TIL that lettuce can grow with artificial sunlight (specifically red/blue LED lights)
TIL that lettuce can grow with artificial sunlight (specifically red/blue LED lights)
As Cary Mitchell, a horticulturist at Purdue University told NPR, in the 1990s, “research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light. If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”
Any plant can grow with "artificial" light. It's just a matter of generating the correct light spectrum for a plant. There's nothing special about the light coming from the sun.
Well, there is one thing special about the light from the Sun... there's a shit ton of it.
Also, it's free.
Well sunlight is full spectrum colour plus ultraviolet and infrared. I'm sure there are benefits to the plant we can't easily measure, since they evolved with full specteum. We found a LED grow bulb with a yellow LED besides RED and BLUE, the plants grow like crazy
That's going to be less efficient per watt though, plant's are green because they don't use the green light, hence red+blue grow lights.
Not all plants reflect the same range of wavelengths though, and different plants will use different wavelengths to grow. This is basically an exercise in finding which wavelengths we can drop without significantly slowing growth for each plant.
Most plants do. That's why they're green - they reflect the photons from the mid range, and absorb the ones from the extremes (red and blue/violet) to actually work their shit. Like this:
Picture from Wikipedia.(I wonder how efficient this would be to power exclusively with solar light. How many layers of plants could we grow, where we usually grow only one?)
Neat! I knew that but the pic is worth 1,000 words.
Weed can grow with artificial sunlight too, people have know this for years now!
Yeah I'm sitting here wondering what all the fuss is about, that's how I've grown weed for decades lmao.
OP, this will blow your mind!
10,000 heads of lettuce a day - indoors! Pretty damn cool.
ooo I'm eating lettuce from my lil' hydroponics system right now! It uses a small pump to circulate nutrients and that gamer-powered light energy.
It's the only way I can keep plants alive... give them back to nature...
Pretty sure plants need a rest period as well
I dont know about need, but a lot of weed farmers feel that plants do better with a rest/dark period. I haven't noticed a difference but give them a rest period anyway as its "natural"
Got the wife an aerogarden for Christmas. We’ve been growing a ton of herbs indoors with just the led lights for months. Wait til you find out you don’t even need soil to grow stuff