Grow with Golgi

Successful gardeners spend as much time tending to their plants as they do hanging out with their best friends. 

Successful gardeners spend as much time tending to their plants as they do hanging out with their best friends. So it’s no wonder we are always looking for cool new gadgets and devices that can not only improve grow room processes, but that are just plain cool! Visually, your grow room can be stunning, why not enhance your view with a few grow room toys!

Running the traditional full cycle lights means using a separate vegetative and flowering bulb. With the MH (Metal Halide) vegetative bulb being blue in color and the HPS (High Pressure Sodium) flowering bulb being bright red/orange in color. The vegetative light is closer to daylight in spectrum, ranging from 4000-7000k, and gives you somewhat of a clear view of your room with only a faint blue hue. When you’re in full bloom under a bright red/orange bulb however, seeing the details of your plants can be difficult because the tint the light in the 2000-3000 Kelvin range gives off makes everything look yellow. We can alter our view with a pair of grow room sunglasses from Method Seven Optics.

Method Seven has developed HPS sunglasses that filter out and balance the hues of orange/red in HPS light. They have also developed lenses that provide color balancing for all different spectrums of light, not just HPS, as well as filter out the harmful UV A&B rays we are all subject to in our indoor gardens. Going one step further, they also remove UVC rays which normally are filtered out of sunlight by the upper atmosphere, but in our indoor gardens where we don’t have this natural filtration, so these rays still pose a hazard to us under grow lighting. A pair of these glasses will run you 70-150 Euros depending on what kind of added protection you want on top of the basic HPS filtering, and if you wear prescription glasses you can get a pair of clip-ons for around 52 Euros.

If you are an LED grower then your room can contain a rainbow of visible colors, dropping all spectrums of deep blue, blood red or a mixed purple hue onto your plants. For this Method Seven has developed the LED Optics glasses, which use nylon lenses to provide absorption of the broad LED spectrum. 

If even the littlest of color change hinders your view, then you can get their MH (Metal Halide) optics glasses, these are silver coated to balance the colors under your blue hue of MH bulbs. Both the MH and LED versions of shades will run you about 70 Euros a pair.

While owning a pair or two of these garden sunglasses is a must in my book, the real buy from Method Seven are their new photo filters. They utilize the same lens filtering technology found in their sunglasses but fitted into a camera lens attachment that fits onto most cameras. These allow you to take clear pictures that aren’t tainted by the lights you happen to be using to grow under. Necessary for capturing the best eye catching views of your buds. Let’s face it we don’t want to let everyone into our grow room but we do want to show off how juicy our nuggets are. Method Seven has 2 camera filters available now for HPS lights and LED lights. 

Another cool garden visual aid gadget is the wireless IR camera. These are mountable or can be placed stationary and come in a few different shapes and sizes. These cameras hook into your internet connection wirelessly or with a direct Ethernet cable. Using a login and password to access it is not required but it is highly recommend it to keep access to the view safe and secure. 

Some of the basic features; they can take still snapshots or record video, they have optional speaker and microphone ports, movement 340 degrees rotation side to side and 90 degrees rotation up and own. It even has night vision that uses an Infrared LED flash to illuminate the room, giving you viewability even at night during your dark cycle. Last but not least they have motion detection that can start recording or snap a photo anytime the motion sensor is activated. 

Not only do they come with a manufacturer’s desktop program to control your cameras but they even have a smart phone app that lets you view and control them from anywhere you are in the world. Being able to check in on things gives you complete peace of mind even when you’re away.

If you are an outdoor grower you can take a slightly different approach to keeping an eye on your grow spot, even when you plant way out in the middle of nowhere, by using a field or hunting camera. Similar to the IR camera it also has Infra red night vision and motion detection. You won’t be finding any WIFI connections in most remote locations so instead it uses an SD card for memory that holds all the images it collects. Then when you arrive to your spot you can pop it into your phone or tablet to view the contents. The higher end models will have larger memory and sometimes even a small LCD viewing screen. It’s a surefire way to see who (or what) else knows about your secret outdoor garden.

Everything on your plants is not always visible to the naked eye, that’s why the USB microscope is next on my list of visual aids. Everyone is probably familiar with the lighted microscopes (30x or 60x-100x magnification), they only average about 15 Euros and are battery operated, handheld and have a focus wheel to adjust your view. The USB microscope is an amped up version of that. The model that we would need costs about 40-65 Euros with a magnification range anywhere from 5-500x with just a touch of a button. It plugs directly into the USB port on your computer and has a snap button for capturing a picture of what you see in your view finder. These are super useful in all cycles of growth for seeking out spider mites or other small plant anomalies, but mostly at harvest time giving you the best view of your trichromes you will ever see! 

Our ability to see every inch of our plants is crucial to learning everything you possible can about their health and care. That’s why sight is the sense that I end up buying gadgets to enhance the most.