If you are a gardener, you know that it is much more cost-effective to start your own plants from seed than to purchase plant starts from a garden center.
You will be able to select seed varieties that most local nurseries do not carry, so your garden will be blessed with much more variety in terms of the plants you can grow.
However, if you are going to start seeds yourself, you will need to remember that all plants rely on three factors for their survival:the growing medium and the nutrients it provides, water, and light.
If you live in a cold-season area of the country, then you will need to start your seeds several weeks in advance of the last frost date in your area.
This means that you will have to start the seeds indoors, and during the late winter and early spring there is not enough natural daylight available to meet the growing seedlings needs.
The solution is to use a grow light to increase both the amount of light available to the plants, and the kind of light as well.
A full-spectrum grow lamp can improve your seedling growth, and help you end up with strong and healthy young plants ready to be planted into your garden at just the right time.
Light bulbs give off a color temperature and a color tone, and both of these affect the growth of a young plant.
Young seedlings need the blue light spectrum, whereas older plants require the red/orange spectrum.
An incandescent bulb has a red-yellow tone and gives a low color temperature.
In contrast, sunlight looks bluish and has a high color temperature, so for growing plants an incandescent bulb is not the best choice.
A full-spectrum bulb is a good choice for plant propagation because it makes the appropriate light shades available at all times to best meet the plant's needs.
Fluorescent bulbs work well for plant propagation because they burn cool.
This is important, because with tiny little seedlings in flats you need to keep the light around four inches above the seedlings, so that they grow stocky and strong, and not spindly and weak because they are stretching up to a light that is positioned too far away from them.
Another great choice for grow lamps are HID lights .
A high intensity discharge light produces more light than a halogen bulb, and it gives off a whiter light that is more similar to sunlight's color temperature, which is what you need for seedling growth.
An HID light requires a lamp ballast to control the high current traveling to the light.
Plant growth will improve when you choose a full-spectrum light.