Week 10 (almost)
More tomatoes and peppers are setting and growing larger. Not without continuous environmental challenges though. It's been getting much warmer lately, and i'm no longer able to blow cool air in through the window. I didn't realize just how much heat this T5 unit would build up with that window show as it gets closer to summer. Once i shut the window, it didn't take long at all for the temperature in the room to hit nearly 100 degrees. Keep in mind i've been running the light cycle at night too, with the lights off during the day. I've turned on my central AC in the last couple days which helps. While the rest of my house stays at 74F, this closet is still creeping up into the high 80s. OH and remember that humidifier I bought? well it's now having trouble keeping the humidity at 23-25%. A lot of times it still goes as low as 20%
I think the most important thing to learn from this is that you should not believe people who say T5s don't create heat. How much it will really effect you depends on where you live. The heat they make is dispersed over a wider area than an HID bulb so there's no hot spots like you sometimes get with an HID, but if you have an HID bulb that's inside an air cooled reflector, it's MUCH easier to keep cool because you can easily direct the heat out of the room via a fan and a duct. With this T5 fixture, all the heat basically just radiates everywhere and i can't do much about it. I do have several oscillating fans, but that's about it. Soon I plan on having a 24k BTU split AC unit installed in this room since the central air in my house has always favored the downstairs area anyway. It should help increase the efficiency of my air conditioning during the summer.
Even with all of the above challenges though, i'm getting some results. Here are some pics:
I raised the light for a better view. I've organized all the plants from tallest to shortest so i could angle the light for best exposure. You can also see i had to trim that jalapeno pepper plant in the front/middle because its lower branches and leaves were suffering from the issues I discussed. it's doing a bit better now
New Big Dwarf Tomatoes
Gardener's Delight Cherry Tomatoes
Window Box Roma - This plant has suffered the most, with lots of crispy leaves. I've been cleaning up the dead leaves as they come. It's interesting that even though all its leaves are falling off, it's setting a good amount of romas, so I guess i'll keep letting it go and see what happens. The weird thing is that I have two more seedlings of this variety sitting in another part of my house where it's much cooler with better humidity, and even those little seedlings are already starting to develop crispy leaves. Maybe this variety just doesnt like the overall environment in my area?
Cayenne Peppers. You can see the plastic loops i've been using on this plant to try and spread out the top a bit. It grew tall and skinny so I wanted to give it a better canopy that was more spread out.
Green Bell peppers growing on the mutant pepper plant. It's already set a couple peppers and it looks like it has a nice group of other flowers that will soon set (hopefully)
This is my nicer looking purple bell pepper plant. That purple bell pepper you see is the "first bell pepper" that you saw in my previous update. You can't really see in this pic, but there are two more peppers which have already set that are closer to the top as well.
Red Robin Tomatoes - Lots of little cherry tomatoes on this one. Some of them are starting to turn red already too.
