SBC,

I'm sure you can purchase high intensity or metal halide lamps that will meet the needs of your plants and hopefully you can mount them in fixtures that will be esthetically pleasing in your new apartment.

I don't have any personal experience that will help you because my focus is on growing seedlings for an early start in our short-season Maine garden. So I use overdriven 4-foot shoplights, mounted just inches away from the seedlings. My maximum light intensity on the plants is about 500 foot-candles.

However, it may help others in their recommendations to list the foot-candle requirements of your plants.

MM

The ficus will be fine near a north-facing window. The others I don't know. Do you really think the others need less light, or just that they don't tolerate bright light as well?

MM, only 500fc? Sounds way low. I would have guessed around 2,000fc from overdriven tubes.

The ficus will be fine near a north window? I don't know about that one, as I've known it to not respond (abcission) to lesser light levels.

The other plants don't need as much light, we're talking about the more common ariods like philos, agnaolemna, homoalemna (sp,) dieffs, monsteras, etc. And maybe an arrowhead and a coupla dracaenas.

So what do you think I'd be able to do in terms of getting the right light setup?

Ficus benjamina, despite being basically a high light tropical tree, is one of the best-adapted plants to low light levels. That's why it is such a good houseplant and office tree. Also, it thrives on little water.

Ficus does drop its leaves whenever conditions change. Moving from high light to very low light could defoliate the entire tree. It would likely drop its leaves anyway from moving home. It will then regrow leaves adapted to the conditions and a couple of months later you won't be able to tell the difference. It will grow just fine near a north window.

I don't know all your other plants, but the dracaenas and monsteras are fine in low light. Maybe not north facing, although I've grown monstera there, ideally, somewhere a bit brighter but not in full sun. I've seen Dracaenas grown over ten feet away from a north window, they seem happy enough. I'm not sure you need artificial light for any of these.

Shrubs n Bulbs,

I measured the 500fc with my old Norwood Director light-powered selenium-detector analog light meter, with the white plastic indirect sphere installed over the detector to measure incident illumination on the upper plant leaves and not the direct illumination on the bulb surfaces.

The overdriven cool white Philips bulbs do look blindingly bright white and, if you aimed a direct reading light meter at them, you might get a reading much higher than my incident readings. But the leaves themselves just look well lit, with the lower leaves getting considerably less than 500fc.

I am reasonably happy with the results I get with my overdriven units. Last year I set out peppers that already had pickable peppers on them. My wife commented that my seedling operation was transitioning into hydroponic gardening.

I do use some hydroponic soluble nutrients, such as calcium nitrate. After a month or so of growth, my seedlings apparently do deplete the available calcium in my Premier Pro-Mix and start to show calcium deficiency symptoms. So now I preemptively feed a little dilute calcium nitrate after a few weeks of growth. That prevents the appearance of those calcium deficiency symptoms and seems to keep the plants quite healthy.

MM