What lights do you use for your seedlings?

[Gary350]

28 years ago when I lived in the other house I planted about 60 or 70 trays of seeds for the very large garden every year. I had all the plant trays on a flat bed trailer. I kept the trailer in the garage at night to protect the plant for freezing. Every morning before work I rolled the trailer out of the garage so the plants would get some sun light. As long as the temperature was above freezing the plants were fine. It is a hard job to move trays in and out but the trailer made the job easy. My tomato plants use to turn purple they did not like the 34 deg temperature outside at 7 am when I went to work but they still grew fine anyway. The color turned nice and green when the weather got warmer. The plants were all ready to transplant in the garden in about 30 days. It is suprising how much better and faster plants grow in real sun light. When I was using grow lights I had to start seeds a lot sooner and grow lights used a lot of electricity. The money saved on planting my own seeds was lost in the cost of electricity for the grow lights and the cost of the lights.

[Eric Woodmansee]

Because we are just talking seedling here and plan to transplant them soon enough out doors, would it hurt to just turn the lights on and leave them on?

Plants will actually stop reach a "light limit" after ~16 hours the plants will stop the processes initiated by the light. That being said its more or less a waste of money to power the lights after that point.

In my south facing windows with large shelves, I let the normal daylight run its course and simply run the lights to make up for the difference of 16 hours. This lets the plants grow at a more normal rate and will require less hardening off before moving them outdoors. I find it good practice to open the windows on nicer days starting normally about the 3rd week of march (here in Southern NH).

My end goal is to try to simulate as natural of a growing environment, while still keeping longer light.

Hope this helps.