How many bulbs per stand? How many plants? Do the stands include reflectors? How much area is being lit by the bulbs? Everything sounds like insufficient light. Slightly cooler temperatures will also help when the light isn't bright enough.

Leaves bleaching in direct sun is exactly what you thought. The sun is too strong. It takes days, even a couple of weeks, to acclimatise seedlings grown in insufficient light to dorect sunlight.

Standard Gro-Lux are difficult to find now. You would probably have to order online and they tend to be quite expensive even compared to the wide spectrum one. I doubt that switching bulbs at the same wattage would really help. The wattage to use is as much as you can. Aim for a minimum of 20W of fluorescent light per square foot of illuminated area with this type of plants. More would be better. Include a reflector so that half the light isn't being wasted.

shrubs n bulbs,

Thank you for your help.

Do you know of another florescent light bulb that will work, i.e. cool light, aquatic light, warm, brand name, etc.? I will try putting fewer plants under and put a mirror around. I have a second stand but I think the bulbs or ballast is bad. So maybe setting up a 2nd one can give more light space per plant.

The light is actually in a stand that adjusts in height. 2- 40 watt bulbs, 4 feet long. The plants in rows about 4 plants deep (yogurt cup size) and the length of the stand (48 inches).

Any ideas about the kind of bulbs to buy for the 2nd one?
michellek2

Open up the fixtures and see what type of ballasts they have.

Insufficient light is the problem, and overdriving might be the cure. If you're really lucky, you got fixtures with Electronic ballasts and you can double them up by overdriving.

Even if not, you can go to Home Depot and grab their sale on Commercial Electric shoplights. I bought ten fixtures for $4.04 each.

One ballast per tube is 1X overdriven, two ballasts per tube is 2X overdriven.

2X should get you 240% the light you'd normally get. Beautiful.

Did you buy these light stands new, or used? If used, I wonder how many hours of use had been run up on those light bulbs by the time you got them. Old bulbs dont give enough light for healthy seedlings, even though the light may look bright to you. Maybe you just need new bulbs. They donÂt have to be Gro-Lux.

Try Cool Whites. HD has them cheap. They're working for me.

This year we put "grow lamps" in the basement. A move from a very sunny south facing apartment to a east facing house required it. We did the Home Depot thing, got ballast and flourescent lamps. Everything was very happy over the winter, in fact the geraniums that I started from last summers cuttings looked terrific. We moved everything outside in early June (May was very cool here, with frost on a few nights), and when we did, it was as if the chlorophyll was drained from the leaves, and several plants didn't make it at all. One is still struggling and it is now July.

Any suggestions as to what we should have done? Oh yeah, and we lost all of our seedlings.

Direct sunlight was probably too strong. June already the sun is at the highest point, and the plants needed to be kept in the shade for a few days before exposing them to all out sunshine. If you can get your seedlings out earlier, before the sun gets so hot, that's better. Otherwise, check the earlier parts of the thread for similar advice.

For a good supply of proper fluorescent lamps, if you can't get high output cool white (4100K) T8's in your local store, just order them from business lights dot com or plant lighting hydroponics dot com. that's where I get a lot of my stuff from. Sativa.

jennifertdot,

"Any suggestions as to what we should have done? Oh yeah, and we lost all of our seedlings."

Sativa was right. Your plants suffered extreme sunburn by being placed suddenly where the light intensity was at least 10 times what they were used to. You should have placed your plants in a shady spot for several days to become adjusted, or been lucky enough to have several cloudy days in a row.

MM

You can read what I did with lights in the following link if you didn't see it. We didn't lose one plant. Lighting is not complicated. Lamps are $7 for two 4' at Home Depot or Lowes. I used two balast and four bulbs in each fixture and kept them on 24/7 the first month two to four inches above the plants throughout growth. The tomatoes grew several inches a week with sturdy stems and bushy leaves. NO PLANT FOOD and too much water will turn your leaves yellow. All plants were raised under the lights and then rotated to the greenhouse. The pics of the lights were taken after almost all tomatoes and peppers were replanted and moved to the greenhouse. The tomatoes were over a foot high when rotated. There are a few smaller ones left in the pics along with the cucumbers and pumpkins. The sun was to much and bleached your plants. When we put the tomatoes in the greenhouse the outside temp was only hitting high fifties low sixties. I kept the temp in the greenhouse set at seventy night and day. The greenouse was pushed into the garage at night cause we were still getting nights in the thirties. We placed an old window drape cheese cloth type material on top of the greenhouse the first several days outside to prevent sun burn. Hope this helps.

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