sprite writes
broodings from the burrow

February 24, 2019


grow light/grow lamp recommendations needed
posted by soe 1:33 am

When I lost my job in November, the thing that hurt most was the loss of an above-ground window safely away from plant-loving cats. (There were several other things that came in a close second, but honestly that sixth-floor windowsill had always been one of the things that had kept me at that job.)

Pie Chest

I cleared off the top of my pie chest as a place safe from the cats and tucked my plants (three pots of African violets and two of orchids, plus a jade plant) in amongst the knitting needles, but while it fixed one of my problems, it did not fix the major one: there is no sunlight in my apartment, not even indirectly.

I’ve shifted my Ott light over to sit in between the plants, but it’s a flip lamp and requires my remembering to turn open it up, which does not happen every day. And it can only illuminate two of the plants at a time and then I have to turn it, so it’s an inadequate stop-gap, at best.

So I’ve been on the hunt for a better solution. I think it will involve another couple lamps up there, honestly, which isn’t great, because it requires running an extension cord over there, but I’ll make it work. Right now, I’m leaning toward desktop-type lamps with grow light bulbs in them, but if anyone else has suggestions that work for them, I’d love to hear them.

I took my plants down today to water them and the bigger of my two orchids is clearly suffering. I hadn’t worried overly much when the bottom leaf started losing color; that’s what happens periodically. But today I noticed two more are also rapidly turning color, so my casual search for a solution has become vastly more acute. While I wouldn’t want to lose the violets, the orchids were a birthday gift from my favorite uncle, who died several years ago, and keeping them alive is important to me. I need to come up with a solution this week in order to avoid inflicting any more damage on this delicate plant.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know. And I’ll keep you all posted on what I decide and how the interior garden fares.

Category: garden. There is/are 2 Comments.