About the lighting technique in flower cultivation
Today, I will focus on sharing some home gardening tips with you, specifically about the lighting technique in flower cultivation, as follows:
Among the many elements of flower cultivation, lighting is crucial for growing healthy flowers. As the saying goes, "All things grow by the sun," sufficient lighting can make the plants grow shorter, stronger, increase their resistance, bloom profusely, and look lovely. Of course, different plants have different lighting requirements, and excessive lighting can burn the plants, causing ugly yellow spots on their surfaces, affecting their ornamental value, or even leading to death.
So, what kind of lighting is considered reasonable? This has always been a confusing issue for me. I can say that to this day, I am still vague about some concepts, especially in terms of determining the intensity of lighting, there is no good standard. This is somewhat similar to the judgment of wetness in watering (though there are now some intuitive and simple methods), and everyone has different standards. Since most of our knowledge comes from flower books, with a few vague terms that leave us at a loss. If there were methods similar to those for judging wetness, like the bamboo skewer method, pot lifting method, etc., it would be great if everyone could follow some rules!
First, let's talk about some ready-made knowledge from books. Lighting has length and intensity, length referring to the duration of daylight in a 24-hour period, and intensity referring to the strength of sunlight hitting the ground. Based on the light requirements of flowers (mainly divided by the light time needed for bud differentiation), they can be categorized into long-day flowers, medium-day flowers, and short-day flowers; according to the light intensity preference, they can be divided into sunny flowers, neutral flowers, and shade flowers. The purpose of these two classifications is different, but there is some overlap for the same kind of flower.
This means that long-day flowers are generally sunny flowers, such as jasmine, pomegranate, lotus, etc., and short-day flowers are usually shade flowers, like most ornamental leaf plants. However, this is not absolute. Some flowers prefer long-daylight, which is beneficial for bud differentiation, but they are afraid of strong sunlight. This is evident in many cacti and succulent plants, such as the commonly seen Guanyin lotus, etc. For example, chrysanthemums are typical sunny flowers but are also short-day flowers, so they only bloom when the daylight shortens in autumn. From this, we can also make simple judgments from some common sense experiences, such as flowers that bloom in summer are definitely long-day flowers, and most of them are sunny flowers, etc.
What is now confusing is the concept of lighting. For example, strong light, exposure, direct light, scattered light, sufficient lighting, semi-shade, etc., and the most frustrating thing is that some books say that certain plants like strong light but are afraid of exposure, which I really can't understand. How to correctly distinguish these concepts is very important for us to grow healthy flowers. Of course, we can still use light meters to judge, but it's too professional, and where can most flower enthusiasts have such good equipment!
Next, I will try to explain the judgment of a plant's lighting needs using my favorite cacti as an example, hoping it can be helpful to everyone.
Firstly, we can determine that this type of plant generally prefers sunlight, which is a big premise, so when buying plants, we must understand the basic habits of the plant, which is very important, as mentioned in the previous articles. Based on the intensity of light preference, I believe that most succulent plants are neutral flowers or above. For succulent plants, their body shape has evolved to this form to resist drought, and in arid areas, there should be relatively strong lighting (I haven't investigated the original habitats of these plants, this is just my guess), otherwise it would be difficult to form a desert climate. Therefore, except for epiphytic cacti from tropical rainforests, the others should all prefer plenty of sunlight, even the soft-leafed百合科瓦苇属 plants that we generally think like semi-shade.
After understanding the basic premise, we start from the angle that is least likely to cause problems, just like watering "better dry than wet," I think lighting "better strong than weak." Of course, it is undeniable that different species of succulent plants have different abilities to withstand sunlight. For example, the commonly seen蟹爪兰, although it belongs to cacti, is a typical short-day flower, meaning that only when the lighting time is less than 5 hours a day, can it form flower buds, so蟹爪兰 blooms in winter and spring (nowadays, it is often possible to buy blooming 蟹爪兰 in the market during the National Day holiday, but don't think it's a new variety, it's just been treated with shading and low temperature to form flower buds提前, and blooms during the National Day holiday.
In fact, except for the noon sunlight in summer (12-15 pm) which should be properly shaded, the rest of the time can fully enjoy the sun, as shown by the lotus flowers I grow (this is still considered an epiphytic variety).
As for the different planting effects produced under different light intensities, which meet the aesthetic needs of different people, this is just a matter of personal preference. For example, some succulent plants look greener and more lovely in the environment of scattered light (my understanding is the light intensity under the tree shade on a sunny day).
It should be noted that the above discussion is for the normal maintenance period of adult plants, and for seedlings, newly repotted, newly cut, or newly moved-out plants, there must be a period of adaptation.
The detailed explanation of the lighting technique in flower cultivation introduced above hopes to bring you some help in green plant management!