Choosing a Lighting System, Feeding my Babies

If you think that growing carnations in your basement rec room might be something that you’d want to do, first consider the variables. You’d have to make some important decisions, each of which will impact on your pocketbook.

You’re creating a total environment for your flowers, that means attempting to bring the sun indoors. Thank goodness that lighting technology has progressed far beyond Edison’s primitive incandescent light bulb. The two main lighting sources you have to choose from are Metal Halide or High Pressure Sodium.

Many gardeners will recommend Metal Halide, because it comes the closest to emulating sunlight indoors. It has good lumen maintenance and long life expectancy. As a lamp ages, it starts putting our less and less lumens, but only gradually.

After twelve months of use at 12 to 18 hours per day, the lamp will put out only about 85% of its original brightness, and it should be replaced. Metal Halide bulbs emit light at the blue end of the spectrum, just as the sun does.

I chose High Pressure Sodium for my six 600W fixtures, since I’m growing flowers. When plants are in their flowering stage, they need light at the red end of the spectrum, which HPS provides. However, during the early vegetative stage, I use conversion bulbs to give my carnations much needed blue light, without changing the ballasts on my fixtures.

My lights use a lot of electricity and generate much heat. The heat is taken care of by high performance, variable speed fans that literally suck the hot air from my grow room and bring in cooler air from the outside.

This works fine ten months out of the year, except during the hottest summer months it has to be augmented by buckets of dry ice or some other coolant. If Mississauga summers get any hotter, I might have to invest in an air conditioning system, either air or water-cooled, which can be costly.

When your electrical use suddenly spikes upwards, you draw the attention of the power company. Many times they alert law enforcement because they suspect that something illegal is going on. I’ve had to ward off many an inspector who thought I was growing marijuana. When they discover that it’s only carnations, they seem disappointed.

I’ve had another talk with my tech advisor at Advanced Nutrients and he advised me against overwatering my carnations. He said because I grow in rockwool slabs, they retain moisture much longer than other growing media, so I have to water less.

As you know, I use a drip irrigation hydroponic system to grow my babies, so I had to turn it down a notch to accommodate what he said. Perhaps I was giving them too much solution. Using Micro, Grow, and Bloom, I’m giving my flowers all the nutrition they need, but I have to remember that their root systems also need oxygen.

My hot lights take care of the drying out periods between waterings. In my reservoir, I also pour Sensi Cal Mg Mix Bloom during the flowering stage. I pre-mix 1.25 mL/L of Sensi Cal, along with 2 mL/L of B-52, an excellent B-complex vitamin, and the bloom enhancers Bud Blood, Big Bud, and Overdrive, in sequence.

O.5 g/L of Bud Blood only during the first week of flowering, 5 mL/L of Big Bud Liquid during weeks two, three, and four, and 2.5 mL/L of Overdrive during weeks five and six.

I never use these flower enhancers all at the same time, because they’re very powerful additives and would burn my poor carnations to a crisp if I did.