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Every time I check on my plants, I talk to them. I encourage them to hang in there! after I notice droopy leaves or brown crusts forming along the edges. I quietly command them to not die as I pinch their stalks, dread washing over me when I realize they’ve turned to mush.
These conversations are one-sided, but somehow the tone of them has recently taken a turn. “Wow, where did all these leaves come from?” I’ll ask my dwarf ZZ, surprised and impressed that it’s alive. “You look so good,” I’ll tell my very pink Chinese evergreen that was looking very frail (and crispy?!) just a few months ago. My little chats with my plants are no longer desperate and self-flagellating but an inadvertent pat on the back for me, a former plant noob who has blossomed into an actual plant parent. And it’s all thanks to my GrowLED plant lights.
Before I owned these lights, zero plants survived living in my apartment. ZERO. Let that sad statistic sink in. As I spent more time at home in the past year, more time reading blogs and following expert greenthumbs on IG, and more time obsessing over my plants, I realized that the biggest threat to them thriving in my apartment was actually a lack of natural light. I clung to this fact partially because it absolved me and partially because it made total sense. My apartment has gigantic windows (10 feet tall!) but it’s gridlocked between office buildings, meaning it gets no direct sunlight and feeble indirect sunlight. Even low-light plants like succulents struggled sitting on my window ledges.
So I took matters into my own hands and got a two-pack of these LED lights, mainly because they wouldn't make my apartment look like a rave at night. They come in sleek matte hues (white, blue, yellow!) and are shaped like tiny umbrellas with a dare I say mid-century-modern look. Also, I noticed the keywords “Ideal for Plant Grow Novice” in the item name (GrowLED gets me).
The lights are easy to install. You just attach the cord to the lamp itself, connect it to an outlet (get an extension cord if your plants aren’t close to outlets since the GrowLED cord itself is short; less than five feet), plunge the pointed tip of the lamp into your plant’s soil, and you’re done! They come with a timer, if you don’t want to think about turning the lights on and off, but I like to play God, switching the lights on once the sun sets and turning them off before I go to sleep. The light is 4000K, a warm light that is apparently ideal for plants since it has a good amount of blue light for regulating intake of water and carbon dioxide and yellow light for growth (thank you, blogs and plant experts!). The lamp itself is small but has an adjustable height, so it can grow as your plants do.
It's been six months since I’ve started using the lights, and they’ve forever changed my work-from-home life. Everyone is thriving.