Growing coriander indoors with 300mW of light

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2024-12-12 14:00:10

In every indoors farm I’ve seen, the lights used were full spectrum, high power consumption LEDs, kept at a distance away from the plant. I wanted to try out what would happen if a low power, cheap, closely placed LEDs were used instead.

For this experiment, I will be growing the plant from seeds. I chose coriander since they were easy to grow and i had prior experience with growing them.

For lighting, i chose the IKEA JANSJÖ. These cost only $8 and are powered via USB. According to IKEA they only consume 300mW of power. I’ve never verified the power consumption but i would take their word for it. These have goose neck, reflector and lens which would make it easy for us to bend it and position the LED right on top of the leaves.

After planting, the seeds took 15 days to sprout. The LED lights were installed after the seeds had sprouted. The LED was always kept as close to the plant as possible, never more than 5cm away. In most cases the LED was in direct contact with the leaves. The LED doesn’t produce much heat and therefore won’t burn the leaves on contact. The LED was powered on for about 10-12 hours per day. The pot was placed in a dark room without any other sources of either artificial or natural light.