If you are starting vegetable seeds or any seeds indoors, your plants may be very light green to white with a lot of space between leaves, and the stems may look like they are stretching. This is a common problem when starting seeds indoors.
The main cause is the lack of light. Light has two factors that affect plant growth. The first is light quality. In natural light the full spectrum of light reaches the plant and promotes chemical changes in the plant. When you see a rainbow, you see the full spectrum of visible light. The different waves of light produce a different color that is visible to our eyes. Plants use primarily blue and red light waves. The plant reflects most of the green light, making the leaves look green to us.
Most indoor lighting does not provide the quality of the light the plants need. Incandescent lights provide mainly red light and fluorescent bulbs give off primarily blue light. With this poor quality of light, the plants do not grow very well and seem to stretch trying to get to light.
The second factor of light affecting plants is intensity. On a sunny day we have about 10,000 foot-candles of light outside and on bright clear days it could even be as high as 20,000 foot-candles. A foot-candle is the amount of light one candle will give at one foot. A typical kitchen has about 150 foot-candles of light and a living room may only have about 25 foot-candles of light. Our eyes adapt quickly so that we hardly notice the difference, but plants will. Plants that will grow in low light conditions we commonly use as houseplants.
Seedlings started in the house, especially vegetables and flowers, often require more light and better quality light than they receive in a house, you can supplement the light by using grow bulbs. A grow light bulb must be within 18 inches of the plants to have any affect.
If you can start your seedlings with natural light it is better, this can be difficult in the winter when it is too cold, but during the rest of the year it would be better for your plants.
Collecting seed from your fruit trees, last year’s vegetables or flowers will not produce the same plants this year. An apple tree grown from seed may produce a good apple, but usually it produces little hard apples or no apples at all, though occasionally you will produce a good apple. This goes for any other type of fruit. The tree itself usually is a very vigorous, healthy tree, but it could also just as easily be a weak, slow-growing, tree.
The seed in your great-tasting fruit is the second generation and receives half of its genetic information from the tree that produced the fruit and the other half comes from the tree that furnished the pollen. Even if the plant was self-pollinated, recessive traits will emerge and the seed will produce a different plant. Usually nine times out of 10 times the fruit produced from the seed will be bad or neutral and only one time out of 10 times the fruit will be good to great.
Taste is just one trait that will be variable. The color of the fruit, the size of the fruit and the number of fruits could also be different. The growth habit, including size and resistance to diseases are also affected. In other words, it will be a totally different tree than the tree the seed was taken from.
The same theory works for allowing your annual flowers to grow back from seeds. If you allow your marigolds to grow back from the previous year’s seeds, the flower show will not be as exciting. Some of the plants will have flowers, some tall, some short, some look great, and some look really bad. It just will not be show. Go buy new plants or new seeds each year.
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March 13, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Are your vegetables getting the right kind of light? - Antelope Valley Press
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