Light Box

Marley Farley asked some questions about a light box, which I am answering here as a seperate thread.

This was my original post some time ago. http://www.gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=2906&highlight=lightbox I used it over the winter, and had a great deal of fun from it. The box is in the house so it benefited from the central heating over winter. But even in a greenhouse it would be warmer than the greenhouse itself. There were 90 watts of fluorescent tube in a closed box, and I also used a heated propagator inside the box (another 22 watts) as well. Between them they raised the temperature by at least 10C.

I don't have a greenhouse, and I made the box as much as a challenge as for any specific purpose. It coincided with a time when a friend very kindly sent me a large number of seeds, so it was a natural usage of the box to raise several batches of seed over the winter.

Another use was for taking cuttings. I took a number of cuttings in October and November last year, and they absolutely loved the box, at a time when the light levels outdoors were poor. In fact I could have usefully occupied the box entirely with cuttings. At one point I was taking cuttings, and then cuttings from the cuttings all within a period of a month. I also overwintered some young Protea plants, which I am sure would otherwise have died, even in my frost free summer house.

There is no question that the box was a brilliant success, but how you use it depends on how you can handle the plants when they come out of the box. My biggest problem was producing health plants in January and February with nowhere to put them. Ideally you would use it in conjunction with a greenhouse.

 

That is very interesting! I need to put on my thinking cap and pore on this.

 

Plum tree canker?

 

That link via old forum software - must have missed being converted during the move to the new software :(
Should be this link I think:
http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/threads/light-box.27919/