Jul '24 (edited) • How to: EXTREME Plant Quality
Cannabis Indoor growing for beginners - lighting part 1
So you want to grow indoors, that’s great. There are a lot of advantages to going indoors. However, there are a lot of things to keep in mind before starting to save yourself a world of trouble.
Growing indoors gives you complete control over every aspect of your environment that being said you have to control every aspect of your environment, which means managing every single thing. In nature, there are very many components to the natural systems that keep everything in a fine balance. Because bringing plants indoors removes them from the natural ecosystem, they are more easy to give the attention that you want to give them, but they are also more susceptible to risks that would otherwise be controlled by components in their natural ecosystem.
Pests, for example, are a known disadvantage to growing indoors and require maintenance to prevent them and get rid of them. It is inevitable that you will get pests growing indoors. Managing them is super important. Other important aspects of the natural ecosystem that we want to emulate in the indoor environment, are the sun, rain, nutrient cycle, protection and soil.
First we’ll look at the sun. Obviously we will be emulating the sun with lights. What type of light is an important consideration and there are many aspects to consider. Besides just optimal growth, space requirements, cost of use, cost of purchase and growth phase of the plants are all considerable factors.
When the cannabis plant is in vegetative phase, the natural setting it would be in would be summer with long days and short nights. During summer, the light is more towards the blue spectrum. Similarly when growing plants under lights, during vegetative stage, one should opt for a similarly blue spectrum as summer sun.
As autumn approaches and the angle of that part of the earth to the sun changes, so the light spectrum shifts towards more of a warmer orange tone. Similarly when cannabis switch to flowering phase, matching the Indoor lighting to the natural warmer winter spectrum helps in creating optimal buds. However when using lights that are re-purposed for the job such as domestic lighting, combing both cool blue and warm orange spectrums can help create the broadest imitation of the natural sun.
Lights designed specifically for growing cannabis will have been tailored to the correct spectrum for the growth phase by the manufacturer. Some lighting options are cheap and easy, some exotic and expensive, some hot, some cool, some big and some small. Depending on your conditions and situation, let’s look at what to consider.
On a budget? Fluorescent lights can do a great job for the whole grow, be practical for small areas and cheap. However not suited for larger operations as their usable light is much closer to the bulbs than some other options. Meaning you have to have fluorescent lights very close to your plants. Luckily they are cool to operate and will only burn plants if the leaves directly touch the bulbs. Because of this trait, plants grown under fluorescents must be trained to be a flat canopy with all bud sites in the optimum close proximity to the bulbs. Well suited for small grows and sea/screen of green style growing.
These type of bulbs come in compact and tube allowing for diverse options. They conveniently come in cool white and warm white colours. Cool white bring more blue like summer and warm white a bit on the yellow side like winter. How handy. Veg under cool white only and flower under warm white or a mix of predominantly warm white with minority cool white added. Eg 60/40 warm/cool.
When using fluorescent bulbs, the sweet spot for optimum performance is having the plants about 10 to 15cm from the bulbs. Likewise, having the bulbs themselves about 15cm away from each other is important. You can see how you may need many bulbs to cover a given area. More powerful lights can use one lightbulb to cover a much bigger area, however they use more power, cost more to buy and create a lot more heat, so besides the cost, are not ideally suited to closed spaces where heat could be an issue or small spaces as these more powerful lights require the plants to be much further away due to a risk of burning.
These more powerful lights are known as HID or High Intensity Discharge lights. They require ballasts to run the bulbs and so the hardware can be bulky. Within this family of lights, two main bulb choices are commonly used. These being metal halide and high pressure sodium. Metal halide being more in the blue spectrum and used for vegetative growth and high pressure sodium used exclusively for flowering. Besides being bulky, hot and expensive to run, they can cover vast areas easily and produce outstanding quality flowers. They were what was used for many years for professional operations before LEDs become good enough to compete.
Next we will look at LEDs. These little light emitting diodes have come a long way. It took a while before they were able to support high quality flowers growth and be affordable enough to warrant their use. However today make up the majority of the industries production, are on par with HID lights for purchase costs, are cheaper to run, are cooler to operate and produce exceptional quality flowers. They are very versatile being able to be used in the smallest spaces to larger production areas.
Warrick co-founder
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Cannabis Indoor growing for beginners - lighting part 1
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