Growing plants with fluorescent grow lights can be an exhilarating experience. If you get involved with it, you can become very close to your plants, and begin to love indoor gardening! In this article I will explain how to use fluorescent grow lights to set up a grow area inside of your house. It takes a bit of work, but once you finish your first grow, you’ll realize that all the work was completely worth it.
To start, pick a room in your house where you are going to grow your plants. You can use an entire room or just a part of one. But no matter where you set it up, it must be closed off to all outside light besides your fluorescent grow lights. This is very important, because many plants will not grow right if they are exposed to multiple different kinds of light 24 hours a day. You need to look up your specific plant to find out how tolerant it is and how much light it likes, but many plants will need at least 4-6 hours of complete darkness a day, which means absolutely no illumination at all.
After you make your enclosed space, which you can do with wood or any material you want, get some pots or trays depending on what you are growing. Usually when I grow I start my seeds off in trays with multiple small growing spots on them, and as they get bigger I transplant the best ones into larger pots. Just keep in mind you may need multiple fluorescent grow lights to cover the entire area with light so that each plant gets an adequate amount. It depends on what kind of fluorescent lights you are using, but luckily they are fairly inexpensive. If you want to be efficient with your light, get some kind of reflective material such as tin foil and cover the walls of your growing area with it. This will reflect all the light that hits the walls right back onto your plants.
The next thing you need to do is set up your lights, which is fairly self explanatory. Just get some strong cords and string them over your plants, then hang your lights from them. Or you can hang them from the ceiling if it is low enough. Your lighting set up will depend completely on what kind you have. You’re going to want your fluorescent grow lights pretty much as close to your plants as you can get them though. Just never let them touch the plants at all, since you could burn them. After your fluorescent lights are set up, you are pretty much all set to begin growing your plants! If you are a more experienced grower, you can look into ventilation systems and fans that can help your plants grow better.
The hardest part of this process is probably setting up the actual area you are growing in. It may take a day or two to get this set up, but once it is all of the hard work will be done. It will be totally worth it once you see your babies full grown, or harvest them. Just remember you can almost never have too many fluorescent grow lights, so make sure your room is stocked full of them.