3 Ways to Optimize Ornamentals Using LED Grow Lights
As a professional grower, it is often difficult to produce the very best ornamentals, but doing so could yield better profit margins and more demand. It is worth it, then, to put some time into learning how to optimize ornamentals with grow lights. Typically difficult to grow to the consumer’s desired needs, ornamental do well when conditions are ideal, which is easier to achieve when using LED lights for plant growth.
Define Your Goals as a First Step
Before investing in LED plant lighting, growers need to define their ultimate goals. This includes growing for transplanting ease, growing to flower, or finishing. To select the right lighting, it is important to have some idea of the desired result before the sale. This could impact the methods of optimizing production.
Are LED Grow Lamps a Viable Solution?
Indoor gardening LED grows lights are an essential investment in many situations. They create a highly controlled environment for plants, reducing the need for chemical additives and pesticides. Ornamentals treated with LED lighting provide the grower with better control over the process. More so, LED growth lamps are a far better option than traditional lighting systems. Those traditional systems create harmful wavelengths of light that can limit the growth and development of ornamentals.
By contrast, indoor grow lights for plants provide more control over the wavelength of light. This allows the plants to have a better (even ideal) photosynthesis process. That leads to improved overall results for growers without the need for harmful chemicals that many consumers do not want to see present.
How Growing with LED Lights Creates Better Results
Having lamps for indoor gardening is a good step. A variety of options exist that could produce reliable results for most growers. However, knowing how to optimize ornamentals with grow lights means understanding the options available. There are three key ways to focus on optimizing LED grow lights for indoor gardening.
#1: Use LED to Help Develop Hardy Annual Plugs
Using LED grow lights for indoor plants like ornamentals is often necessary to produce outstanding results. One way this helps is during your early season. To meet production goals for early season demand, the use of these lights can enable better results.
In many situations, growers grow during the time of the year when there is the lowest light time. This makes the addition of supplemental lights critical to meet that early demand.
In fact, in northern states, using LED lights will save growers money because they help reduce the amount of time it takes to reach transplant. A shorter crop cycle can lead to a reduction in the amount of time the greenhouse has to be heated, lowering energy costs.
Also, some growers can adapt indoor gardening light systems well enough to allow them to develop shorter crop cycles. This means it may be possible to increase the number of crop cycles during the season to better meet production opportunities and demand.
More so, when the quality and intensity of the available light improve, this can lead to better plug production. The result is a hardier ornamental. The root and shoot growth develops better, but the plants themselves remain more compact, allowing for easy transportation.
There is no doubt that an LED grows light for indoor plants like ornamental production can create not just faster growth but also a higher quality of growth that can help ensure better transplant success.
#2: Use Spectrum to Improve Ornamental Foliage
For many ornamentals, the ability to produce beautiful colors and interesting patterns makes it a true seller. Color is vital to many ornamentals, but it is not always simple to produce in a traditional environment, even with fluorescent grow lights for indoor plants.
Blue light use can offer a significant improvement in developing and improving ornamental foliage. That includes creating different color patterns in ornamentals. Plants use blue light photoreceptors. By increasing the blue light provided to plants before finishing, can encourage better coloration within those ornamentals.
For specific results, you may need to adjust blue light to meet the specific demands of the plants grown. However, significant improvement can occur by increasing blue light to 50% at a photosynthetic photon flux density of 100 µmol·m-2·d-1. This can lead to better coloration in leaves. This specifically works well for purple fountain grass and geraniums. Buyers often select these particular ornamentals for their coloration, making this a critical investment for better sales.
#3: Use Blue Lights to Develop Compact Plants
The use of indoor gardening light systems also enables growers to create plants that are easier to manage when it comes to shipping. Specifically, consider the use of blue lights. As some of the best grow lights for indoor plants, these lights can help to produce compact plants, though highly healthy and ready for transplanting.
For those growers that want to keep their plants compact to allow for improved shipping and transplant, the investment in a blue LED grow lights lamp could make a significant difference. These lights work to reduce the stem stretch in plants. As a result, the plant does not grow as full or stretch out. The blue lights help promote a more compact plant.
Blue lights do this using the plant photoreceptor cryptochrome. By triggering this, the stem stretch is significantly reduced.
To accomplish this, growers should aim to increase the blue light percentage to 20 to 30 percent of the total amount of light supplementally provided to the plant. For those currently using a lighting solution that has a more red and green light and under 20 percent blue, the adjustment to a new lighting system is best.
If you are using high-pressure sodium lamps, these typically have far less blue light than other solutions, including LEDs. LEDs that have a targeted spectrum are ideal for producing a more compact plant.
Getting LED Grow Lights in Place
Making the switch to LED lights not only provides an opportunity to improve ornamental coloring, growth rates, and overall quality, but it also helps to create a product that is more in-demand and more efficient to manage. As business owners, growers need to consider the investments available to them to improve their output, and these lights typically offer that.
LED lights for ornamentals can offer numerous benefits, including:
- Ensuring healthy plug development even in natural low-light conditions like early spring
- Reduction of the timeline for growing and growth cycles
- Reduction in costs for heating greenhouses for longer periods due to shorter growth cycles
- Creating plants that are more cost-effective to transport – especially when they are grown to a more compact size
- Building more beautiful and reliably healthy plants that consumers and end-users want
Providing a better plan means creating a better value for the end-user or consumer. That leads to more demand, not just this season but also in future seasons as well. Optimizing grow lights like this can produce outstanding results.
For those who are ready to find a better solution, consider BoyaLite Lighting Technology. These indoor gardening LED lights can help ornamental growers get the best possible results. It’s an investment in better solutions.
