While we love adding greenery and life to our living spaces, sometimes they don’t love living in our homes as much as we’d like them to.
Light is such a major factor in plant growth and vitality but it often goes undiagnosed when your houseplants need more light! Plants process light differently to humans. So even when our homes seem bright in our eyes, the light levels can be completely different to a plant.
1. Sparse or Leggy Growth
One sure sign that your plants are struggling with a lack of light is leggy growth. This looks like new leaves growing far apart, more length of stem between leaves and sparse, straggly, ‘thin’ plants.
When indoor plants aren’t getting enough light, they’ll lengthen their stems and branches in order to ‘reach’ for sunlight. This results in the leaves growing further apart or your plant just not looking lush and healthy.
The distance between two adjacent leaves on a plant is known as the internodal distance. A lack of light can increase internodal distance, which is generally not as nice of a look.
2. Bringing Plants Inside for Winter
Our human eyes can’t quite compute the difference in light between indoors and outdoors. While we may think our homes are nice and bright, a plant really notices the difference in light levels. Especially if they’re used to receiving ample light outdoors.
Similarly, there’s actually less light available during winter, indoors and outdoors! Shorter daylight hours, the angle of the earth and more cloudy weather conditions all impact the light levels in winter. Add these factors to bringing your plants indoors and it’s a given that they’d love more light!
This is especially true for tropical plants such as calatheas or Fiddle Leaf Figs. In their natural habitat (usually close to the equator), there isn’t as much variation in the daylight hours at different times of year. Places near the equator often don’t even have four seasons – they just have a rainy season and a dry season.
This means that tropical plants especially are happy to have as much light as you can give them, year round. These plants can slow or stop growing during winter months because of lack of light. But they really don’t have to – if you’re able to give them extra light through a full spectrum led grow light, you can have them thriving and growing all year long.
3. Soil Not Drying Out for Weeks
You may think that it’s air temperature that helps the soil dry out. In actual fact, pot plant soil dries because the plant is drawing up the water from its roots! Water is another key component of performing photosynthesis. So when there’s a lack of light available to perform photosynthesis, the plant does not draw up as much water.
This results in the soil staying damp for longer, which is not good for most plants. In most plants, if the roots stay damp for too long they will start to rot or leaves will start to yellow.
While the soil not drying out can also be from a very water-retentive soil, if your plant isn’t getting enough eco farm led lights, that could also be why.
When you put your plant in a position with more indoor soil grow lights, you’ll notice the soil dries out quicker. You may think that’s because a well-lit area must be warmer. But actually, the plant will be using more of the water you give it! Allowing the soil to dry out faster means watering may need to be done more regularly.