- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Whether you have brought in tender plants for the winter, or are starting seeds, you need to provide light.

Today we are talking about di fferent kinds of grow lights.

Also, microgreens are all the rage, and you can grow them yourself.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Celeste Scott.

Celeste is a UT Extension Agent in Madison County, and Dr. Natalie Bumgarner will be joining us later.

All right, Celeste, it's good to have you here.

- Hey, thank you.

It's good to be here.

- Oh, yeah.

- Thanks for having me.

- Always, always.

So let's talk about grow lights, right?

- Oh, yes.

- So you brought some for us to see.

So where would you like to start with this conversation?

- Let's start with just talking about what light is, so folks can get a good understanding of that.

- Okay, let's do that.

- And it's confusing.

I had to do some research on this myself.

I don't want people to get discouraged.

You can be overwhelmed when you get into trying to decide what lights you need for what different types of purposes.

So I think the best place to start is just at the beginning and talk about what light is.

So we can talk about light in terms of particles, right?

So photons of light, and that's has to do with intensity of light.

We could also talk about light in terms of waves, right?

Which are measurable.

We can measure those in a wavelength.

So you may have heard that term before.

And when we get into talking about measuring light and wavelengths, that has more to do with quality of light.

So some wavelengths of light are very available and usable by plants.

Other wavelengths are not usable by plants.

So it's important to understand what that means.

Plants are gonna have different requirements of light, not only in intensity, but also in quality of light.

At different portions of their life cycle.

So the lights that you might use for seed starting are gonna look different from lights that you might need to sustain a plant through its entire life cycle, through blooming, through fruiting.

When you purchase lights they're gonna have lots of different numbers and all these different things on there.

So try not to get distracted by all of that.

Watts, I feel like wattage that's listed on grow lights in general can be very confusing to people.

That doesn't have anything to do with the growth of the plant.

Wattage has to do with how much electricity that bulb is gonna pull out through the outlet.

There's a really neat publication that I shared a link with you guys.

Hopefully we're gonna share that along with this-- - We will.

- With this episode.

- And it puts it into analogies of light filling up buckets.

So think of a plant, for example, a plant that is a shade-loving plant would have a smaller light bucket, than say a plant that would be a sun-loving plant.

Their bucket's gonna be larger and those buckets need to be filled in order for that plant to grow and reach its productive capacity.

And it continues through that publication to put into perspective all of these scenarios of filling these light buckets.

So not only are we concerned with filling the light bucket for intensity, our daily light integral.

So that's the amount of light that the plant would need in a day for it to grow.

Now depending on the quality of light, that portion of time could be less or more, right?

If we're providing it wavelengths that are very usable by that plant, maybe you only need five hours of light exposure.

- Got it.

Okay.

- If you are unsure of the quality of your light, maybe that time is much longer.

- Ah, okay.

- So what I use mostly in-house are lights for starting plants.

And so we brought some examples.

- Let's look at those.

- We will start right here.

This is a four-bulb fluorescent light, teeny tiny lights.

These are called T5 bulbs.

And they're much smaller than what we would think of in a typical fluorescent shop light.

Those are T8 are what those are categorized as.

And I feel like the question that we get in Extension most often is, "Can I use shop lights?"

Or do I need LED lights?

Or do I need specific grow lights?

And that is a question of light quality when for starting seeds, we really need to be focusing on light quantity.

- Okay, got it.

- We'll talk about some ways that plants can help us pick up on their cues for if they're getting enough light or not.

But we can turn some of these lights on and show you, for example, let's start with this big, fluorescent, four-bulb light.

See how bright that is?

- That's bright.

- Right.

So we are gonna be able to measure the intensity and quality, in some cases, with light meters.

I did not bring a light meter today, but it's important to always use that light meter as an aid to help you see what kind of intensity, what kind of output that you're ha ving with these lights.

- Okay, good.

- So a smaller scale version of this, 'cause this is pretty huge... That's big, so you've gotta have some room to use that.

This is what I use.

- A tabletop.

- For a little tabletop.

Seed starting in my kitchen.

It's the same type of bulb.

It's a T8 and it's got reflective surfaces here.

So that just helps reflect that light back down to the plants and it comes on a little stand.

So that's perfect for putting a flat up underneath here, and helping you get some lights going on there, to get your plants going.

This particular one comes with this stand, it holds it about six to eight inches above the plants.

And because that's what it's been rated at.

So it has enough output that this doesn't have to be inches from the tops of plants.

And this is what I use when I'm getting seedlings going right off the bat.

Now other options are LED lights.

So here I'll just leave it right here and turn it on.

So we can see it.

So this LED light, you can tell it's putting off a purple cast, that's because it is supplying multiple wavelengths of light.

This is supplying blue wavelengths and red wavelengths.

You're gonna see this on a lot of your "grow lights" where they are providing specific spectrums of light that are most usable by plants.

So this is another great option.

The bulbs are super small.

They don't use much electricity to run and they put off very little radiant heat.

So you don't have to worry about the light burning your plants, if you have it too close to the plants.

- Okay, that's good.

- A few other types of lights that we have here.

And we would use these for a little bit of a different purpose here.

These would be more for if you were trying to grow a plant to its full production, indoors with all artificial lighting.

So this is the blue wavelength of light.

I think that you can see that from here for vegetative production.

And you also have the ability to swap on a red wavelength in there to get flowering.

So that would help promote fruiting and flowering.

- So you're saying the full development of the plant?

- Yes, this would be a type of option that a person might be able to to use indoors, if the plant was never gonna be planted outside.

- Right.

Gotcha.

- The first two that I showed, those are my favorites for seed starting.

- Oh, seed starting.

- Seed starting.

Right.

They're providing high intensity.

We're less concerned about the quality of light, 'cause it's all about the amount of light that's hitting those leaves there at the beginning.

But once we get into, growing that plant throughout its life cycle, it's gonna need more spectrums of light.

And so that's what this type of light is providing right here.

This other light right here on this arm, I thought this is pretty cool.

- Yeah, that is cool.

How about that?

- So that's pretty neat and it has similar bulbs to the one that we just looked at here, but they promote this type of light, I think mostly for helping overwinter plants.

So I know that I have, ferns and different things that I like to try to bring into my garage, overwinter them throughout the year.

I don't have a greenhouse to put them in and this just helps give them some light throughout those winter months.

It's not a heat lamp.

I wanna clarify 'cause this could be confusing and people could think that's a heat lamp.

We wanna stay away from heat lamps.

Heat lamps are not what we need for seed starting or plant growing.

They are not providing that quality of light nor the intensity of light.

So these were just a few of the different types of lights that we wanted to bring and share with y'all today.

And talk about the different uses, and how you might use those for different types of plants.

They're gonna tell you if they're getting enough light or not.

If they are not receiving the high enough intensity of light, the seedlings, they're going to elongate.

As they grow, they're gonna stretch.

They're gonna stretch towards light.

- Gotcha.

- I've seen that sometimes where I've tried to put too many seedling trays underneath a small light.

Maybe I only have one bulb, or I even have a fluorescent shop light that has two bulbs.

Traditional shop lights would have four bulbs in them and you can see 'em, they'll lean this way and I'll flip the tray and then the next day they kinda lean this way.

So that can be a sign I really need, for that size tray, I need to put them under a ballast that has four bulbs under it.

And so just taking cues from your plants.

Monitor 'em every day.

Making sure that you're not getting leaf burn, are a few of the things that you can do to help you make good decisions about what types of plants and what types of light your plants are really gonna find most useful.

- Celeste, this was good.

I like the buckets of light.

So yeah, we're gonna focus on quantity.

- Yes, for seed starting, quantity.

Quantity of light is the most important.

Measuring that intensity, those photons of light which are measured in moles.

That's important to know.

So when you're using your light meters, PAR, that's another term that you may run into.

Photosynthetically active radiation.

- Look at you.

- Yeah, that's a big one.

We'll go with PAR for short.

- Yeah, let's do that.

- So you're gonna see bulbs with ratings for that, and so use that as your guide as well.

- Good deal, Celeste.

So there's your science course, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you much, Celeste.

We appreciate that.

- You're welcome.

[upbeat country music] - Wet feet.

- Yeah, wet feet.

Yeah and you mentioned that in your rose culture thing, about when you dug the hole and it filled up with water.

Most plants do not like what we call wet feet and that's soil, whether it's in the ground or in a container, that is continually wet and soppy, what we call soppy.

I don't know if that's a real word or not, but I believe it is.

But unless they're a bog plant or an aquatic plant, most plants do not do well with wet feet.

And that's just a term we use to refer to a waterlogged soil.

[upbeat country music] - All right, Natalie, microgreens.

They're all the rage now, so what are they?

- Yeah.

So what's the deal?

Well, they are a great way to add both color and flavor and a little bit of novelty to all sorts of dishes.

They can be used as a garnish on top of soups and salads, or they can be used as an entire salad all to themselves.

- Yeah, I see a couple of folks on the set, watching that pretty closely there.

- They're a bit dangerous to transport around the state.

It's hard to keep 'em intact.

- Okay.

Now what crops can be grown as microgreens?

- Pretty much anything that has an edible leaf and stem.

So some of the most common are cool-season crops in the cabbage and broccoli family.

So Brassicas, I have cabbage, I have broccoli in here.

There are a lot of herbs that are also commonly grown.

Some of the highest value microgreens, the commercial growers grow are basil.

So that's one of the most common, cilantro.

Some of the other herbs and a lot of leafy crops like lettuce.

I have amaranth here.

So, really a range, even root crops.

- Yeah, I knew you was gonna say pigweed when you said amaranth.

- We eat it early though before we spread any seeds.

Cousin of redroot pigweed right there.

- That's right.

So what media are you growing them in?

- I think the simplest way for beginners to grow is to use a soilless germination mix.

So one of the great things about it, is of course it's sterile, so it's very fine and it holds moisture, it drains well.

And one of the best things about it is a lot of time if you buy it, it'll have a slight fertilizer charge in it.

And for a one to two week crop, we can grow microgreens in such a short period of time, that may be all the fertilizer that we need.

- One to two weeks.

- Yeah.

Everything here is one week old, these were seeded a week ago today.

- That's pretty good.

- Yeah.

So they grow pretty quickly.

- It makes a pretty good stand too.

Now where can we grow these?

I mean, can you grow 'em in your house?

Outside?

What do you think?

- Yeah, so of course they are vegetable crops, so they do need a pretty good level of light, but not as high a light levels as a mature crop would, a fruiting crop.

So we can grow these in sheltered porches.

We don't want bright outdoor sun because they dry out so quickly and they can desiccate, but bright indoor spaces.

I've grown them in the summertime, in my living room that gets good light from the patio door, home greenhouses.

So once we get into winter and the natural light levels are lower, we might need a little bit of extra light.

But even a small fluorescent light over these guys in your house can grow them pretty well in the fall to wintertime.

- Okay.

So let's talk about basic care.

- Yeah so basic care, we'll direct seed these and a lot of the small-seeded crops like turnip, mustard, cabbage, and kale, we don't even need to cover.

We'll just sprinkle along the top of the media and moisten very well and they'll be up in just one to three days.

Most of those quick germinating crops, in indoor, our regular house temperatures, in that 60 to 75 degree range will help most of those.

And those are cool-season crops.

So they germinate relatively rapidly and then once we get them germinated, we'll generally water from the bottom.

So that helps us lower the risk of plant disease.

These are seeded pretty closely.

So the dryer we can keep the stems, the healthier we can keep the plants.

And if we have a fertilizer charge in our media, once daily, once every couple of days, watering from the bottom is our main care.

We need good air movement, so that we can keep 'em healthy and growing well and good light.

But generally ten days to two weeks, we're to a harvestable stage for a lot of these crops.

- Wow.

I think Mr. D could handle that, huh?

- I could.

- A week to ten days, pretty good.

And can you tell us, I mean what you have here, the specific, plants here.

- Yes.

Yes.

So a lot of these are in the Brassica family.

Over here we have turnips, which are milder, oftentimes eaten as a microgreen, that we sometimes have in a root crop, We have mustard, lettuce, which can provide a good range of color.

Not one of your strongest flavored crops.

Kale, red cabbage, which is of course beautiful for its color.

Some of the kinda sharper flavors.

A little bit more zest might be arugula that we have right here.

Cress is also one that we'll use in just small quantities.

Basil, you can see the basil, is one of our slowest growing crops, which I mentioned it was a higher value.

So that's why basil's expensive.

It's one of the slowest growing crops.

And then this is amaranth, which is actually a warm-season crop.

Many of these are cool-season crops.

Basil being a warm season crop and amaranth.

This is cilantro, one of my favorite ones.

- Yeah.

I was gonna ask you, which one did you like?

- Yeah as a microgreen, it is a little bit slower germinating.

Some that I don't have that are really common are some of the larger seeded crops like peas.

Pea tendrils are excellent.

But we'll need to grow them in a little bit larger space, a little bit more media than we have here.

Beets and chard can be great.

They provide beautiful color.

Rainbow Swiss chard can make a beautiful microgreen.

- I like the color of the chard.

How about that?

So tell me, how do you know when they're ready though?

- Well, we can really eat them whenever we ourselves are ready.

- When we're ready.

- Yeah.

So it's really a lot about how large we want the plant to be.

If you're growing 'em to sell, you wanna get 'em a little bit bigger than this.

These are what we call cotyledons.

So these are the seed leaves.

We don't have true leaves.

That's why you may not be able to look at these and recognize them.

If we had true leaves, the cabbage and the broccoli and the kale and the basil, everything would look more familiar to you.

But these are all seed leaves and we can certainly eat 'em at this size, but oftentimes we'll let 'em grow just a little bit larger.

So we'll have slightly more weight, and then we'll harvest those with true leaves on.

- Okay.

Now how would you harvest them and store them?

- We'll just harvest them, with a clean pair of kitchen shears.

And it's really a by hand job, so we'll just carefully separate 'em and harvest as close to the media surface as we can without picking up any particulates on our scissors.

I really don't like to store them for a long time.

If you're growing them in your home, you can just harvest as you need.

- Store 'em right there.

- Yeah, yeah.

We're storing 'em upright.

We're storing them alive.

They can certainly be washed and dried well, and put in a plastic container and stored for a few days in your refrigerator.

But I just let 'em grow until I was ready to eat them, growing them in my home.

- So when we're ready, then we can go ahead and get started, right?

- It is.

It's a self-service buffet right here.

- All right.

Well Natalie, we appreciate that.

Thanks much.

- All right.

Thanks a lot.

[upbeat country music] - In agriculture, we have several different kinds of applicator tips for spray nozzles, and they all have different specific purposes.

But for homeowners, what we're gonna come into contact most often, are these adjustable nozzles that are on one gallon pump up sprayers and pump up backpack sprayers.

They have basically two different ways that you can spray them.

You've got a steady stream if you open up your sprayer nozzle all the way, and this is what that would look like.

That type of application is gonna be useful when you are trying to do perimeter applications, or if you're trying to reach high up into canopies of trees.

It's important for homeowners to know that a finer spray has finer droplets and that actually provides better coverage.

So if you're trying to get inside shrubbery and dense, herbaceous plants, that's the type of spray you're gonna want to use.

And you can see how it covers a larger area and it's a finer mist and a finer droplet.

And that's what you wanna use for adequate coverage.

[upbeat country music] - All right.

Here's our Q&A segment.

Y'all ready?

- Yes, sir.

- All right.

These are great questions.

Here's our first viewer email.

Oh, I think Natalie likes this one.

"Looking ahead to next year's vegetable garden, "what are some flowers that I can add to our garden to encourage pollination?"

This is Harmon from Hickson, Tennessee.

And Hickson, right outside of Chattanooga.

So Harmon, this is what I'm gonna do.

I'm just gonna get out of the way, and we're gonna let Natalie and Celeste just have at it.

All right?

- Oh, yeah.

So not only pollination for your crops benefit, but maybe even some beneficial insect support.

And I mean, it's not ugly on the side of a garden to have flowers.

So some of the things, you would have annual options, you would even have perennial options.

You could think about, the bee balm, even options that could be cut flowers, thinking about sunflowers, some of the cover crops could be a benefit in certain periods of time.

Your clover, something in the spring, buckwheat I tend to think of in the summer.

- So just generally speaking, flowers that are in the Asteraceae family are very attractive.

- Wow.

Did you hear that?

- I know, I know.

Are very attractive to a number of bee pollinators, not only honeybees but native bees, bumblebees.

And that is a wide, a wide range of flowers.

Some things that you might not even consider, but think of open face flowers.

Sunflowers would fall into that category.

Obviously asters and the list goes on and on.

I mean, even yarrows and many, many of our perennial plants would fall into those categories.

So just in general terms of what types of plants would bring those in, that would be a good family of plants to look into.

- Yeah.

And then I would think about things like establishment.

Are we talking about a perennial bed that is alongside a garden area?

Or are we talking about things that we would want to direct seed at a similar timeframe of our garden?

- So zinnias are always really beautiful and everybody, not everybody, lots of people, wanna have a row of zinnias out there with their flowers, and they do bring in butterflies, later in the season.

But I don't know that they would be super excellent at intentionally bringing in pollinators for your other crops.

Does that make sense?

- Some of the herbs might be options.

- Oh, yes.

Nearly all of the herbs fall in the Asteraceae family.

Yes, yes, for sure.

Mints, they love those blooms.

- How about that?

All right, Harmon.

They can go on and on and on.

I'll just jump back in here.

That was good.

Nah, that was good.

So thank you for that question, Harmon.

And yeah, you can go to your local Extension office there.

They would have some publications for you, or how about uthort.com?

- Yeah.

- Yes, check it out.

- Could be an option as well for you, Harmon.

All right.

So yeah, check that out.

Thank you for that question.

Here's our next viewer email.

Interesting.

"I was told squash bugs and vine borers "overwinter in the soil.

Would it help to till the ga rden during freezing weather?"

And this is Craig from Jonesboro, Tennessee.

Celeste, what you think about that?

So squash bugs and vine bores overwinter in the soil.

So tilling?

- So for sure the vine borers are probably, likely going to be in those top inches of the soil.

So I could see how tilling, yes, could help with that situation possibly.

- I could see that.

'Cause you can bring those pupa from the top and expose 'em to the elements and to birds.

So I can see that.

- But the squash bugs, I have a feeling that they're probably overwintering in just neighboring weedy areas.

- Maybe hard to sanitize quite enough.

I completely agree with that.

One thing that I would say is think about the timing of the tilling in the sense that good sanitation in the fall, maybe tilling before you put in a cover crop.

But I would not necessarily suggest going in when the soil is cold and moist, moist essentially.

- Exactly.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

- We wanna make sure that we are not doing tillage when there's too much moisture and we're gonna add to compaction.

- No, that's good.

I was definitely thinking that 'cause he was talking about during freezing weather, and of course there's gonna be a lot of moisture during that time.

But yeah, squash bugs and vine borers are so tough.

- Aren't they?

You gotta be on top of that IPM.

Out there scouting.

- Multi-faceted.

- Yeah.

Definitely gotta do that.

You might have to stagger the planting dates and things like that.

- To help avoid.

- Screens, maybe early for the vine borers.

- So you might have to do that.

So hey Craig, it's a good question.

Got your work cut out for you.

Be careful out there tilling and that ground is moist.

All right, so Natalie, Celeste, so much fun.

So much fun.

Thank y'all much for being here today.

Remember we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org.

And the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee, 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about anything we talked about on today's show, head on over to familyplotgarden.com.

We have tons of information on all sorts of gardening topics.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]