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Mar 8, 2013 5:26 PM CST
Baltimore County, MD (Zone 7a)
A bit of this and a bit of that
Charter ATP Member I was one of the first 300 contributors to the plant database! I helped beta test the Garden Planting Calendar Garden Sages The WITWIT Badge Herbs
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Natalie, this link might clear things up a bit (or make them muddier, I'm not sure): http://www.inda-gro.com/unders...

In short, plants may benefit from some UV, but only the end very near the visible spectrum. Your windows may block other useful wavelengths, though.

In long (I've never been good with short Whistling )... Plants look green because that's the light they reflect, the stuff they use is shorter and longer wavelengths than green (wavelength determines the color of light). If your windows are blocking 100% of the UV, your plants should still be able to function from other wavelengths of light, but might not thrive quite as well. That's the difference between growing plants under standard bulbs versus grow lights - many people do just fine with the former, but you get the best results from the latter, because they have a broader spectrum, usually including some UV (though it varies with the type of bulb). To complicate things further, plants use light differently at different stages of life - they'll benefit more from light on the blue end as seedlings and in vegetative growth, and toward the red end in flower or fruit production. There are also differences between plants - as Ken mentioned, many tropicals that we grow as houseplants come from the understory, where they'd see green light filtered through the trees above. Although chlorophyll doesn't absorb green light, plants have other pigments that can, and the ratio of different pigments varies between plants, between leaves on the same plant, and throughout the plant's life.

I don't know a darn thing about windows. If you can find out what wavelengths of light yours are reflecting versus passing, you can compare it to the needs of the plants you have, and maybe get an answer. Within the visible spectrum, you can get an idea using a glass prism - if certain wavelengths are reflected by your windows, you won't see those colors in the rainbow produced by a prism inside the window... but this doesn't help with the UV, since you can't see it anyway. Shrug!

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