Light For House Plants
Houses are built for people, not plants. By a plant's standards, houses are too dark, too dry, and often too hot _like sunless deserts. The wonder is that so many plants survive.
Light needs of plants have received careful study by scientists in recent years. The amateur indoor gardener now has at his command the results of their research.
The chart at the bottom of the page and the photographs of typical home situations at right will help you to determine how much light plants in your home are actually receiving when measured in footcandles.
Scientists use the unit, 'footcandle,' to denote quantity of illumination. Technically, one footcandle is equal to the amount of illumination cast on an object by one candle at a distance of one foot. Light meters used for photographic purposes measure light on the object to be photographed, rather than the strength of the light itself. But, with a chart that some manufacturers can supply, these photographic light meter readings can be converted to the footcandle units plant experts refer to. Or, much handier, there is now on the market a pocket-sized meter made especially for the purpose of measuring the amount of light available to plants. It has a range of from 0 to 5000 footcandles.
What happens when a plant gets too little light? Nothing, at first. Plants can survive for long periods on reserve food. Ultimately, however, new growth becomes spindly, new leaves smaller, and lower leaves die.
It may take only a few weeks, or as long as a year for a plant to show symptoms of light starvation. The cure is not a massive dose of light, this could kill a plant, but a return to adequate light conditions.
Nor is it wise to set foliage plants next to unshaded windows that face directly into the sun except during the coldest winter months. Even then, with the reflected light from snow, the total could be excessive. Very few foliage plants can tolerate direct sunlight, especially when magnified by clear glass. Shifted to such a spot from a dim corner, they will sunburn.
There are several ways you can give your plants more light safely: by moving them a little closer to windows, by moving them to a brighter room, or by leaving draperies and blinds open during the daylight hours. The most convenient way is to supplement the natural light available with artificial light.
There are several ways to supply proper light. You can use incandescent lamps, fluorescent tubes, or special growth lamps to supplement sunlight. Ceiling spotlights can be a successful light source, too, and they are decorative as well as functional in supplying general lighting for one area of a room.
There is still another trick employed by clever indoor gardeners who wish to use a plant for a major decorative role but find that the best location has insufficient light. This is to buy two specimens of the particular plant you want, and shift the two periodically from the spot where the plant performs best decoratively to the location where the light is ideal. This shifting should take place on a weekly basis (or more often) in order to keep both plants healthy over as long a period as possible.
If the plant in question is a large one, a tubbed palm, totem-style monstera, or other plant that is four or five feet tall, it is a heavy job to shift the plant from one place to an other. This problem can often be solved by displaying the plants on low platforms equipped with casters, thus, reducing the physical exertion to a minimum when the time arrives to shift the two. Such platforms on wheels are available commercially, but they are simple enough to build so that almost any handyman can easily put one together, at a total cost of only a few dollars.
Indoor House Plants : Using House Plants Decoratively | How To Grow Healthy Plants
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