streetlights shine on garden

ClareBroommaker's picture

Last night I opened my curtains to sit with a glass of wine and look out over the gardens, --two of them on different lots; both can be pleasantly viewed from my second floor. I noticed that the annoying security light that illuminates an adjacent never-used-at-night parking lot and which has been going haywire for several years was almost dead. Not dead as in little brightness, but dead as in cycling off for ten minutes, then coming on for about three seconds, only to shut off again. Well, I was kind of glad to see that. I have chrysanthemums close by and they need a long night- short day to come into bloom. They have always bloomed so late that they would get hit by a wet freeze while in their fullest bloom. So I was glad to see that light is be wearing out. The light is mounted on the same pole with a weak sodium vapor light and there is a second sodium vapor a few yards farther.

So this afternoon, I'm looking out the back door at my drying laundry when I see a cherry picker truck pulled up to work on one of the sodium vapor lights. I am guessing they are replacing them with LED fixtures. This will probably mean a switch from orange light to blue light. I haven't looked up the wavelengths, but maybe someone here can tell me-- are these LED lights likely to affect my chyrsanthemums favorably, infavorably, not at all? Oh, I think the security light that is dying is high pressure sodium vapor because it has a more balanced color to my perception (blue range plus red range). I don't think that light will get replaced, as it is a leftover from when the factory whose lot it illuminates ran 24 hours a day. So I think soon the security light will not be a factor.

Here's a link where you can read about day/night length in plants. https://www.cropsreview.com/photoperiodism.html

It does affect some crop plants, so if like me you live in a city, you might want to become familiar with which plants are affected and how. I looked briefly at three different sources and they all named different plants, so you might want to check multiple sources. I have grown beans, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, winter squash, sweet potatoes, asparagus beans, malabar spinach, and gooseberries on the lot in question, so I don't think those are affected negatively by the extra light they get.

Don't know about plants, but I've been seeing articles about how blue light can mess up human sleep patterns.