by britta
Growing with CFL bulbs
December 21, 2009 in Getting Started, Materials and Resources, Plants, electronic components by britta
You can grow edible plants with 100 or 150 watt CFL bulbs. Even fruiting plants. I have done it successfully in several windowfarm systems. You must use CFLs with the proper color spectrum. The “daylight” bulbs you get at Home Depot in the blue package work. Arrange your plants so they are no more than a few inches from the light. You will need to move them frequently or they will grow into the light and singe themselves. I highly recommend putting them in a window so they are also getting at least some indirect natural light because I highly doubt that these CFLs really provide the complete spectrum of light that plants need. You can put them on a timer so that they are only on a few hours during the day to supplement natural light. This keeps them from blinding you at night.
Until plants reach the adult phase, they require more light. I generally supplemented seedlings light for 18 hours per day. Then, once they reached maturity, I decreased to 12 hours.
Thanks for the tips! We’re going to try growing ours from seeds. Forgive my ignorance on the issue, but how exactly does one know when a plant is an adult? Would that be when it starts flowering? I want to be sure not to cut down the light before my seedling is an adult.
I had a question. I’m building a window farm for an internship this month and some questions came up about the need for adding lighting in a south facing window. I don’t know much about hydroponics, so I was curious to know about how much light would be necessary to support plant growth? There is concern that the lighting would create a net energy loss and most of our sustainability projects aim for achieving net zero if possible, but I’m not sure whether that can be be achieved by eliminating the usage of the lights if they’re necessary for the plants to grow.