I was chatting with Scot (Chironex) the other day. He's my cohort here in Vegas. I've been growing both bananas and orchids under various types of artificial light in the last year. I had noticed that my bananas did exceptionally well under some of the the fluorescent lights I was using. They turned a beautiful blue-green. I never really thought much about this other than I was aesthetically pleased with their looks. I received a newsletter from my orchid club and the main topic was growing under artificial lights. Our club president has been using them for over a decade. She is well studied and one of the things she points out is that different plants respond to different parts of the spectrum. Now I know there's been a thread or two on this subject but I just decided to point out some of the finer observations that I have had for those of you that are interested in this topic. My president pointed out that bananas and orchids are from the same branch of the plant family both descended or at least some what related to palms and or cacti. She told me that blue spectrum light stimulates vegetative growth, whereas infrared stimulate flowering in these types of plants. I have lights that are high in both ranges of the spectrum, as well as ones that are wide spectrum. As stated earlier in this thread, I noticed that some of my bananas turned a really dark blue green and developed larger more paddle-like leaves. So I did some investigating and lo and behold the ones under the blue spectrum lights were the best and fastest growers. The ones under the higher red spectrum lights were growing very slowly and had poor chlorophyll formation. So even though this is not scientific I'd say blue light gets you the best growth.
Also, in talking with Scot we were talking about how our bananas burn so badly in the sun. (at least mine do) I've tried various things to stop this and the best results were growing in less than 3 hr of direct sunlight. These plants grow much faster than the ones that were getting sun for 5 to 6 hrs. Now one of the things I know about the sun here in the desert is that we have an inordinately high amount of UV. The weather service gives us the indexes every morning on the news so I think, and again this isn't scientific but given the fact that the bananas that I have growing under red artificial light do poorly, I'd say bananas don't like high UV but need lots of blue light which is in abundance in the shade as the blue spectrum is mostly reflected whereas the red is mostly absorbed by the surfaces that are directly exposed to it. I would be most interested if any one else has had these observations or disagrees with me on this. What do you all think?
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