I'm currently considering to purchase seeds for Silene Capensis, Psychotria Alba and B. caapi and I also have 10 peyote seeds which I received with some cacti I ordered a while back. I'm pretty poor at the moment and I probably will move back in with my parents for a few months next month so taking a professional grow light consumes too much energy and on top of that: I cannot afford it anyhow. It is fall here at the moment, so the light conditions indicate it's end of season and my apartment gets very little direct sunlight, so growing without the use of a light isn't really an option.

I have a large plastic tub and my idea is to get hang a CFL above the container and put all the seeds in their own pot according to their germination instructions. The CFL will be 12 hours on and 12 hours off to simulate a normal day/night cycle.

My question is, before spending money on seeds, pots, a light standard and a bulb: would this work? I'm aware I'd probably get much better results with a professional grow light but my budget doesn't allow for that at the moment.

Love,
VoidTraveler

Those will all grow fine under a cheapy cfl. Alba and viridis dont like much light anyways. The peyote and silene will be fine too under that.

I'd stay start out with that and down the line when your finances improve get a better set up.

Silene, Psychotria and the cacti will be perfectly fine under fluorescent/CFL lights, particularly for germination and seedling stage. So you are good to go with that type of light at the moment, unless the wattage is very low.

I cannot speak about Caapi but jamie might be an invaluable source if he reads this.

It will help for seedlings to keep the light at a close distance of the plants. Just keep in mind that, if you have a large compact CFL (say 125W or more) there can be significant heat emission so be careful at the first stages, particularly with the Silenes.

Salutations VoidTraveler,



It's not clear to me how tall those 5 types of plant previously mentioned will get, nor what temperature and humidity levels would be suitable for that matter. Yet i can show you what i've tried in terms of CFL lightning so far:



Since you've decided to go the DIY route my advice to you would be to take a modular approach under the present circumstances. In the begining your seedlings will have very modest needs so it won't be necessary to buy the whole setup all at once... After a few weeks more modules can be added when light "penetration" issues arise. In my exemple an horizontal bar mounted on telescopic tripods serves as support for such modules which slide horizontally on it, in addition to having their vertical position set about 10 cm (4 in.) above the canopy, typically.

I could have suspended chains to my ceiling but just prefered something less invasive which 1 person can dismantle in fairly little time without leaving any trace. At 1st i tried a lamp holder equipped with a reflector and a claw but the cost rapidly became prohibitive so i experimented with more affordable hardware (1 piece of wood, 2 ceramic lamp receptacles, a power cord and screws). The (split-sockets) dual-lamp adapter is an option meant to add CFL bulbs above the center area.

That's still going to cost though, so perhaps a ready-made commercial product wouldn't be such a bad idea: the expense of making successive mistakes does accumulate after all!



In any case, it sure helps a great deal to have some convenient system allowing easy 2-axis relocation of CFL light bulbs!!

And by the way, safer bulbs with a plastic confinement coating will inflate the bill but should an accident occur you might find yourself lucky to avoid spilling toxic substances on those vulnerable yummy plants under! Additionally, multiple bulbs mean that heat gets distributed more evenly but the consequence for this is that the number of ballast assemblies producing such heat is also raised in the process. It seems there's some trade-off to make by finding the right balance between overall heat and global cost, past some limit you'll probably need to look closer at more popular technologies.

...



Wouldn't it be possible at all to consider an hybrid concept where sunlight is put to contribution if available while CFL lightning would complement as needed?



Last summer i adopted the habit of moving my plants from one window to the next, this allowed me to provide a maximum of about 10 hours of sunlight on a cloudless day - which i optimized a bit further by installing a light reflective panel behind, in order to flood my girls with light from both sides...

Most unfortunately, cultivation behind a window doesn't seem to be such a great idea in the Northern hemisphere. After a while i came to believe that a "Docking Station" for plants would be essential for better results (weak plants are vulnerable to desease), etc. Now i think that my next major gardening project should assume the form of a large piece of furniture for my kitchen, with no bottom panel but a mobile accessory on wheels to carry the plants around instead... Its back-side would supply proper ventilation through natural convection, etc.

Anyway, i wanted to illustrate the fact that seedlings don't stay small forever. What worked initially is bound to fail once a culture has grown many times in size... It's quite important that our plants remain healthy during their early days, consequently i no longer plan to start anything behind a window again. I also decided to put a stop to stretching a while ago (rapid gain of height will translate as bad news under CFLs!), so i restrain them to promote low-profile shapes.



Beware, a minimalistic approach may lead to difficult problems as illustrated below:



This particular plant went through all sorts of punishment and hence eventually became an easy pray for the parasites that caused its loss in the end...

Thanks for all the supplies. Knowing that a CFL is going to work for these plants I'll dive into reading up on cultivation. I wanted to know if it was worth putting in the effort into learning this stuff right now. Thanks for all the replies!