Metal Halide Grow Lights

Using grow lights for indoor plants can allow you to practice your gardening hobby year round. Beyond curing your winter boredom, you can actually produce herbs, fruits, and vegetables if you do things the right. Part of that right way is choosing the best type of grow light for the plants you are raising.  Metal halide grow lights should probably be reserved for the more experienced indoor grower, but can produce amazing results. They are definitely a type of light that you should consider.

Specifically, metal halide grow lights are very good at producing the full spectrum of light. However, they are best at producing light on the blue end of the scale. This type of light is excellent for leaf and foliage growth in plants. While these halide plant lights produce the whole spectrum, they are definitely weaker at the red end.

Unfortunately the wavelengths of light on the red section of the spectrum are what encourages plants to come to flower and produce fruits. This means that plants will still reluctantly do this, but fruit is likely to be significantly smaller than its usual size. There are several ways to combat this problem so that you can make use of the awesome plant body growth that the metal halide lights provide.

The best idea is to use them in combination or rotation with high pressure sodium grow lights. HPS grow lights have the opposite problem; they’re good on the red end of the spectrum and bad on the blue end. This means that you can use the two types of lights to encourage plant growth during the different natural phases. Some people just keep the two lights on all the time to make sure they cover their bases, while others swap the lights at the most opportune moment to change the plant from growing leaves to growing flowers and produce.

The other idea is to keep your garden next to a window so that your plants get some well rounded natural light to complement the artificial light you’re providing. This works really well, because the sun provides everything the plants need. However, not everyone has this option available to them.