What most gardeners don’t know about sunlight..

Growing plants is rewarding.

Knowing what they need to grow is essential for a healthy garden. In this post, I’d like to talk a bit more about just sunlight.

Plants need energy to grow and carry out various life processes. The reason most plants require sunlight is for creating energy. To put it into simple terms, you and I get energy from the things we eat or drink meanwhile plants produce chemical energy via photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is the process by which most plants, algae, and some bacteria convert light energy from the sun into chemical energy stored in the form of glucose (a type of sugar). This process is essential for plant growth. Chlorophyl is the pigment contained in plant leaves that allows plants to trap sunlight. 

Plants can sense the quality (wavelengths) and quantity (intensity) of light, allowing them to adapt to their environment. Over time, crops have evolved specific adaptations to suit their unique sunlight needs. For instance, those demanding more sunlight may possess leaves optimized for light capture or mechanisms to reduce shading by neighboring plants. Conversely, shade-tolerant crops often feature broader leaves, enhancing their ability to capture light efficiently in low-light environments.

Delving deeper into this, we can also look at how plants use different light spectrums. For example, blue light is generally used to promote vegetative growth while red light is generally used to stimulate the production of flowers. With this in mind, it makes sense why indoor grow lights for plants appear "purple"

For now, let's take it back a step to appreciate the implication of these requirements as it can be beneficial for growing plants.

The plants we grow didn’t all originate in conditions like we have in our gardens or out in the fields we grow them in. For example, basil and watermelons didn’t originate from the same place, but we grow them together in our gardens and fields today.

With this knowledge, we can appreciate that if we want our plants to perform well, we should plant them in conditions conducive to their growth. For example, commonly grown crops like Basil, Bodi, Chive and Lettuce require more sunlight than things like your Thyme, Rosemary and Celery.

For your convenience, I’ve created a small table that lists the Common Name, Scientific Name, Difficulty to grow, likelihood of pest and disease, water requirements and sunlight requirements of 20 commonly grown plants. This table is provided to you absolutely free here at my Ko‑fi shop, although leaving a small tip helps motivate me to continue to create resources like these.

Here's a link to that blog post: https://www.agrinationtt.com/post/plants-you-can-grow-with-rating-scale Download the PDF For free blow:

Plants You Can Grow with Rating Scale.pdf

Download PDF • 997KB

If you enjoyed this and you are able to, leaving a small contribution over at my https://ko-fi.com/agrination page helps me keep putting content like this out for free :)