to control strawberry anthracnose, leaf spot disease, gray mold, and cucumber anthracnose.
Controlling Dynamic Lighting Intensity
One of the best attributes of LED garden lights is their ability to dim or increase light based on prevailing conditions. Some LED grow lamps have automatic control mechanisms designed to do just that. A typical garden lamp has adaptive light controllers, which improve efficiency and lower energy costs. The light brightens in dim light and darkens in bright sunlight. Thus, they reduce energy consumption by up to 60%.
Final Words
Are you ready for indoor gardening with grow lights? Getting the right grow lights can help you to improve the efficiency of crop production, leading to enhanced yields. It enables the customization of light intensity, depending on the time of the day. Besides, garden plant lights create room for more efficient utilization of space in an indoor garden. Moreover, an indoor garden with grow lights is easier and cheaper to install. What are you waiting for?