Episode 61: growlights with Leslie Halleck

An LED growlight from SolTech Solutions lights up a corner of a living room. Photograph: SolTech Solutions.

Transcript

Episode 61

[Music]

Hello, this is On The Ledge and I'm Jane Perrone, your host.

This is the podcast for people who find houseplants irresistible.

[Music]

You know what I mean. You're walking along, minding your own beeswax, and then suddenly you spot something in the window of a florist, a junk shop or even one of those trendy clothing stores that sells houseplants now, and you know it has to be yours. I've added to my collection this week and it's a little bit worrying because I don't quite know where I'm going to put all the new plants, but hey, that's a good problem, right?

In fact, this week's episode, No 61, is the ideal episode to help me with this dilemma because I'm talking about grow lights, those wonderful inventions that can help you grow houseplants in parts of your dwelling that you never thought would be suitable, help you keep your succulents stocky rather than leggy during the winter off-season, and generally up your houseplant game. Plus, I have a Q&A about a Venus fly trap, a request for help from those of you who grow cannabis, and exciting news about upcoming episodes.

[Music]

I actually have to admit I find the world of grow lamps anything but relaxing. There are so many different options, lights, systems, prices, I just don't know what I'm looking at or what I need. In the James Wong episode, we heard James talking about how great the Ikea LED grow lamps are, but there is a whole world of grow lights out there incorporating all different kinds of lighting technology and indeed price points from a couple of quid or dollars, right up to, well, hundreds.

So I needed somebody who could break this all down for me, and that's where Leslie Halleck comes in. She's a horticulturist based in Texas and she's the author of a great new book published by Timber Press called 'Gardening Under Lights -- The Complete Guide for Indoor Growers.' This book really made me jump for joy because it breaks down in terms that even I can understand, the pros and cons of the various forms of grow lights, how to use them on specific types of plants and basically everything you need to know to get started with your grow light journey whether you're an absolute beginner like me, or somebody who's already dabbled with a few T5s and the odd LED.

First, I wanted to find out what grow lamps can actually do for the average houseplant grower, not to mention their plants.

Leslie: Well, as urbanisation continues to intensify, more people moving into urban environments, perhaps living in smaller spaces, staying in apartments longer, many people are really craving the ability to bring some nature indoors, or even just cultivate collections of plants. That's becoming yet again intensely popular.

Even as a horticulturist, my home is incredibly dark. I don't have near enough light in my home to grow what I want to, and that's the case for many people indoors, whether they want to grow foliage plants or they want to get into food production.

So what grow lighting of varying scales allows you to do, is cultivate plants indoors 12 months out of the year, or for seasons that you may not be able to keep them outdoors, in spaces were you traditionally wouldn't have enough light. I find that grow lighting is useful from the level of somebody wanting to keep one Pilea peperomioides - you know, the Chinese money plant is so trendy right now - alive in their apartment or dorm room, up to people who really want to do more food production, that want to grow tomatoes inside or keep an orchid in bloom. So it really runs the scale from keeping individual houseplants and African violets and foliage and orchids, up to more intensive production, so it can be useful to you no matter what level that you're keeping plants or that you're starting.

Jane: Let's just go on to talk about light. Now, all light is not equal, as I seem to be learning from reading your book. Can you just explain a bit about what kind of light houseplants, or plants generally, need in terms of making photosynthesis work and how that's offered by grow lights?

Leslie Sure, and that's one of the topics that I try to digest, not dumb it down, but make it a little cleaner and simpler to understand, because as you've said, light science can be intimidating. It's a big topic and the ways in which it's commonly addressed in some of the publications that are available, really, in my opinion, aren't relevant to the home gardener.

So I do go into explanations of how plants use light versus how we as people use light, and that's how I break down the difference between the lights that you're generally going to use in your home for visual brightness versus the light that's meaningful to plants. Plants see light differently than people see light and there are certain wavelengths of light that are required in order to generate photosynthesis -- which is what you're trying to get for a plant. For people, we need brightness so we can see. Plants need a spectrum of light that's conducive to driving photosynthesis, and generally blue and red light within the visual light spectrum are going to be the two types of light that are most efficient at driving photosynthesis. Red light specifically, which is why you will see a lot of LED -- what I can dual band LEDs that blend only red and blue light to give you pink or purple light. So that's why you see a lot of grow lights that emit a pink coloured light because what they're trying to do is most efficiently drive growth for that plant with red and blue light.

So certainly the spectrums of light that are going - and the amount of light that can be used by a plant is going to be different in different grow lights, depending on how they're manufactured and how they're calibrated. So there will be differences between the light that you use to brighten up your kitchen versus a grow lamp that you will buy to most efficiently drive photosynthesis or get a plant to flower and fruit.

So that's generally why horticulturists such as myself will recommend that you go to actual plant grow lights versus just using the lamps that you might have in your house - not to say that there isn't some crossover use of some of those lights.

Jane: It would be easy for me to just think, "Well, I can just stick it under this light bulb and it's going to help it in some way or other." I guess it might do, but if you really want to get a bit of efficiency going here, then the grow light is the way to go.

The other issue that gets complicated with grow lights it seems to me is that there seems to be so many different options out there - fluorescent tubes, LED lights are now coming onto the scene. Are LED lights so good and efficient and excellent that we're going to be very soon just talking about LED lights? Are they going to take over from everything else or are there still pros and cons?

Leslie: Well, certainly the LED manufacturers hope that that's the case, but I actually go into quite a bit of depth about the actual different types of lighting and gear in my book, specifically because I want people to understand the benefits of each different type of light.

So, yes, LEDs for plant lighting, especially vertical farming and things like that, have really exploded in the last few years, so there's a lot of focus on LEDs but there's also a lot of people who don't understand plant growth jumping in the game of manufacturing LEDs. So there's also a very wide array of quality, you get what you pay for in the LED market. Probably some of your listeners who are a little more experienced in this category will probably speak up and say, "Yeah, I've bought a bunch of LEDs that were garbage. They didn't do a good job for me and I've had to buy new lights." You have to be careful with quality.

Certainly though, the advances in LEDs, that's where a lot of people are putting money. However, just as with LEDs, some of the conventional types of grow lighting -- what I call HID -- high intensity discharge lighting, high pressure sodium lamps, metal halide lamps, ceramic metal halide, things like that are also advancing in efficiency and as of to date, are often more efficient at plant growth than LEDs. So that's not to say that LEDs don't continue to get better and better - they do - but they'll also cost you a bit more because you're paying for some of that innovation, some of that R&D that's being done by the manufacturer. So you'll find that some of these more powerful LEDs will actually cost you a bit more than say a really efficient, high pressure sodium grow lamp or LEC, a ceramic metal halide lamp.

So I would say that efficiency across the board of grow lighting is getting better. LEDs are generally in the forefront in terms of marketing and what people are seeing and because of their size and low wattage capacity, they tend to be more versatile for home growers that maybe are wanting to grow smaller groups of plants or individual houseplants, versus more intensive production.

So pay attention to the quality, pay attention to where you're buying it from and certainly keep an eye out for a lot of advances in technology with all types of grow lights, but certainly LEDs, I think, are going to become more and more used by more home growers just because of their availability and ease of use at this point, for sure.

Jane: As you say, we shouldn't discount all these other forms of grow lights that are still very widely in use by lots of growers.

Can you just take me through those various different options that you've talked about and explain the differences between them and the pros and cons?

Leslie: Yeah. What would be considered the old school lighting options are HPS -- high pressure sodium lamps and MH metal halide lamps. HPS lamps have traditionally been used to extend photo periods in, say, greenhouse production, and also to encourage flowering. They produce a little more red light.

Metal halide lamps produce a cooler blue light, so they're often used for a lot of vegetative growth. So let's take cannabis as an example. Traditional cannabis growers would grow their vegetative plants under metal halide, cool light set ups and then switch them over to say an HPS lamp for a warmer light to induce flowering. So that's a very old school, common regimen that you would see with cannabis production, and in greenhouse production of many other types of flora culture crops.

Those lights are still in use and they're advancing, as well, in efficiency. HPS and MH lamps are classically very efficient, high efficiency options for grow lighting. You can get them in varying levels of electrical use, so home growers can use these lights. They're not just for industrial production.

And then another really interesting development that is related to metal halide lamps are what we call CMHs, or ceramic metal halide -- also branded as LECs. These are lower wattage, high light output options. For example, I have a garage garden and that's where I have all my grow tents set up. I'm using these CMHs or LECs. They pull 315 watts, which is low for a high output grow light and I use them to grow tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers. So they put out enough light that you can get good flowering and fruiting on food crops. So that's a really cool advancement that's not an LED option, but that's very accessible to a general home gardener that wants to do things, say, in a grow tent, in a few square feet of space.

Then of course, fluorescents. I always still get the question, "Well, can't I just use shop lights, the big T12 shop lights?" I always say, "Well, you can use whatever you want, as long as you're willing to accept varying results." So you have okay results or great results. If you're going to use fluorescents, which are still a good option and they're affordable, definitely use the HO T5s -- that's high output T5s. Those are going to be the most efficient fluorescent grow lamps. So you can still get really good high output of light with moderate heat output, so still going to be great for germinating your seedlings and growing young transplants or supplementing light for salad greens, foliage crops, things like that, herbs that you might want to keep in the house.

LEDs, boy! There's a huge array of options with LEDs from little tiny LEDs that fit into your home lighting fixtures that are going to be good for say one or two plants, an orchid plant or another houseplant that you love, up to large, what they're calling HID LED rigs. The LED fixtures are getting bigger and bigger to put out more and more light, so you really can run the gamut with LEDs, from just single plant lights up to big rigs that you're going to put into a grow tent.

One option that is an advancement you'll see with LEDs are what they call HO T5 LED bars. Those basically replace your fluorescent tubes. You have a fluorescent fixture with your HO T5 fluorescent tubes, you pop that out and you pop an LED strip right into that fixture. So it essentially replaces the fluorescents. You're going to see more of that technology and that's the type of technology that really is most available to the mainstream gardener. But I encourage everybody to look at all of the different lighting options just because they have traditionally been sold to cannabis growers. It's all the same science and it's all the same gear and you can use it to grow whatever else you want.

Jane: This is an opportune moment in the interview just to drop in a little request to any of you who have tried growing cannabis indoors. I am planning a little special mini-series about cannabis growing. As it becomes legal to grow a few plants at home in several countries and parts of the world, I'm increasingly fascinated by how the cannabis industry has impacted the houseplant world and vice versa.

I'm hoping to talk to any of my listeners who would be prepared to tell me about how they got into growing cannabis, whether the houseplants came first, or the cannabis came first, and how the two practices interweave with one another, or otherwise.

If you're interested, do drop me a line to <ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com data-preserve-html-node="true"> and you can speak anonymously if you prefer.

Back to Leslie, so she can explain why she included details on cannabis growing in her book.

Leslie: Time is marching forward and attitudes are changing. That was a consideration when I wrote this book because this book is not a cannabis growing book. All of the science is there, all of the gear is there and it can be used for whatever you want to grow, but I did think that it was important for those who are interested to get some basic information on that, and have this be a way where there was a little bit of cannabis lite. So just maybe take the stigma away so people who are curious who have no interest in growing it, maybe could just at least learn a little bit more about the plant itself because it's just interesting.

I think that the conversation is going to continue and it's going to become more mainstream, but it's certainly not something that everybody needs or has to grow for goodness sake. It's totally a personal choice, and obviously, as you say, there are legalities that have to be taken into consideration. I even say in the book, please make sure you understand the laws where you live before you do this, because I'm certainly not endorsing that you do this if you live in a place that you can't. I certainly have neighbours trying to crawl over their fence on a regular basis to peek into my garage when I open the door because they're trying to figure out what I have going on in there.

Jane: Those of you who are Patreon subscribers of $5 dollars a month or more will be able to hear Leslie talking in more detail about the cannabis industry and grow lights in On The Ledge -- An Extra Leaf No 12, which is out now. She also talks in that extra episode about propagation and grow lights.

So, if you're not a subscriber but would like to find out more, check out my show notes at janeperrone.com where you can catch up on all the information on Patreon and how you can help out the show.

But now, back to my chat with Leslie, and onto the vexed question of ugly grow lights.

I've had a flurry of email press releases about attractive grow lights. Grow lights that you can put into your living room and not feel like you're living in a commercial greenhouse. Obviously the companies are really latching onto this now. Obviously that's a hugely growing industry. Are they any good those lights? Can they really work effectively, these ones that put style just as important as substance?

Leslie: I would say I'm very happy about this because I consider myself to be style focused as well as scientific. I put a lot of thought into my living space and I want it to look attractive, but I also understand the science of growing indoors, so that's been a frustration for me in that I want pretty grow lights. I want grow lights that look nice in my living room and aren't embarrassing, that don't look like my closet garden in my living room. That's been the challenge and we're really just right on the cusp of this.

I would say that there are some really good options out there. One lamp that I just purchased is from a company called Saltech and they're doing nice LEDs that are very attractive and respectable for hanging anywhere in a living space. That's one that I'm actually testing right now myself.

Most of these kinds of lights are generally low-emitting grow lights thus far. So most of them are not going to be tomato plant ready, if that puts that in perspective. So when you're trying to flower and fruit plants, it takes a lot of energy and some of the lower light, attractive lighting fixtures are not quite there yet but they're perfect for supplementing light for your houseplants and your leafy herbs and things like that, that fiddle leaf fig that you so desperately have to have. You put it next to the window and you think there's enough light and there still isn't enough light. Those type of LED spot lights are perfect for lighting those types of plant material.

We're probably going to progress, I would think in the next couple of years to the point where we have grow lights that are powerful enough for you to actually fruit things indoors, keep flowers and fruit on your citrus plants and flower and fruit those tomatoes indoors, in a living room space. So we're almost there, we're not quite there yet, but definitely that's where the market's going and that's where I'm encouraging many grow lighting companies to go because that's where I see desire and demand. I'm in an apartment and I want to have the tomato or citrus plant in my living room. I need enough light but I don't want it to be ugly. So we're getting there. We're getting there.

Jane: And when it comes to using that grow light for that very purpose, to enhance the light that something like either some succulents or a fig leaf is getting, how long do we leave it on during the day? Should that vary in the different seasons of dormancy and growth? Is there an easy guide to know how long or shall we just leave it on? We'll put it on when we wake up and turn it off when we go to bed - is it as simple as that?

Leslie: I wish it was as simple as that, but it's not. That's why I do, in the book, go through lots of different plant material and provide some general recommendations for the length of lighting that you should provide with your supplemental light. But understand that everybody's space is going to be different. The amount of ambient light that you may have in your home or office will be different from your neighbour, or a caller or a listener that you have. So it really depends on how much light, ambient light, you already have in that space and thus how much you need to supplement. If you have a dark space you may be supplementing all of the light, and if that's the case you may need to leave those grow lights on for a number of more hours. If you have a very bright space but it's just not quite enough for what you want to grow, it may mean that you put that grow light on for three or four hours a day to supplement. It's just going to depend on how your plant is doing, if it's thriving the way that it should.

I do provide those kinds of recommendations but it can get a little tricky with photo period and timing, so I hesitate to give you a one rule fits all. The most general thing I could tell you is that for most of the plants that I keep indoors, whether they're succulents or herbs, it's a moderate to low light environment. Those grow lights stay on about 10 hours to 12 hours, depending on what I'm growing. If you are growing inside a grow tent, for example, where you're providing all of the light that plant is going to grow, depending on the type of light you are using, you may need to run that light 14 to 18 hours to deliver enough volume of light.

So it really is going to depend on a lot of different, organic factors -- being the light you have in your space and the type of lamp that you're using, but what I've tried to do is connect those dots for you in my book, so that you can piece together the pieces and parts that you need to use and want to grow in your type of space to give you a relatively good formula.

Jane: Is there a danger that you can give a plant too much light and end up damaging it through too much exposure, either by having the light too long or indeed by putting it too close to the light?

Leslie: Absolutely. Yes, you can burn things out. Plants have essentially a metabolism and they need a break. Most plants need a dark period where photosynthesis is not running because if you're running lights 24 hours, for example, on a plant, it's going to use resources much more quickly. It's going to use water more quickly. It's going to transpire and lose water through the plant more quickly and unless you're able to replenish the water and nutrients quickly enough, then the plant keeps running without the energy to run, if that makes sense? So it can just exhaust itself essentially because it's not getting the inputs it needs based on the speed that you're driving photosynthesis with all that continuous light.

Tomatoes and peppers are a good example. You can grow peppers under 24 hours of light without really losing productivity. Tomatoes, on the other hand, if you grow them under 24 hours of light, you'll reduce productivity. So they just can't keep up with that rate of photosynthesis. Seedlings, for example, they need a lot of intense light. So you can place your grow lights three or four inches above your seedlings, they need that or else they're going to stretch and fall over. But as they grow and put on a couple of pairs of true leaves, you actually need to lift that light up and pull it a little further away from those plants or you'll burn them because the rate at which they're using that light will slow down a little bit, and if you keep it too close to the plant, you'll burn.

And then you have plants that require different intensities of light from a full sun plant, to a medium light plant, to a low light plant. Put a fern, a low light fern, under a very intense high pressure sodium lamp and you can fry it in 30 minutes. The tomato under that lamp will be perfectly happy,, so you also have to take into account the natural environment that the plant you're growing thrives in, to determine how much light and how close that light needs to be.

So, for example, you can use the same grow light for a low light plant and a full sun plant simply by moving that light closer or further away from the plant. Does that make sense?

Jane: And would you recommend using timers for these things because it could be tragic if you forget to turn it on for a couple of days and then your plant is unhappy?

Leslie: Yeah, timers are sort of a standard add-on feature for most grow lights and there's lots of different timers out there to choose from, from the really basic lamp timers that you use when you go on vacation to turn your lights on and off. You can use those on your grow lights. Higher-powered grow lights might require a little more sophisticated timer, so yes, always use timers because there's so many things we have to have to remember in a day. Trying to remember your grow lights on your seedlings exactly 16 hours every day is probably not going to happen and then you accidentally leave them on overnight a few times and you burn out some seedlings. So, yes, timers are a very inexpensive, simple tool that will make your indoor gardening much more successful.

Jane: And with the smart phone being ubiquitous now, are there any apps or programmes you can use that will allow, or indeed products, grow light products, that work with smart phones in terms of managing everything, so you can be sitting at your office miles away and managing your system at home?

Leslie:Yeah. In fact, there's a couple of things and it's still emerging technology, but I just talked a lighting company the other day who is working on smart phone controlled LED lights that's an app.

Right now there are actually timers that you can use that there's an app for. You can plug your grow light into this timer that you synch up to on your home wi-fi and you can control the timers. So that's actually a good intermittent technology you can use right away, the lighting timers or the electrical timers that you can plug all sorts of things into it and control from your smart phone. But yes, we're getting to the point where there will be more of that technology available, so again it's developing but we're getting there.

Jane: I think over here, talking to James Wong, who's a botanist based in the UK, in a recent episode he was talking about the effect that Ikea's grow lights have had on making this a mainstream thing. I don't know what your opinion is on the quality of Ikea's grow lights, but it's interesting to see how they're making people consider that LED grow lights are an attainable option -- something that you can get your hands on quite easily and set up at home.

Leslie: Yeah, we don't have those released here in the US yet. That's been something I think they've threatened for a few years. I know that's been available in the UK and Europe, but not quite here yet.

I think that it falls into that category of very low light options that are good for maintaining a small number of plants or leafy greens. They're not going to be very intense grow lights that they're providing just yet, but I do think it does do a service in that it is making people aware that this is an option and it's also helping to make people aware of why they might be failing with plants indoors -- which is one of the reasons I was asked to write this book because there is so much frustration with categories so popular, such as succulents. People buy them. They bring them indoors. In three weeks they have gone to mush because they've actually watered them but there's not enough light indoors for the plants to sustain that way and people want their plant collections. They want their succulents. They want their foliage plants. They want their orchids and many people just don't have enough light.

So I think the thing that perhaps the Ikea products are doing, are creating an entry point certainly for people and making them aware. It's just that we have to be careful not to over-promise on expectations for what some of those smaller, lower powered lights can do. They're not going to give you fruiting tomato plants indoors, but some leafy greens and salad greens and foliage plants, yes, they can help you maintain those for sure.

Jane: It's interesting about the succulent craze. I'm sure that it's the same where you are, but over here where winters are quite long and dark, lots of people buying succulents and you just know that in winter you're going to end up with all these Echeverias which are about two foot long because they've just stretched and stretched and stretched trying to find light. I guess that's the peril of it. We only have so many south-facing window sills to put these things on in winter.

Leslie:Right. Well, even a south-facing window in winter is not the same thing as a south-facing window in summer. Light volume dramatically decreases so you just aren't going to be able to sustain things that you want.

I have grow lights right next to a window. Just because you put a plant on a window sill doesn't mean it's going to get enough light, and I think that's what's confusing to a lot of a new plant keepers, or new succulent enthusiasts, is they just don't have an understanding yet of light volume, of how much light plants really need and how much that light changes with every inch that you pull away from the window, how much light you lose.

Jane: Does the window itself cut out some of that blue and red light that plants need? Is that acting as a filter also?

Leslie: Yes. When trees provide shade or windows filter light, a lot of what often you lose is blue light. When plants are getting enough blue light, they stretch. They get elongated. So that's why when you put a plant that prefers a little more sun into a shady spot, it stretches and elongates. You get that internode elongation because there's not quite enough blue light for that plant to maintain its more dense nature.

So certainly different types of windows will change the spectrum of light that enters your home and that's not going to be something that most people are going to measure. If you're a total plant nerd like me, you're going to have a PAR light meter that's going to measure all of that for you and you're going to know exactly what kind of light you have where, but that's generally not the sort of thing that most sane, residential home dwellers are going to have.

So yes, there are ways you can measure that light if you want to get geeky, and I talk about that, so I give you that option if you want to do that, but yes, different windows can change not only the amount of light that you're getting, but the type of light.

Jane: I imagine you're going to have to throw down at least 50 to 100 bucks on one of these things, but is that something that's worth looking into as a gadget, to really get to grips with how much light you've got available?

Leslie: If you are windowsill gardening or counter-top gardening and you're doing small collections of house plants, no, not going to be worth it to you. If however, you decide to step up your game and you get a little bit more interested in this and you decide that you want to invest in some higher intensity lighting and maybe try to grow your tomatoes indoors, that sort of thing, you might want to do that.

What I could offer is that there are some lower technology, lower price light meters that you can sometimes find at the garden centre that you can put outside that tell you whether you're getting full sun, medium light or a shady location. If you want to improvise, you can certainly try using one of those if you don't want to spend the money, but if you like data -- I love data, I love style, but I also love data. I find it really interesting because it allows you to measure all sorts of things that are going on with your ambient light as well as exactly what you're getting from electrical grow lights, so it's kind of cool! So, if you want to get geeky, they'll cost you some scratch. They're not cheap, so you have to be serious about it.

Jane: Yeah, I understand. I guess it's one of those things. Plants are quite cheap, so some people like to splash out on their gadgets, I guess.

Leslie: Sure, why not? If you like technology, it's a fun tool. Take it out at parties, you'll impress everyone or run them away, one or the other.

[Music]

Jane: Well, I don't know about you, but I am definitely going to be splashing some cash on some grow lights this autumn. Thanks so much to Leslie. You can find out more about Leslie online at lesliehalleck.com. That's H-A-L-L-E-C-K.com and she's on Twitter as @lesliehalleck. And of course, as usual, my show notes are packed with more information about the things we've discussed in the show, plus links to where you can get the book.

And now question of the week which comes from Christopher. He wants to know what do with his Venus flytrap when the traps go black and die. Now, this happens regularly when the traps have closed about two or three times. They get exhausted and they will die back, and hopefully as the plant grows there'll be new traps forming to replace them. Obviously, if all the traps go black, then that's not a good sign unless it's the winter time and the plant is going into its dormancy period.

Now, for more on Venus flytraps, I highly recommend that you listen to my episode, No. 32, in which I talk to Tom of Tom's Carnivores about these plants and get into all kinds of detail about how to look after them.

But let's just address this specific issue of the traps. Now this is one of those things that's a bit of a personal preference. I know from reading the classic kind of plant book, The Savage Garden by the much respected carnivorous plant expert, Peter D'Amato, he recommends trimming off the traps once they are black and fully dead. Why? Well, it's aesthetic obviously, in part. It looks better if those dead traps aren't there, plus also there is a risk that those traps as they die go a bit mouldy and that mould could spread to the rhizome, so there is a bit of a housekeeping issue around it too, but there are those who prefer to let the traps just die back and disappear into the soil over time, and that approach is fine too. I'd say in the winter time, if you've got dying traps it's more advisable to get rid of them because the mould has more of a chance to take hold in those kind of cooler conditions. You can gently pull them off, but I would highly recommend getting in there in with a pair of nail scissors to remove them. This way you can cut cleanly. Make sure the scissors are clean and you can stick them under a naked flame if you want to make sure they're sterile before you start. Snip them off and that way you won't be pulling away at the main plant.

Do be very careful because it's very easy to trigger the traps accidentally doing this job, and the problem with that is that you will exhaust your traps very quickly if they are triggered when there isn't any food inside.

Another issue that comes up sometimes is people ask whether they can remove the husks of the insects that have been caught in the trap. Well, yes, if you do this, you're going to probably trigger the trap again and the plant's going to get tired because there's not gong to be anything in it. I tend to leave the husks for this reason because it's just not worth the bother. Obviously, in the wild, wind, water and other things will gradually remove the husks via the force of nature. In the greenhouse this isn't going to happen and the husks will sit there, but they really don't make that much of a difference.

I mean, if you're bothered by the sight of some dead insects, then probably carnivorous plants are not for you!

I do hope that helps, Christopher, and if you've got a question for On The Ledge, then do drop me a line to <ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com data-preserve-html-node="true"> or through the Facebook page, facebook.com/ontheledgepod, or you can drop me a message on Instagram where I'm at @j.l.perrone.

[Music]

Jane: If this podcast leaves you itching to have more chat about houseplants and your friends and family just don't understand your obsession, may I recommend that you pop along to the Facebook group for On The Ledge. It's called Houseplant fans of On The Ledge, and it's a wonderfully friendly, warm community for anyone who love houseplants and this podcast. When you sign up, just remember to answer the two questions that pop up on joining and you will be a member before you know it.

If you've got a question, want to show off your plants, or generally shoot the breeze about indoor gardening, it's the place to be.

That wraps up the show for this week. I'll be back next Friday for more houseplant fun and frolics.

[Music]

And to finish with a quote from the late, great gardener, Christopher Lloyd, who writes in his excellent book, The Well-Tempered Garden, 'Sometimes the reader may be incited to explain what a lot of trouble, or who wants to go through all that? But however labour-saving you make your hobby, you will never get more out of it than you put in. Now and again it seems worth taking that extra bit of trouble that brings in its train some rather exciting results.'

[Music]

The music you heard in this week's episode was Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, Rashem Pidity, Pokhara by Samuel Corwin, and Oh Mallory by Josh Woodward. All licenced under Creative Commons. See my website for details.

Subscribe to On The Ledge via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Player FM, Stitcher, Overcast, RadioPublic and YouTube.

Leslie Halleck's book Gardening Under Lights (published by Timber Press) is a really welcome book for those of us who haven't fully dipped our toes into the confusing world of artificial light for our plants.

In this episode, I find out about what kind of light houseplants need, investigate the pros and cons of the difference types from LECs to LEDs and beyond, and discuss how cannabis growing fits into the picture. 

I also find out whether you need to invest in a light meter, whether IKEA's LED offering is worth a look, and whether it's possible to buy a non-ugly growlight!

I am planning a special mini-series about cannabis growing, so would love to hear from anyone who's in the industry, or an amateur grower: who should I speak to, what would you like to know and what should I include? Drop an email to ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com to get in touch.

Question of the week

Christopher wanted to know what to do about the dead traps on his venus flytrap: I suggested that the traps should be cut off with a pair of clean nail scissors, but this wasn't essential. What about insect husks though? I advise leaving these in situ as you may trigger traps unnecessarily by trying to remove them. The book I name is The Savage Garden by Peter D'Amato: listen to my flytrap special for more info on how to look after this carnivorous plant.  

Want to ask me a question? Tweet @janeperrone, leave a message on my Facebook page or email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. There's an episode about moth orchids coming soon, so I'd particularly like to hear from anyone with a Phalaenopsis problem to solve.

Are you supporting On The Ledge on Patreon yet? 

This week you can listen to Leslie Halleck talking in more detail about the cannabis industry in An Extra Leaf 12, the bonus podcast for my Patreon subscribers who pledge $5 or more a month. 

If you like the idea of supporting On The Ledge on a regular basis but don't know what Patreon's all about, check out the FAQ here: if you still have questions, leave a comment or email me - ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. If you're already supporting others via Patreon, just click here to set up your rewards!

For those who prefer to make a one-off donation, you can still buy me a coffee! A donation of just £3 helps keep On The Ledge going: helping to pay for me to travel to interviews, and for expenses like website hosting and audio equipment. Don't forget to join the Facebook page for news of what's coming up on the show and bonus blogposts!

If you prefer to support the show in other ways, please do go and rate and review On The Ledge on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you listen. It's lovely to read your kind comments, and it really helps new listeners to find the show.

Credits

This week's show featured Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, Rashem Pidity, Pokhara by Samuel Corwin, and Oh Mallory by Josh Woodward, licensed under Creative Commons.