Do Chilli plants require sleep?

[prbaxter]

Hello.

we're growing loads and loads of various chilli plants. Most of them are in the greenhouse, where they will receive about 5 hours direct sunlight before they go in to shade.

I also have a couple of trays of chilli seedlings in the cellar, growing under fluorescent lighting.

My question is:
Do chilli plants require a sleep or can I expect better growth if they are given 24hour lighting?

[crichmond]

If you give them 24 hours of light they wont perform well at all, I grow chillis under grow lights and have the lights on from 7am until midnight, so 17 hours a day and they seem to love it.

[prbaxter]

can I ask what type of grow lights you use? I've just replaced my standard fluorescent tubes with GroLux Plant and Aquarium tubes, which give off less green light and more pink and blue - they're ideal for photosynthesis apparently, and my chillis aren't getting leggy and seem quite happy.

I also have them on from 7am until 11pm, but i forgot to switch them off last night and that got me thinking.

[Duronal]

I'm not sure any plant requires sleep per se but most require some time to respire.

Under sunlit conditions plants photosynthesise creating a cellular store of glucose sugar, when a plant isn't in sunlit conditions they start to respire using these sugars.

Without this respiration period the plant doesn't create enough ATP - a product of broken down glucose - to survive and thus it slowly starts to die.

I hope that helps

D

further reading can be found here.

Biology - Google Book Search

[crichmond]

I use 200watt envirolites about 1 foot above the plants and the switching is done by a time switch.

I do also have metal halide and sodium lamps if I need to but they use a lot more electric.

I use blue spectrum for plant growth and red spectrum for flowering / fruiting

[prbaxter]

yes I looked at halide lighting, but it wouldn't have been a bit more costly on the electric.
The fluorescents are both cheap to run and cheap to maintain. Also they give off very little heat, just enough to keep the plants at about 16degrees, but not enough to require constant watering, ventilation and spraying.

I have my tubes about an inch off the tallest plant as the intensity of light decreases substantially with distance and this prevents them from getting leggy. As they grow larger, and have more leaves, I will raise the lighting to be about 8 inches away from the plants.

fascinating stuff is artificial lighting. I'm going to repot my chilli's in to 10cm pots today, so they should really start to grown quite soon.

[rana]

Question>>

Surely with artificial light (flourescent or otherwise) the cost of the power far outweighs the convenience and cost of buying chilli/sweet peppers in the supermarket.

eg. 200watts x 17 hours (per day) = 3.4kkwh
Over say 2 months = > 200 kwh
with electric at about 7p/unit = £14 (which buys a lot of chillis)

and that's after you've invested in the kit.........................

Or are we in it just for the fun ?

[prbaxter]

Personally, I think it has more to do with being self sustained, and knowing what goes in to our food. It's also quite rewarding. I mean, why grow veg in the kitchen garden, which takes months and months, if we can go and buy it from the supermarket?

I don't think that requires an answer.

I also like building things.

[rana]

So fun it is.................... - Fair play

[SarzWix]

I see your point rana! If you're using artificial lighting, it's only being 'self-sustained' if you're also producing your own electric

But if you're doing it for fun, what the hey, probably cheaper than a night in the pub

[starloc]

I use growlights, and because of them you can grow crops all year round, i have them mainly for the citrus, they dont cost that much for what you can do with them, in the winter if you grow in the house with growlamps you wont need any heating on!, its quite good heating that grows plants as well!

I fit as many other plants in the rooms with the sodium and metal halide lamps, strawberries, chillies etc, all of them grow well all winter and most fruit all winter, you can start the plants off so early as well, to get a crop around now on most plants, im going for tomatoes all year long using the scattered light from the citrus lamps this winter, they are growing and ripening fine in here now so the winter should be no different

Obviously growing outside is cheaper, and buying the fruit/veg is/can be cheaper but growing your own all year is good

1) things taste better, all year not just at the normal harvest time
2) If you grow it you know what your eating, you decide what/(if any) pesticides to use
3) You can grow better tasteing fruit/veg all year long, when you want it
4) You an grow all sorts of strange plants and excellerate the growth of bought in plug plants as well using the extra light

If you want a cheaper to run growlamp that works better than standard flourescent lamps, a CFL growlamp is quite good, they produce a high power for the watt and its cool so they can go right against the plants, but i would always go for a metal halide over flourescent every time due to the heating effect ( apart from seedlings!, it doesnt work well on seeds, apart from tropical ones )

[crichmond]

Question>>
eg. 200watts x 17 hours (per day) = 3.4kkwh

200watt envirolites consume around 0.24kwh

I grow with them yes for fun but also to grow types of chilli's that you just cant buy in the shops easily.

[rana]

Sounds like an indoor Kew Gardens - I can see the secondary heating benefit from the lights during winter but aren't there problems with excess moisture permeating/condensing through the property?

[crichmond]

I havent noticed any excess moisture buildup and I was using a 1kw SO lamp over the winter to grow peppadew peppers. It may be because the room I use has an air brick in the wall.
Although if anyone is worried about moisture build up you can get dedicated extraction systems.

[starloc]

i like to keep the room with the citrus in it at about 70-90% humidity on the gauges kind of tropical, its quite hard to raise it that much, in very cold weather the windows do steam up occasionaly ,as i block the vents on the frames until the humidity/temp gets too high and then they open using a solonoid, generaly i use the humidifyer for 5 hours or so a day to generate steam as well, after a couple of years like this the walls are no more damp than they were when tested a few years ago.

the other room with lights no humidifyer i generaly keep very dry, just by leaving a window open to keep the temperature down a bit, using the lamps i generaly have about 30% humidity on the gauges

The lamps and plants dont realy raise the humidity much, i have more problems with low humidity,i have to raise it for the plants that need it using humidifyer, pebble trays and fountains and it takes some doing to raise it, to keep heat down you can use extraction if needed, i have the vents on one light but i dont use the fans as its not needed unless you grow in something like a sealed grow room like the grow tents they sell on ebay