In my garage, you’ll find several large HO T5 hanging fixtures and full-spectrum LEDs for overwintering large-foliage plants and citrus trees, plus growing herbs, leafy greens, and cut flowers. I also have several shelves with T5s for seed starting and small houseplants, along with lights about my indoor potting bench countertop.

In the summer, I do a lot of vegetative propagation in these areas. In winter, I jump-start seeds of warm-season crops for the winter grow tents and outside garden, and grow extra cold-tolerant plants indoors.

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It's always good to apply a fertilizer to your tomato plants at planting time. Then, hold off! Then, plants start to set fruit and fruit reaches about half its mature size, pick up your normal every-other-week fertilizer rotation. The plant will now put those nutrients to work developing flowers or fruits.

If you fertilizer tomatoes too often too early, before fruit begins to develop, you might just end up with too much vegetative growth instead of flowers and fruit.

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Blue light helps control excessive stem elongation, or stretching toward light. It influences how chloroplasts move around in plant cells and helps regulate stomatal opening.

You can grow some crops (short-lived ones such as microgreens) using only blue light, which supports ongoing vegetative growth, but don’t expect any flowers in certain types of plants--such as cannabis.

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When starting new seedlings, you may need to place the lamps within a few inches of the top growth. As plants grow, raise your lamp. If you hang your lights on ratcheted cords or chains, you can adjust them as needed.

These ratcheted cords are especially helpful when you need to raise and lower larger grow lamps, which can get heavy.

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You can root many tropicals, perennials, annuals, and edibles directly in water. Transplant to soil as soon as plants develop a small root mat.

You can expose cuttings to 24 hours of light to speed up the rooting process. Cool-spectrum T5 fluorescents or CFLs are good options for rooting vegetative cuttings, but be sure to place the lights at least 2 feet above the cuttings, if not higher.

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No matter what LED lamp you choose, be at least a bit wary of claims of proprietary spectrums or unique combinations of light colors. If you understand the basics of light science, you know your plants can use all the light within the PAR spectrum, and blue and red light used individually are most efficient for photosynthesis and best employed to shift developmental stages of plant growth.

While different manufacturers can create custom blends of spectrums, grow lights that produce full spectrum white light can be used successfully to grow most plants indoors.

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A great option for most indoor growers is a reflector hood fixture that includes a built-in ballast for your lamp. You can plug in and use these all-in-one options immediately without any setup. These types of fixtures can also be air-cooled: simply insert the lamp into the fixture and plug the entire fixture into a standard outlet.

In terms of both space and aesthetics, it’s nice not to have a separate piece of heavy equipment, such as a ballast, you must plug in and make room for.

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Lamps that allow you to raise and lower them on the same fixture are handy for growing plants with different light requirements. Lowering the lamp reduces the light footprint but increases the density of light delivered. Raising it increases the light footprint but lowers the light density.

This is how you can use the same lamp to grow a full-sun plant and a shade-loving plant.

Gardening Under Lights Book