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  • From: "Mark Lee" <markl@nytec.com>
  • To: "'North American Fruit Explorers'" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] indoor lighting
  • Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:38:46 -0800

A recent post talked about indoor lighting for seedlings. I thought I
should share my experience with plants lights. Sometimes my fruit
exploring projects take place indoors as I try to propagate cuttings and
seedlings during winter.

Last year all I had under the lights was tomatoes. I have fluorescent
tubes meant for plants. The tomatoes were leggy and took quite a while
to adapt to direct sunlight. Last fall I started to experiment with
various cheap sources of light to improve my chances of success this
spring. What has worked best for me are compact fluorescent bulbs, CF,
the kind that replace the standard screw-in incandescent bulbs that you
see everywhere. These CF bulbs are cheap relative to bulbs marketed as
"plant lights". I just bought a 23W CF bulb today for $7 that puts out
the equivalent light energy of a 100W standard bulb without wasted heat.
I also saw one the puts out the equivalent of 150W standard bulb. These
CF bulbs are really cranking up the lumens in my seedling nursery.

Seedlings that are doing well with the high light output of these cheap
CF bulbs include honeyberry, figs, citrus, mountain ash and black
cherry. I even have a fig cutting that rooted last summer that is
setting a fig under these lights. I look forward to seeing how my
tomatoes do with these lights.

-Mark Lee, Seattle, zone 8a





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