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Indoor gardens are superb during the winter. When not much is growing outdoors, you can put your energy towards nurturing houseplants, kitchen gardens, and seedlings inside your home. If it’s the growing season, maintaining an indoor garden is an excellent way to beautify your space. No matter the time of year, indoor plants need a few things to thrive. Like outdoor specimens, they need water, air, and light to grow. If they’re lacking light — a common issue indoors — they’ll grow leggy and weak before withering away.
It’s easy enough to water less or more, or to increase airflow with a fan or open window. Light, however, is difficult to control. Fear not, as there are clever solutions to increase the light levels in your home. Perhaps your windows are already full of plants, or you’d like to begin indoor gardening in a dark room of your house. Regardless of the space, grow lights are excellent solutions. They add light in frequencies that plants appreciate, boosting the brightness and replicating natural sunlight.
Harbor Freight carries many tools that people love at affordable prices, and grow lights are one of them. The LUMINAR EVERYDAY Full-Spectrum LED Plant Grow Light is one of the best options they have, as it’s cheap and easy to set up. It’s only $22.99 on Harbor Freight’s website. Simply hang it with the included chains and set it above your budding plants indoors. You know it’s a good product when it has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars with over 300 reviews.
How to use grow lights for indoor gardening
Unlike older fluorescent grow lights, new ones like this LED option from Harbor Freight are energy-efficient and long-lasting. They’re some of the best grow lights for indoor plants. Buy one once, and you’ll have it for years. Once you own it, you’ll want to use safe setup practices to ensure your plants don’t burn or receive insufficient light. Harbor Freight’s website shows that one light bar will cover an area 2 feet by 2 feet. When hanging the light, set it above the foliage so the brightness adequately covers the space.
If your seedlings, herbs, or houseplants become leggy, the bar is too far from their tops. Move it closer to the foliage and watch as your plants recover. If the leaves are burning and bleaching, it’s likely the lights are too close to the foliage. Move them higher to give the tops some room to grow. If you have many shelves or trays full of houseplants, you’ll need more than one light. The good news is that these grow bars daisy chain, or link, so you can plug in multiple bars using one outlet. Simply link them using the included cables, then hang them side by side so they blanket the site with artificial light.
It’s easy to forget when to turn the lights on and off, which is where a timer comes in handy. With the help of a mechanical or digital timer, you can plug the lights in and forget about them. Set up the timer to turn on in the morning and off at night, and you’ll have an automatic lighting solution for successful indoor gardening.
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