How to Use Grow Lights to Grow Seedlings
If you want to ensure rapid growth of your vegetable seeds indoors, then using grow lights can make all the difference. Get advice on which plants benefit from starting indoors and how to use grow lights.
If you are planting seeds indoors, then your seedlings must have strong light once the first leaves have emerged. Otherwise, they will get leggy and weak, a sure sign they are not getting enough light.
If you have ever grown seeds on a not-so-sunny windowsill or too early in the season, then you have seen how seedlings get tall and spindly and sometimes flop over. In many areas, the winter sun is simply too weak to provide enough natural light.
Grow lights provides strong light to start healthy, vigorous, fast-growing plants. They provide light from directly above which promotes strong, upright growth. This is different than a windowsill where light is from the side.
There are many different grow lights on the market. See our post on what kind of grow light to buy.
Vegetables for Grow Lights
Some crops should not be started indoors—such as root vegetables (which do well outside in the cold, anyways).
However, many vegetable seedings are perfect for starting indoors. Here are our favorites:
- tomatoes
- peppers
- cauliflower
- chili peppers
- squashes
- broccoli
- melons
Many of these vegetables require a long growing season so starting them under grow lights will give them a nice head start.
How to Use Grow Lights
Watch our video demonstration above to see how to use your grow lights! We’ll discuss placement, timing, and set-up details.
Try the Garden Planner
After you watch this video, check out our Garden Planner if you want to plan a spring garden! We are offering more free videos plus a a free 7-day trial of the Almanac Garden Planner.
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While certainly an interesting idea, we would recommend against putting plants or seeds in a tanning bed. Tanning beds produce UV light, which is damaging to cells and is outside the wavelength of light that plants require to photosynthesize.
We're glad to hear that you'll be using some of the techniques we've suggested! Let us know how everything turns out!
LEDs are a great alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights for all the reasons you mentioned. Another positive is that they put off little to no heat, so you don't have to worry about burning your seedlings. We'll be trying our own indoor lettuce growing setup in the coming months, so keep your eyes peeled for a report on that!
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