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High quality high power monochrome LEDs could be an excelent addition to a garden.
For this friend of a friend's garden the goal is to get huge vegitative plants indoors so that they can be planted outdoors a week or so after the equinox. As such the focus is on 450nm blues (2x60W) and cool white 5000k (4x60W) for now. Hopefully this is enough. A 5' tall (or bigger) plant put into the ground in the spring should be quite impressive at the end of the summer.
This may need to go into another thread, but here are some thoughts about the monochrome and possibly high color temperature LEDs.
In nature a plant is triggered to go into flowering when it recieves red light at 12 hour intervals. The red light comes from the sun being filtered by the atmosphere at rise and set, and also sitting lower in the sky due to the tilt of the earth.
Since flowering is dependant upon the red spectrum light, would it make a difference to feed blue light to a plant 24hrs a day during flowering, or during the 12 dark hours of flowering. Even an ebay 50W unit run at 30W can put in an extra 12x30=360Wh of energy to the plant. That's not insignificant. Vegitatve growth during flowering may be a great thing, or a terrible thing. It may start as a great thing and end up a terrible thing too.
It is also not well known what blasting high power (nearly) pure red spectrum light for 12hrs/day does. 22hrs/day of pure red can make a vegging plant curl up like it wants to flower
When thinking of natural light sources the moon is often overlooked. The light from a full moon on a clear night is sometimes enough to read a book, so it is not unnoticed by plants. The light of the full moon in the sky is a 6000K color since it is essentially reflected sunlight. It may be possible to use LEDs with wide angle lenses to distribute the light to have a "harvest moon" every crop. It could also totally ruin the flowering cycle. Won't know until an a/b test is done.
It is also thought that waxing and waning moons influence seedling growth, flowering and all sorts of other aspects of plant development. If anyone is feeling adventureous or has wondered about these things LEDs give you the technology to do so and more.
If any of that is wrong, or has already been studied link the info please.
Anyway, time to go relax