What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. This is Kevin and I'm back with

Leslie Hallick, the author of Gardening Under Lights. And today we're talking about how long should you actually light your plants indoors.

This is a question that I'm pretty sure on every platform I'm on I've gotten questions about and you know sometimes I know the answer, sometimes the answer can be a little bit more

complex and one thing I really like to do both for myself and for you guys listening is

always to try to understand the core concepts because if we can do that then we can move

forward and sort of solve a lot of our problems for ourselves because now we

understand the the base level of knowledge that we need and so that's what we're going to talk

about today with Leslie and it's going to start off with something called light

volume accumulation so can you explain what that is Leslie? Well, so when we're talking about what's meaningful to plants, you know, versus what's meaningful to us as people when we talk about grow lighting,

yeah, there's a lot of confusion about how long to leave grow lights on.

And you know, there is no magical number.

Most people want a number.

You know, give me a magical number

for how long to leave a light on and of

course I'm going to tell you it's just not that simple. You know but when it comes to

you know each individual type of plant based on where that plant evolved and what its needs are

is it foliage doesn't need a lot of energy to flower and set fruit each plant's going to

need to accumulate a certain amount of light,

volume, all those little raindrops, those photons of light that hit the

leaves over a 24-hour period. So when we talk about lighting seedlings and how long to do that or you

know we talk about how long to light our orchids or whatever we're talking about what

we're really talking about even though you might not know it because you don't

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