With the legalization of marijuana, users and businesses began to grow marijuana by themselves, but how to cultivate high-quality marijuana has also become a problem. Let's discuss the effect of led grow lights on marijuana.
Lighting is essential when growing cannabis. The best possible lighting is natural sunlight. It has the perfect blend of UV rays that plants desire, and the closer you are to the equator, the better those rays get.
Cannabis needs a lot of light to produce high quality plants and flowers. On average, a cannabis plant takes twelve hours of darkness to flower each day. In general, the more light your plants get, the better and stronger they grow, which leads to higher yields.
The use of grow lamps
Despite its advantage in outdoor cultivation, but some growers prefer planting lamp, because it can better control the plant and the growing season. Just pointing the bulb at your plant is not enough for it to grow properly. In order to replace the sun with lighting, it must be provided with lamps that are specially made for growing cannabis.
How a cannabis plant grows depends on the way the grow lamps are used. The best lamp types are metal halide lamps, high pressure sodium vapor lamps and meanwhile also special LED grow lamps. Fluorescent lamps are also good because they give off the best blue light for leaf growth. The MH lamps work best during the vegetative phase, while the ND lamps produce the best light during the flowering phase.
Distance between the grow lamps
The distance between the lamps is crucial for the growth of your plants. Too far away and your cannabis will not get the light it needs, but if they are too close, you risk burning your valuable plants.
During the nursery stage of the plant, it is essential to keep the lights at the correct distance. One of the biggest mistakes made by growers is to keep the lights too far away. This results in plants that are long and slender, with weak stems that cannot support the weight of the plant and can hang upside down. These elongated stems appear when the seedlings are stretched to get more light.
The actual optimal distance of your lamps depends on the type of light used and your grow room. Here are some basic guidelines:
Light intensity
Plants that get more light tend to grow better and get higher yields - that's a fact. However, it is also easy to over-saturate your plants with light and cause them to burn easily. Or adjust the lamps too weakly so that your plants do not receive enough light and "stretch" or have slowed growth.
The light intensity or brightness can be measured in lumens (lm) as well as in lux:
Lumen - measures the luminous flux emitted by a source. The higher the lumen, the brighter the light source.
Lux - measures the light intensity that falls on a surface. Since plants only absorb the light that falls on their surface, light guides are usually measured with lux in grow guides.
Similar to the removal of the lamps, the optimal light intensity also depends on the type of light you want to use in the grow room. Here are some basic guidelines:
The color of LED grow light
Many people don't know that the color of light can affect the growth of your plants. Visible light actually behaves like a wave and shows different properties depending on the length of its waves. For example, a light with a wavelength of 400 nm is recognized by the human eye as a purple color.
Certain types of grow lamps show a certain light color. For example, MH (metal halides) produces a predominantly blue colored light, while LED lamps can isolate and emit a multitude of colors.
In terms of plant growth, blue light is best used during the seedling and growth stage because it promotes the formation of chlorophyll, a chemical that makes plants grow faster and stronger. MH lamps are often used because the blue light is said to mimic the summer months when the sun is high in the sky. Conversely, HPS lamps mimic the end of summer, with the sun's rays passing through more of the earth's atmosphere and showing a red spectrum that is ideal for the flowering of cannabis plants.
Lighting cycles
Like humans, plants need their sleep and usually cannot be lit by light 24 hours a day. In addition, cannabis lighting can be expensive when it comes to power consumption. This is another reason why it is a good idea to have a lighting cycle for your grow lights.
You cannot keep cannabis plants under constant light as the plants will not flower without darkness. The only time the plants can be exposed to light for 24 hours is when they are in the seedling phase as they are still babies and need a lot of light to grow.
In the dark, plants produce the hormones necessary for flowering. If the darkness is not disturbed by light, they will continue to bloom and growth will be reduced to a minimum. You need a good combination of the two to get a good harvest of marijuana.
For the duration of the vegetative phase, your plants need 18 hours of light and 6 hours of darkness. Once you're ready to flower your plants, you can trigger their flowering phase by setting the lighting cycle to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of total darkness.
